I Don’t Know What Happened With Bayley Being Pulled From The WrestleMania Card, But There’s A Larger WWE Problem I Need To Talk About

Bayley appears to be off the WrestleMania card. The former World Champion, Royal Rumble winner and extremely popular face of the WWE Women’s Division was attacked backstage by a mystery assailant ahead of her tag team match with Lyra Valkyria against Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez. She’s apparently going to be replaced by someone to be announced later tonight, who may or may not be Becky Lynch. Fans are not happy about it, and neither am I.

Despite obvious excitement to maybe see Becky Lynch, the general reaction on social media has been extremely negative. Initially, many fans assumed she must have been injured in real life and WWE was explaining that by writing it into the storyline. Multiple outlets, however, are reporting that she’s perfectly fine and this was simply the creative direction WWE wanted to go.

That hasn’t sat well with her biggest supporters or even casual fans who see Bayley as the selfless heart of the women’s division and can’t understand why she’d be left off the card. Many supporters have even spent the past day digging up many of her old tweets that could be interpreted as negative and/ or retweeting her good friend Mercedes Moné who seemed to imply she should leave WWE and head to AEW after the slight.

Now, before I get into what I see as the bigger story here, I want to say out loud that I agree with the part about it being nonsense that Bayley isn’t on the WrestleMania card. We are getting fourteen matches, many of which involve more than two people. Bayley is a cornerstone of the women’s division, and while I don’t think anyone should just be handed a match, I think it’s beholden on WWE to write storylines for the company’s biggest stars that lead into WrestleMania. That didn’t happen for Bayley this year, however, and it’s symptomatic of a larger WWE problem.

I love WWE and am not typically the most critical fan. I’ll question things now and again (like Jey Uso winning The Royal Rumble), but in general, I’m pretty positive about the product. I also realize injuries happen, stuff arises behind the scenes and plans need to change. Because of that, I don’t need every single thing to be booked out a year in advance, but I also don’t want to see everything thrown together at the last minute. It’s hard not to look at this WrestleMania 41 build and see a lot of obvious last minute changes and sloppy executions.

Bayley quite clearly, as an example, seemed to be working toward a program with Roxanne Perez at ‘Mania. The latter finished second in The Royal Rumble and seemed ready to be put into a big spot, as we were given a lot of little moments between the two… until suddenly we weren’t. Perez basically disappeared from WWE TV without explanation, and Bayley suddenly started working with Lyra Valkyria.

I assumed the plan was going to see them wrestle for Lyra’s Intercontinental Championship, except that match got scheduled for a few weeks ahead of ‘Mania. Before it even happened, Lyra and Bayley were then scheduled for a tag team gauntlet match with the winners facing Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez at ‘Mania, despite the fact that they were feuding for the IC belt and weren’t a natural fit to team together. I would have guessed they’d lose and it would add intrigue to their singles feud, except it was obvious they were going to win the match before it started because no one else in the match had been built up enough to be a credible threat to appear on the WrestleMania card.

So, yeah, I’m not a happy camper about Bayley being left off the WrestleMania card, but the problems started months ago. She’s easily disposed of here because there’s no storyline we care about that makes her necessary to the match. She was quite clearly just shoved in to appear on the ‘Mania card, which makes it even more weirder that she’s no longer even on the ‘Mania card. It makes me wonder what the point of all of this even was?

She’s not the only one with a rushed or confusing storyline either. This entire program with Bianca Belair, Rhea Ripley and Iyo Sky has made absolutely no sense. I have no idea why they decided to do a triple threat, and it’s done nothing but lead to Bianca Belair getting booed every time she wants to talk, despite being presented as a babyface. John Cena and Cody Rhodes have had some nice promo battles and built a fun story here, but it also doesn’t make any sense if you really think about it. We were initially told Cena sold his soul to The Rock, which is why he turned on Cody, but the latter literally hasn’t made any appearances since Elimination Chamber. In fact, he’s barely even been mentioned on television, and Cena has given his reasons as if The Rock had nothing to do with any of it.

You can just keep going down the list, and this lack of planning is obvious in almost every program. The New Day had one of the hottest heel turns of all-time when they kicked Big E out of the group. Then the writers did nothing with them for months. They lost all their momentum and didn’t even appear on TV some weeks, until we were suddenly told to care about them again a few weeks ahead of WrestleMania? CM Punk, Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins did a fantastic job finding a story and creating a triple threat leading into WrestleMania, but you can’t convince me those three weren’t thrown together because there wasn’t anything else for them to do.

WWE has never had more going on. With two weekly shows, monthly PPVs and now quarterly specials on NBC, there is this constant need to build toward something. Unfortunately, those frequent builds mean it’s a lot harder to tell long-term stories and to time them to get hot at ‘Mania. Seth Rollins and CM Punk had a great feud going, but WWE burned it off during the first episode of Raw on Netflix.

Braun Strowman and Jacob Fatu had a fantastic feud going, but WWE worked through it prior to WrestleMania. Rhea Ripley and Liv Morgan had maybe the hottest feud in wrestling for a hot minute, but everyone got sick of seeing them work together for months— so now both women are doing less exciting things in stories we’re less invested in at at ‘Mania.

WWE needs to figure this out. Giving fans more specials and more programming sounds great, but the most important period every year is the road to WrestleMania. That is when the stories need to be the hottest, and this year, we don’t really have any hot stories at all. Instead, we have matches that feel slapped together and some big stars like Bayley watching from catering.