WWE's Original Plan for the WWE Universal Championship Match at Royal Rumble 2022
The 2022 Royal Rumble opened with Roman Reigns maintaining his grip over the WWE Universal Championship, but as often is the case with WWE plans surrounding how the match was supposed to end changed drastically. The match saw Reigns lock Seth Rollins in a Guillotine Choke and refuse to let go even after Rollins made it to the bottom rope, forcing the referee to call for a disqualification. This gave Reigns an incredibly rare loss, but it also meant his record-breaking title reign was still intact. According to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer, the original plan was for Reigns to beat Rollins cleanly, resulting in the latter being a surprise entrant into the Men's Royal Rumble match.
"Seth Rollins was originally in the Rumble, which is another story," Meltzer said. "I don't know if you've heard but both Rumbles were changed over and over and over again. In fact, the Seth match with Roman was changed several times too. Essentially, the original finish was Roman Reigns was gonna beat Seth Rollins. I don't what was gonna happen from there. The basic gist of the Rumble show was that Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar is the big match of the year and everything at the Rumble was to accentuate that as the big match of the year. So both had to look really really strong."
Reigns pelted Rollins with chair shots after the match, something WWE Creative believed would send a bigger message to fans than the actual result of the match itself. Vince McMahon then shot down the idea of Rollins entering the Rumble after suffering that kind of beating.
"Vince changed the finish because when the decision was made to do all those chair shots at the end, Vince thought that was too much to do to Seth Rollins to destroy him like that. Shane was really pushing for Rollins in the Rumble but when he did that beatdown, the feeling was it would be really stupid to take that terrible beating and then go into the Rumble," Meltzer said.
Even though the result gave Rollins a compelling argument for a rematch, it doesn't look like WWE is going that route. Brock Lesnar has already challenged "The Tribal Chief" for his title at WrestleMania 38 and Rollins cut a promo on this week's Raw saying he'd go back and capitalize on being in Reigns' head at a later date. He was then quickly added to the WWE Championship Elimination Chamber match at next month's Elimination Chamber pay-per-view.