WWE Elimination Chamber 2026: Biggest Winners And Losers

WWE stopped in Chicago, IL last night for the company's first PLE in the United Center since the 1994 edition of SummerSlam. There was a Men's Elimination Chamber, there was a Women's Elimination Chamber, there were title matches, and a guy came out of a box with a bunch of go-go dancers in leather bodysuits. If you want to read more about what happened, the results page is here. If you want to read what the staff loved and hated from the show, you can find that here.

Now, it's time to discuss who looked "good" and who decidedly did not. As always, this will not be a literal recounting of winners and losers, as that's already done on the results page, and also a really boring way to approach this topic. Sure, Randy Orton came out a winner in both result and appearance, but sometimes winners like CM Punk look like losers, and sometimes losers like Je'Von Evans and Trick Williams have the night dreams are made of.

Enough of my bloviating though, without further ado, let me present the winners and losers from the 2026 edition of WWE Elimination Chamber.

John Cena has retired. AJ Styles has retired. Batista has retired. Randy Orton remains.

A lot of people had Cody Rhodes pegged to win Saturday's Men's Elimination Chamber Match, and while "The American Nightmare" has plenty of wiggle room to get back into the WrestleMania WWE Title Match, the official Chamber winner and WrestleMania main eventer will be Randall Keith Orton.

Orton is no spring chicken. The years are clearly starting to show, and like his contemporaries, the sun has begun to set on his career, but in the photography world, that specific time of day is known as "Golden Hour," and Orton was wrestling in that amber glow all throughout the Chamber match. WWE will simply not have any other chance to give Randy Orton his final WrestleMania, so it's now or never, and WWE has firmly chosen "now."

It wouldn't have worked with anyone else. Had an other star been wrestling Rhodes in those closing moments, Drew McIntyre's interference would've felt a bit overbooked. But Orton played off his connection with Rhodes perfectly, letting Rhodes take care of McIntyre, and then swooping in with an RKO like only "The Viper" can. He might be a safe choice, but one last Randy Orton victory lap is not something I'm gonna complain about.

The Women's Elimination Chamber Match felt like a tense round of callbacks. The WWE Women's Division had been auditioning to replace Women's Champion Jade Cargill, and these were the six women who made the final cut.

The match was an embarrassment of riches and full of incredible talent, but it did make me feel a little bad for the champion. Cargill has had a very stop-start run in WWE, and it feels like the full stop could be coming any day now. With Rhea Ripley set to face the former AEW TBS Champion, it feels like there is very little in Cargill's arsenal, both in-ring and politically, that can counterbalance the sheer star-power of her opponent. Cargill has not generated the fan interest that the Women's World Title scene over on "Raw" has, and it feels like WrestleMania could be the spot where the Jade Experiment ends, especially considering Ripley will be her opponent.

Trick Williams, Je'Von Evans, and Kiana James are all relatively new names to the main roster. While I'm sure no one expected them to win their Elimination Chamber matches, the three former-NXT talent proved they deserved the spots in the first place.

Williams has been greeted by the main roster crowd with tremendous energy, same with Evans, and James has been a solid utility player on "SmackDown," but that doesn't change the fact that the Elimination Chamber could've exposed them at any point, as being the rookies they are, and yet all three competitors came out of their matches looking like ready, able members of the main roster. The transition from NXT to main roster isn't always as smooth as this, and as long as Evans is ok after a nasty head bump from Logan Paul, the future should be bright.

We have a little over a month until WrestleMania and I've already seen AJ Lee overcome the Big, Bad Becky Lynch. We're about to get over a month of bad Donald Trump riffs from "The Man," as WWE tries to find a way to do a big blow-off moment for the second time in a row.

There is no doubt in my mind that Lee and Lynch are going to have to find a way to turn s*** into Shinola, because the WrestleMania match is definitely going to be a rematch, but I've already seen AJ Lee win the title. Lee hasn't wrestled more than a few matches over the last decade, so everything about her act is still fresh, but Lynch is running out of steam on this Trump parody, and she's stuck with it for the foreseeable future, and so are we.

Maybe there's a way to pivot here, but considering CM Punk is already tied up with the, you know, main event, it doesn't seem likely that it'll be any kind of mixed-tag pivot. It's looking like we're stuck finding some kind of fragrant stipulation to cover up the stink of leftovers.

I don't think WWE actually knows how WrestleMania will end, but I think myself and CM Punk are both assuming Roman Reigns is winning the World Heavyweight Championship. Everything about Punk's current run feels like a man who knows his days are numbered, living it up through as many fantasy moments as possible. Essentially, a slightly more dignified version of Kash Patel's recent sojourn with the US Men's Hockey Team.

Take his entrance on Saturday. En route to what everyone assumed would be an easy victory over Finn Balor, Punk got the announcer for the Chicago Bulls and the iconic song "Sirius" by the Alan Parsons Project, so that he could live out his dream of making a big, Michael Jordan-esque entrance into a world title match in Chicago. Sure it was merely a house show match, but still, it's more about being able to say he did it, than anything else. A lot of his matches have felt that way during this World Title run, as if he's a man who knows he's just killing time until Reigns shows back up to work, and you know what? Good for him.

You'll notice that I had to use an AEW picture of Danhausen. That's because WWE did not bother to upload any pictures of his WWE debut to the website.

It feels like Danhausen's WWE debut was the definition of a half-measure. Sure, he got a full entrance and an army of go-go dancers, but he was given so little to do that the United Center crowd booed the segment in bewilderment. 

And who can blame them? The whole segment was him pointing. Sometimes pyro would go off, but mostly he was just pointing as an ironic Scooby Doo song played in the background. It was the comedy wrestling equivalent of feeding a guy to the lions and then being surprised there's no hand left to shake afterwards.

Danhausen is perfect for WWE, and the glimmers of promise in his debut leave me excited for what they can come up with, but it's impossible to deny that his debut fell flat.