Big E's scrapped WrestleMania plan shows how Vince McMahon ruined a star

The Day 1 Disaster We Never Saw Coming

Pull up a barstool, grab a cold pint of the cheapest lager on tap, and let's talk about the absolute tragedy of how WWE handled one of the most beloved champions of the modern era. We all remember when Big E cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase on September 13, 2021, to win the WWE Championship.

It was a rare, pure moment where everyone, from the hardcore internet snarks to the kids in the front row, was genuinely thrilled. But the title run that followed felt like a slow-motion car crash of bad booking.

Now, we finally know how much better it was supposed to be. As Ringside News recently detailed, the former champion laid out the original plans for his title reign during an appearance on Notsam Wrestling with Sam Roberts.

The original outline makes the actual television we got look like a total embarrassment. The office had a clear path to make Big E a permanent main-event superstar, but they panicked, shuffled the deck, and let the creative rot destroy a great story.

The Seth Rollins Feud and the WrestleMania Redemption

According to Big E, the original plan was clean, logical, and built around a classic pro wrestling formula. He was scheduled to defend his WWE Championship in a singles match against Seth Rollins at the Day 1 pay-per-view on January 1, 2022.

Rollins was supposed to win the title that night, setting up a chase that would culminate at WrestleMania 38 in Dallas. Big E would then conquer his rival on the grandest stage of them all and reclaim the gold.

“The plan was, what we were moving towards initially, was it was supposed to be me and Seth [Rollins] in a singles match at Day 1. I was going to drop the title anyway. So I was supposed to drop the title to Seth. We come back in at WrestleMania, we do it again, and I regain the title.”

That is a stadium-caliber storyline right there. You get a hot heel champion in Rollins, a beloved babyface on the chase, and a massive payoff that makes the champion look like a true franchise player.

It's classic storytelling, the kind of arc that turned guys like Stone Cold and Daniel Bryan into absolute legends. Instead, WWE creative looked at this clean blueprint and decided it needed more clutter.

How the Creative Pipeline Got Clogged

The trouble started when WWE realized they had two months to kill before the January pay-per-view. Instead of booking a focused, intense singles rivalry, the writers got lazy and decided they needed some filler to stretch out Raw.

Big E recalled that creative added Kevin Owens because they needed a "filler program," and then inserted Bobby Lashley simply because Vince McMahon loved Lashley. That turned a clean singles program into a messy four-way match.

This is the classic Vince McMahon booking trap. Rather than telling a single compelling story, you just throw all your action figures into the same sandbox.

Adding Kevin Owens because you need "filler" is the most corporate WWE sentence of all time. It’s like buying a beautiful Italian sports car, realizing you have to drive it to the grocery store, and deciding to weld a minivan trunk onto the back of it just to hold the groceries.

By the time they reached late December, the elegant Rollins versus Big E storyline was buried under a pile of multi-man matches. Big E went from the focal point of the division to just another guy standing in the ring waiting for his cue.

It was lazy, it was uninspired, and it stripped away all the momentum he had built. He was basically a passenger in his own championship reign, which is a slap in the face to a guy who paid his dues for a decade.

The Lesnar Buzzsaw and the Butterfly Effect

If the multi-man clutter was a warning sign, the day of the show was the atomic bomb. Hours before Day 1 was set to go live, Universal Champion Roman Reigns tested positive for COVID-19.

His scheduled title defense against Brock Lesnar was cancelled instantly. Vince McMahon panicked, as he always did when his main event fell apart, and threw Lesnar into the WWE Championship match.

The four-way became a five-way, and the writing was on the wall. Brock Lesnar did not just enter the match; he ran through it like a buzzsaw.

He hit F-5s on everyone in sight and pinned Big E clean in the middle of the ring to win the title. The champion who had spent years scratching and clawing to the top was treated like an afterthought.

He was booted out of the title picture immediately, sent back down the card to tag-team filler duty while Lesnar and Reigns marched toward their unification match. It was a booking disaster that made Big E look weak and unprotected.

If you wanted to show the audience that Big E didn't belong in the main event, you couldn't have scripted it any better. It was the ultimate Vince McMahon move: throw away months of planning for a cheap, short-term pop.

But the booking was only the first half of the tragedy. The sudden change at Day 1 tore up the script for WrestleMania 38.

With Lesnar holding the WWE Championship and Reigns holding the Universal Championship, the company shifted to a winner-take-all match. The planned Big E versus Seth Rollins rematch was thrown in the garbage.

Rollins was left scrambling for a storyline, eventually facing a returning Cody Rhodes. Meanwhile, Big E was sent back to SmackDown to team with Kofi Kingston.

Then came the night of March 11, 2022. During a tag match against Sheamus and Ridge Holland, Holland attempted an overhead belly-to-belly suplex on the floor.

The throw went wrong, and Big E landed directly on his head, fracturing his C1 and C2 vertebrae. In an instant, the WrestleMania redemption arc was not just canceled — his entire career was put in jeopardy.

The contrast between the planned stadium triumph and the reality of a neck brace is enough to make any wrestling fan sick. The butterfly effect of Roman Reigns getting COVID on New Year's Day literally ended Big E's career.

“Then Roman [Reigns] is sick, now Brock [Lesnar]’s in. So this match that was supposed to be a singles, where I dropped the title at Day 1 and regained it at WrestleMania, doesn’t even look anything close to that anymore. And by the time we get to WrestleMania, my neck is broken. My career is over.”

This whole situation exposes the fundamental flaw in how WWE operated under the old regime. Vince McMahon ran the company like a guy playing with an Etch-a-Sketch, shaking it clean every time he got bored or hit a minor speed bump.

There was no long-term patience, no willingness to protect the babyfaces who actually connected with the audience. When Roman got sick, they threw Big E to the beast and ruined months of planning just to give Brock a short-term pop.

Look at how Big E was booked during his actual title run. He lost clean to Reigns at Survivor Series 2021 and was constantly booked to look like he was lucky to have the belt.

When you treat your champion like a secondary player on your own show, the fans notice. By the time Day 1 rolled around, the office had already conditioned the audience to expect Big E to lose.

The addition of Lesnar was just the final, lazy nail in the coffin. It was a symptom of a creative team that had no faith in their own talent.

They built a new star, got cold feet, and ran back to the safety blanket of a part-time legend. It's the same pattern that frustrated fans for a decade, and Big E was the ultimate victim of it.

What makes this story even more remarkable is how Big E himself looks back on it. He has every right to be bitter about how the office took his moment and how a botched suplex stole his career.

Instead, he speaks about the situation with a zen-like calm that makes him one of the most respected human beings in the business. He knows that in pro wrestling, the cards you are dealt can change in a heartbeat.

Big E noted that he doesn't mention this to complain or say "woe is me," but rather because the butterfly effect of how life works is so insane. It is funny, but it is also incredibly frustrating for the fans who invested their time and emotion into his rise.

We wanted to see the big man run the show and get the solo spotlight he deserved. Instead, we got a lesson in corporate panic and creative bankruptcy.

The original plan shows that the company knew how to do it right, but they chose to do it wrong, and that is the real tragedy. It's proof that sometimes, the biggest opponent a wrestling star faces isn't the heel across the ring, but the person writing the show.