What Could Have Been: What If Cody Rhodes Hadn't Lost At AEW Full Gear 2019?

Cody Rhodes will be entering yet another WrestleMania as the WWE Champion this year, defending the title against Randy Orton as the vaunted "QB1" of the company. 

But there was a time before he had finished his story, when he had not won the WWE Championship, had not made his grand return at WrestleMania 38, and plied his trade elsewhere. 

There was a time when the man that serves as the face of the company had positioned himself as the beacon of the alternative. And while no one will truly speak to why the circumstance changed, Rhodes was very much on his way to being the face of AEW. 

History will now speak of that time as a stepping stone on his way back to WWE, but for a time Rhodes was a founder and EVP to the first true competitor to WWE in quite some time, and went on to become a three-time TNT Champion. 

Though he would never be able to become anything more than that having lost a World Championship match against Chris Jericho at Full Gear 2019. 

The stipulation set out that Rhodes losing would mean he could never challenge for the title again, and MJF threw in the towel for Rhodes ensuring that he lost. A striking parallel with Revolution this Sunday, as MJF takes on "Hangman" Adam Page in a Texas Deathmatch with the same losing stipulation applied to Page. 

So everything he did and could achieve with AEW was limited within months of its existence, and he was effectively banned from the main event picture. 

Hindsight is 20-20, that much is true, but that does feel like a sore waste of the man who would eventually switch gears and become the face of modern wrestling with WWE. 

It also opens up an avenue for thought; what could have been if Rhodes hadn't lost against Jericho that night? 

The most obvious outcome of this hypothetical scenario where-in Cody Rhodes has not lost his one and only shot at the AEW World Championship would be him becoming World Champion. Thus spurring an entirely new set of odd and unpredictable timelines in the multiverse. 

Jericho would go on to defeat Rhodes and continue to be the World Champion until Jon Moxley dethroned him the following year, and Moxley would then go on to hold the title until Kenny Omega captured it in a fan-less arena and became a belt-collector, and then "Hangman" Adam Page finally completed his story and beat Omega for the title. 

Rhodes was gone just a couple of months away from Page dropping the title to CM Punk, a man he now shares the WrestleMania main event picture with. Point being, what does him holding the title, just once at the very least, do to the canon of AEW and WWE altogether? 

Rhodes lost his chance at the title and he went on to feud with the likes of MJF, Brodie Lee, Sammy Guevara, Malakai Black, and Andrade. His role was the gatekeeper for the main event, but one would expect that to have changed significantly if he were to have won the World title. 

Hindsight is 20-20 but his title reign could have got started with the MJF feud, cementing MJF as the top heel of the company almost immediately. He and Kenny Omega could have revisited their brief feud as part of the Bullet Club civil war. 

He may have been the final mountain for Page to overcome, or he may have even been in his corner for that specific title feud.  

But the main thing this would have done is made Rhodes the undeniable face of the company – which proved to be something he wanted, so much so he would depart.

It is hard to imagine a universe where Rhodes is not now a three-time WWE Champion, having been the one to beat Roman Reigns, John Cena, and Brock Lesnar throughout his run and clearly looked at like the top guy; he is heading into his fourth WrestleMania main event in a row, winning titles on TV to cement that as the case. He is about as Hulk Hogan as one could get in 2026. 

But that would also undermine how shocking his move from AEW to WWE originally was. For much of the time he had been presented much in the same way Paul "Triple H" Levesque had been for WWE, speaking as a suit in media calls and leading the company seemingly be example. 

It does often beg the question whether becoming AEW World Champion and stripping away that one significant constraint would have changed what transpired with his career as time went on. 

Does a proven main eventer/face of the company in Rhodes choose to leave AEW in 2022 like he did in real life? Maybe not. It's not as though it will ever be known either way, and likewise the argument could be made that him winning the World title and leaving anyway might have at the detriment of the company. But that in itself is the nature of considering what could have been. 

The decision to rule Rhodes out of AEW's main event picture is one that may well have spelled the end of his run with the company he co-founded. 

And if there had been that decision made to make him the top guy instead, perhaps both AEW and WWE's main event pictures look a lot more different.