Daniel Bryan On If WWE Should Unify U.S. And IC Titles, IC Champions Losing All The Time, More
As noted earlier, Daniel Bryan took part in a media day this past Friday in San Francisco. During the event, I asked Bryan if WWE should unify the Intercontinental and U.S. Championships.
"If you were to make my ideal situation, I would like to keep them separate and treat the Intercontinental championship as a world championship," Bryan replied. "The way they had it before, where they had the WWE championship and the World Heavyweight championship, but then they combined those two. Now there are these two main stories. So you would have a main story with the WWE World Heavyweight championship and a main story with the Intercontinental championship, because if things were as they are now, I would never have got the opportunity to be in a main event spot. If they didn't have the World Heavyweight championship in 2011 when I first won it, I would never have got the opportunity to be in like a main event position, to main event things like Smackdown and all that kind of stuff. Because that was a good testing ground for, 'OK, can this guy get over? Can this guy get popular?' All that kind of stuff before they put me on Raw in bigger spots. I think that is needed because there's a lot of guys, if there is only one main title, then there's a lot of guys who aren't even going to be given the opportunity to be put in main event spots."
I also asked Bryan about secondary champions in the company losing all the time after winning their titles.
"It's kind of become – I don't want to say a joke – but when you when the Intercontinental title, then it's the end of you winning (laughs). I personally don't like it," Bryan said. "But I just think differently with a lot of things. So, to me it's one of those things where I would like the Intercontinental Champion to be strong, I would like our U.S. Champion to be strong, I would like for our tag team champions to be really strong. I think Cesaro and Tyson Kidd are a phenomenal tag team, and if you present them as the phenomenal tag team that they are, it would be awesome.
"But on the flipside of that, some of that might sound negative from something like that. But then you look at the job they've done with building Rusev. Here's Rusev who has only been in WWE for like a year and look at how strongly he's being presented. Look at how strong Roman Reigns is being presented. Seth Rollins is now in one of the biggest matches at WrestleMania, Bray Wyatt is in one of the biggest matches at WrestleMania two years in a row. So WWE has done a very good job in building stars within the last year. Now we need to build even more people so next year. For example, I would love it if for next year they said, 'we are not bringing anyone from the past or anything like that. All full time guys, and for the next year we have to build those guys on our television.' And you would see guys like Cesaro and Tyson Kidd and see them do what they do, you would see guys get brought up from NXT who are just unbelievable. And then when you had a special attraction, somebody that was just added to the show, it would be extra special. So, that's what I would like to see."