The fact that Ring of Honor needs to rebuild stands clearly in the mind of anyone even halfway paying attention to the company. With The Elite leaving them, and not only leaving but starting their own promotion, they have lost their major draw and gained a lot of market pressure in the same stroke. And it’s even worse. It’s not just that ROH lost their biggest draw, they lost the Sun to their system. Everything revolved around The Elite in Ring of Honor. With the Elite, guys like Flip Gordon and Scorpio Sky could raise their profiles fivefold just by interacting with them. Without them, pulling up a new crop of stars will be a difficult enterprise.
We’re in the middle of Jay Lethal’s second reign as ROH World Champion, the sequel to his remarkable first and on its way to cementing him as the longest reigning world champion in company history. As the champion, we should assume that he’s going to be one of the biggest draws, and he is undoubtedly one of the five biggest stars in the company. But is he *the* biggest star? Is he the guy to keep ROH in the headlines? Well, given that there’s so much speculation about how ROH will fare with The Elite gone, I think we can say that the confidence in Lethal as the money draw is not quite there.
Does ROH have a money draw? Maybe it does. They’ve just signed Rush which could be huge for them, and they do still have one member of the Elite: Marty Scurll, who’s now at the head of a stable called Villain Enterprises. Jeff Cobb has also done a lot with his reign as ROH World Television Champion as well. The company seems determined to push Matt Taven, and those four could form a reasonable top card. Would they be better than Lethal in the role? They’d have to be tried out to see. But it’s worth trying them, if for no other reason than a change of scenery.
But where would losing the ROH World Championship leave Jay Lethal?
It’s important that Lethal does remain in a prominent role for ROH. While he might not be the kind of light-the-world-on-fire draw that would make ROH stand out strongly, he is an icon of the company in a time when the company really needs to lean on its made stars.
Plus, Lethal can serve an important purpose: he can elevate people. His name value alone will help put anybody who’s in against him on a higher level. Cementing that is Lethal’s in-ring ability. He’s capable of putting on the kinds of matches that will get people to notice his opponents. The example of Jonathan Gresham is all you really need to prove that: Gresham’s series of matches with Lethal was a major element in lifting Gresham from a prelim guy to a player, and their tag team is working to that as well.
The best way to use Lethal’s name value, put him in high profile situations, and allow him to elevate people is to have him win the ROH World Television title. It gives a ton of positives to Ring of Honor, positives that they will need to keep themselves competitive in the wild landscape emerging in 2019.
Firstly, Lethal needs to win the title from Jeff Cobb. Right now, Cobb has been tearing it up as World Television Champion and I believe that he could be a top-line star for the company. The best way to put him up there would for him to lose that title in a huge full-tilt match against Lethal, the kind where Lethal has to give him everything to put him away. That would set Cobb up to take the main event scene by storm, since he won’t lose the momentum of his TV title run.
One of the skills Jay Lethal’s honed to a high pitch is being a champion. That’s one of the reasons that he works so well as world champion for this company, and as a “franchise” figure, holder of an abstract title. Giving him a belt is a great way to maximize his character, and his legacy with the TV title amplifies that effect even further. Times when you can’t have the world champion defending on the show, you can have a real main event with a Jay Lethal TV title defense. At least as far as ROH goes, that would not be a disappointment at all.
Being TV champion as opposed to world champion does something for the company, though: it lets him work with the guys who are lower down the card. He’ll be in the best position to elevate the stars that the company will need looking into 2020 and beyond.
What makes Lethal a better choice for this than anyone else is his personal versatility. It’s not just that he can pull out a great match, it’s that he’s got a style which means that he can work with anyone. He is not always on point, he’s stumbled before when he needed to put on an A+ match, but he can always make his opponent look good even if it’s not littered with snowflakes. Whether he’s against a power wrestler, a technical wrestler, a striker, or a flyer, he can accentuate their strengths.
ROH has a good deal of talent that they can start to build. They’ve just signed Brody King, they’re bringing in David Finlay and Tracy Williams, they’ve got Flip Gordon waiting to be made. Guys like TK O’Ryan and Shane Taylor might be able to hit a higher level if they’re given the chance. And Jay Lethal can have at least a good match with all of these guys. What a lot of them are missing right now is a good introduction to the crowd, something that will make the audience really sit up and take them seriously as contenders. To give them a high profile singles match with Jay Lethal is a straightforward way to get there, and ROH is not in a position to be wasting time.
Now this shouldn’t be a massive reign. Four months, six months, enough for him to rack up a good number of defenses on TV and otherwise. At the end of it, Lethal can serve another purpose: putting over someone else. Now, an idea would be to give the belt to one of those that I mentioned earlier, but it’d be even more effective for him to drop the title to someone like Bandido, like Mark Haskins or Juice Robinson: guys who are already strong commodities but who could use something to legitimize them within ROH. He could even lose it to Jonathan Gresham, which would provide a great keystone in their relationship.
What he does after that isn’t so clear to me, but what is clear is that 2019 should be the year that Lethal takes a step back from the world title scene. ROH has enough guys to make a solid world title scene and try to elevate them to be big stars in the wrestling world, and with outside wrestlers like Will Ospreay and Zack Sabre Jr lurking around, there should be enough top matches that Lethal doesn’t need to step back in. I don’t think there is a better move than Lethal holding the TV title. It does so much, and in this new wild west, ROH needs to get the most bang for its buck.
