Has Roman Reigns’ World Championship Reign Been as Light as Brock Lesnar’s Run?

Roman Reigns has defended his Undisputed WWE Universal Championship just once on pay-per-view since WrestleMania 39. “The Tribal Chief” hasn’t even appeared on WWE TV in nearly a month, and reportedly won’t be in action again until Crown Jewel on Nov. 4 in Riyadh. Reigns announced shortly after he unified the WWE and Universal Championships back at WrestleMania 38 that he’d be taking on a lighter schedule thanks to signing a new contract. He has wrestled just 32 matches since that historic bout with Brock Lesnar. 

Speaking of “The Beast Incarnate,” fans have recently started comparing Reigns’ lack of title defenses to Brock Lesnar’s various title reigns since he first returned to the company in 2012. Lesnar’s schedule has consistently been incredibly light compared to full-time members of the roster, but that didn’t stop WWE from giving him another seven world championship reigns and multiple WrestleMania main events. 

But based purely on the numbers, Reigns has still done a better job as a fighting champion even with his lighter schedule. The longest Lesnar reign was his 504-day Universal Championship run from April 2017 to August 2018 and he only recorded six successful defenses before dropping the title to Reigns at the 2018 SummerSlam event. That’s three title defenses per year, and even though 2023 has been Reigns’ lightest schedule by a wide margin, he already has that number beat with four successful televised title defenses (and another three at live events). 

The Rock Confirmed He Nearly Wrestled Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson recently broke the news on The Pat McAfee Show that he was in talks with WWE officials for a dream match with Reigns at WrestleMania 39 this past April. Those talks fell through and Reigns would instead retain against Cody Rhodes. 

“The Rock headlining WrestleMania with Roman Reigns, SoFi Stadium, that was locked. We were doing it,” Rock siad “In the beginning of 2022, (WWE CEO) Nick Khan was very instrumental in bringing Vince and I together. We all flew to LA. We met. We sat. We broke out the Teremana, and about an hour later we started talking about the potential of what this match could be. Myself and Roman Reigns headlining WrestleMania at SoFi. We shook hands and we hugged right there and said, ‘Let’s do this.’”

“The north star thought was let’s not do something good, let’s not do something great, let’s do something unprecedented,” he added. “A match? Great. Roman’s an incredible athlete. He’s going to be on Mount Rushmore. The bigger thought was what can we do for the fans where WrestleMania isn’t the end of something, it’s actually the beginning of something bigger. We got really, really close but we couldn’t actually nail what that thing was.”