What Could Have Been: What If Jey Uso Beat Roman Reigns At WWE SummerSlam 2023?

This Saturday on WWE SummerSlam 2025 Night 1, Roman Reigns teams up with his cousin Jey Uso, something that just two years ago would have been seen as a shocking occurrence. That's because two years ago, Jey was challenging Roman for the Undisputed WWE Championship, which he only lost because of a, shall we say, questionable choice from Jey's brother Jimmy. With Jey and Roman teaming up once more, it's time to ask the question: What if Jimmy had stayed backstage, and Jey had won the title instead?

I think at this point we can safely say it's not an insane idea. WrestleMania 41 has come and gone — we've seen Jey Uso win a world championship and serve well in the role. The weird thing, though, is it didn't really seem like an insane idea at the time, either. Jey had just gotten a pinfall victory over Reigns at Money in the Bank, becoming the first man to pin the champion in three years. More than that, Reigns had slowly been losing the support of the Bloodline, the family group that had been propping up his reign almost the entire time; Jey himself was a former member, his brother Jimmy Uso was also out, as was "Honorary Uce" Sami Zayn, and the Usos had been working on the final member, Solo Sikoa, in the lead-up to SummerSlam. Reigns had finally lost the protective shield of his family. And even beyond that — it just seemed right. Roman's title reign had been about Jey almost from the beginning; the entire Bloodline story was about the two of them. To some, Jey winning seemed less improbable and more inevitable.

Of course, that's not what happened, and in the end, maybe that's okay. Jey still got to pin Roman, he still got to be world champion eventually, and the general fanbase seems fine with Roman's reign of terror ending at the hands of Cody Rhodes. But could we have kept all that, and still gotten the artistic achievement the Bloodline story would have been if Jey had won the world title at SummerSlam 2023?

I'm mostly interested in artistic arguments here, so I'm not really going to talk about gate or ratings or any other business metric. That said, let's say Jey beat Roman and won the title. Say instead of interfering on Roman's behalf, Jimmy interferes on Jey's behalf, and Solo turns on Roman, too — Roman's family has always been the difference-maker, after all. Now what do we have? I think we have Undisputed WWE Champion Jey Uso leading a new babyface version of The Bloodline. Or, as I prefer to call it, a license to print money.

I think a lot of things that happened to Jey in late 2023 could honestly still be incorporated after his title win. Drew McIntyre, for example, could still be his first great nemesis — those matches would just be title matches. Crucially, I would also keep Jey's friendship with Cody and their short-lived tag title reign, including the pathos of them defeating Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens for the titles. If the story maintained its themes, Jey would stay a babyface through all this, but the pressures of being champion would begin to wear him down, and he might start making decisions that worry Jimmy and Solo, perhaps by reminding them of Roman. Jey's title reign wouldn't have to be long, but ideally it would have lasted long enough for the cracks in his composure to begin to show.

Don't worry, Cody Rhodes fans, this timeline still likely results in your boy finishing his story at WrestleMania 40. In this version of events, however, instead of rehashing the one thing he and Roman Reigns have in common yet again (their relationship with Dusty, which is basically all anyone wants to talk to Cody about) Cody has to honor his father's legacy by defeating his friend, Jey Uso — a man who is rapidly crumbling under the weight of the title. There's a ton of potential for poignance here, particularly if Cody (as he usually does) wants to frame things in terms of wrestling families and/or dynasties. The idea could be that the Rhodes family is ready to take on the burden of the throne, which has weighed heavy on the head of the Anoa'is for years now.

That's all just speculation on what such a feud might look like, of course. The important thing is, no matter what the scenario, Cody is getting crowned in Philadelphia. The really important thing is, in this version of events, we don't get the Jimmy vs. Jey WrestleMania match.

Roman stayed gone from WrestleMania until SummerSlam after losing the title to Cody, and if Jey had won the title, there would have been no issues with him doing something similar from SummerSlam until WrestleMania. Be advised there is no need to mourn for the remainder of Roman's title reign following SummerSlam 2023; one of the reasons I believe Jey winning is the superior timeline is that it avoids the last two successful title defenses of Roman's reign — the LA Knight match at Crown Jewel and the Royal Rumble four-way, neither of which were anything to write home about. Instead, Roman could have stayed home and nursed his aura back to health, returning just in time for ... hey look at that, it's the match he was always supposed to have at WrestleMania!

I know most people loved "Final Boss" Dwayne Johnson, and maybe some of that could be incorporated if the fans started booing Johnson over Roman, but how much messy drama would WWE have avoided by simply removing Reigns from the WrestleMania 40 title picture and booking him in a non-title match with The Rock? That's the match they wanted anyway. And after that, there are any number of directions to go with Roman, with Jey's babyface Bloodline, and with new family members like Jacob Fatu and the Guerrillas of Destiny presumably still coming in.

It's not necessarily that Jey winning at SummerSlam 2023 makes the current state of WWE so much better, but it does make the last two years feel more intentional. And in this case, it always felt like there was more at stake than that. Stories live or die on their endings; without a great ending, your great beginning and middle won't bear the fruit of their potential, whereas a great ending can turn a mediocre story into a masterpiece. AEW's Death Riders storyline, for example, won't be remembered for the multiple speed bumps it hit along the road to All In — it'll be remembered for "Hangman" Adam Page winning the AEW World Championship. In contrast, the Bloodline story could have (and arguably should have) been remembered as the greatest WWE storyline of all time — and if Jey had won at SummerSlam 2023, it might have been.