Now that Cody Rhodes has dropped the WWE Title to Drew McIntyre, so much of the landscape of the company’s booking going into WrestleMania 42 has drastically changed.
The long rumored rematch between Cody and Roman Reigns has been all but fully scrapped by Triple H and the company, with McIntyre now leading the charge and Cody, despite being the babyface, starting to get “Cody sucks” chants and raucous boos, almost as if to officially seal the transition of taking the “top guy” mantle from the now retired John Cena.
Cody did something else official in London on the Friday, January 16 episode of Friday Night SmackDown, announcing his intention to compete at Royal Rumble 2026 in Saudi Arabia – and potentially put himself in rarified air with three career Rumble victories.
The thing is, nobody – not even Cody’s biggest fans – wants to see him win the Royal Rumble this year. Out of everything that is on the table for the American Nightmare, winning the Rumble has to be the one thing Triple H and Co. cannot even pretend to contemplate.
If Cody were already overexposed by the company, winning the Rumble would be almost akin to Cena burying the Nexus. It would make Cody look like a caricature of winning and fully turn people off against him.
No, the answer of what to do with Cody is pretty evident, and as the lovable Jacob Fatu came out to brawl with the man Wade Barrett tried to anoint as “QB1”, you could almost feel the fans wanting WWE to start this path of the Cody heel turn.
Back last year when Cody and Kevin Owens put each other through a brutal match at the Royal Rumble that nobody should be going through, you could almost see that heel ish, Homelander side of Cody coming out, and WWE kept teasing it but never pulled the trigger.
Well, now is the time to pull the trigger. WWE fans have been itching to see Cody expand his horizons and show other layers of his character as a heel, and the funny thing is, like Cena, if Cody is to fulfill his full potential as the true, undisputed QB1, then he has to go full heel and kill this Homelander role first. It is time.
Joe helped manage the pro wrestling site Daily DDT from 2017 to 2019. He has appeared in many wrestling podcasts and has had his work featured by mainstream media sites and professional wrestlers themselves. Joe also covers soccer, writing about Tottenham for Hotspur HQ, Real Madrid for A Trip to Cibeles, and general world football for The Trivela Effect.