The week of 8/23 – 8/28 was arguably the greatest week of Roman Reigns’ WWE career. He returned at SummerSlam on August 23, followed by some extremely significant character development on the following episode of SmackDown. Many fans on the Internet have speculated about Roman possibly becoming a Paul Heyman Guy for a couple of years now given his history at WrestleMania with Heyman’s client Brock Lesnar.
Reigns was in the main event of WrestleMania 31 in 2015 and WrestleMania 34 in 2018 with Brock Lesnar (and lost both matches) before The Big Dog finally won the Universal Title from The Beast Incarnate at SummerSlam 2018. Reigns would have to relinquish the championship unexpectedly in October 2018 to deal with his leukemia which had returned for the first time in 11 years. Roman was out for about four months before he made his extremely emotional return in February 2019.
This change in attitude for The Big Dog means a whole lot more now as opposed to the possibility of WWE setting this in motion a couple of years, so the timing was perfect. This is the payoff of long-term storytelling – the only problem is, no one wants to wait to get to the conclusion of the story. However, the reward is so much greater if you wait for the right time and take the necessary time to build anticipation. Fortunately, Mr. McMahon understands this perfectly and has executed it many times over.
In my humble opinion, Roman Reigns’ promo on August 28 was the best promo he has done since the one he cut the night after he won the WWE World Heavyweight Championship from Triple H at WrestleMania 32 (I believe the date was April 4, 2016). His promo that night read “I’m not a bad guy, I’m not a good guy, I’m The Guy.” The energy Roman brought with this recent promo a little over a week ago felt extremely authentic and like WWE finally trusted him to bring out his personality.
Triple H has hinted at the possibility of WWE doing another draft in the Fall of 2020, so it would be conceivable to assume that Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar will be moved to the same show to make the travel easier on Heyman whenever the company does start traveling again. Reigns could very possibly win the Universal Championship at Payback on August 30 (giving The Fiend an opportunity to turn his attention to the storyline he started a few weeks ago with Alexa Bliss).
What could be an interesting story to tell is if, after Roman going through leukemia amongst other things to finally secure the Universal Championship for an extended period (because, unbelievably, The Big Dog has never held a world championship for more than about 2 ½ months consecutively), he could lose the Universal Title to Brock Lesnar (who Roman thought he was done with). WWE could then proceed to tell the story of how Roman cannot get rid of The Beast (with the subtext of how Paul Heyman betrayed him. Originally, Reigns may have been of the thought, “If I struggled this much to finally beat Lesnar and Heyman, I don’t want to waste years of my career doing it again. This go around, rather than fighting against them, I will join them.”