How COVID Was Behind Roman Reigns 1316 Day Reign: Yes, you read the heading right, it can be argued that COVID was the reason behind Roman Reigns’ historic and record-breaking title.
Now that the Tribal Chief’s 1316-day title reign ended at the hands of Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania 40, we can look back upon what was, without much competition, the greatest title reign in WWE’s modern era.
It is hard to remember that Roman first won the Universal Championship back at the Payback PLE in August 2020, where he defeated Braun Strowman and the late-great Bray Wyatt as The Fiend in a “No Holds Barred” match.
But many tend to forget how we got to that position in the first place. Roman was supposed to challenge Goldberg for the Universal title at Wrestlemania 36, but as the pandemic took over in March 2020, Reigns was pulled from the show because of his immuno-deficiency.
When he returned to WWE at SummerSlam 2020, he did it with a new attitude and a new ‘wise man’ in Paul Heyman. But this is not the moment where COVID contributed to his mammoth title reign.
Let’s fast-forward to January 2022. At this point, Roman has been the Universal Champion for well over a year, double-stack pinned Daniel Bryan and Edge in the main event of WrestleMania 37, defeated John Cena at SummerSlam 2021 and had also breezed past Brock Lesnar at Crown Jewel 2021.
How COVID Was Behind Roman Reigns 1316 Day Reign
WWE was running a new PLE concept, Day 1 on January 1st, 2022. There were two men’s world title matches announced for this show. While Roman Reigns was set to defend his Universal Championship against Brock Lesnar; Big E was supposed to defend the WWE Championship in a fatal-four-way match against Seth Rollins, Bobby Lashley, and Kevin Owens.
But hours before the show, it was announced that Roman had contracted COVID and hence would not wrestle at the show. So rather than shelve the idea of Lesnar being in a title match on the show, The Beast was inserted into the WWE title match, making it a fatal-five-way.
And wouldn’t you know it, Lesnar won that match to become the WWE Champion, pinning champion Big E in the process. Brock would then go on to lose the title to Bobby Lashley at Royal Rumble just a month later when Paul Heyman betrayed him, won the titular Rumble match later that night, won the Elimination Chamber a month later to win back the WWE Championship and take on Roman Reigns in a world title-unification match at WrestleMania 38.
According to Dave Meltzer via the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Roman was supposed to lose the Universal Championship to Brock Lesnar at the Day 1 PLE, bringing an end to his near-500-day title reign. According to Meltzer, Seth Rollins was supposed to win the WWE Championship instead. At the time, he had this to say on Wrestling Observer Radio –
“The plan for Day 1 was that Seth was gonna be the WWE Champion coming off of the show and Lesnar was gonna be the Universal Champion coming off of the show… So Lesnar is now the Champion. Seth was going to defend the title on one of the WrestleMania nights and then Lesnar and Roman were gonna be for the other title on the other WrestleMania night.”
So, if Dave Meltzer is to be believed, Roman vs Brock was still the plan for WrestleMania 38, but it would have just been for the Universal Championship and Lesnar would have gone into the show as the champion.
As we know, it was Roman Reigns who won the title-unification match at WrestleMania 38 and became the holder of both world championships in WWE. His title reign became so dominant that WWE had to introduce another world championship in 2023, the World Heavyweight Championship.
Now that The Head of The Table has lost his Undisputed WWE Universal Championship to Cody Rhodes, it is hard to imagine that this historic title reign would’ve ended over two years ago, and it was COVID that prevented that from happening.
