Why The Shield wasn't as dominant as the WWE claims
The WWE likes to refer to The Shield as perhaps the most dominant faction in WWE history, but that just flat isn’t true.
There can be no denying that the group – made up of Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins – was a powerful force in the company during their rougly 19 months together. Still, their actual legacy is much less impressive than the other groups with whom they could be compared.
To recap, The Shield had two championship runs as a group, a roughly five-month run as tag team champs for Reigns and Rollins and a lengthy but uneventful United States title run for Ambrose. Many would argue that their dominance of the company went beyond titles, and that’s true to an extent. The list of men involved with or against The Shield reads like a “who’s who” of recent WWE history – Triple H, Kane, Big Show, Daniel Bryan, Randy Orton, Batista, CM Punk and Bray Wyatt, to name a few.
That said, while their opponents and allies, were main-eventers, The Shield brothers were not. In fact, they only main event any of them participated in while they were together was the final event before Rollins famously turned on Ambrose and Reigns, a six-man elimination tag team match at Payback 2014 in which the Shield swept Evolution.
To be fair, it could be argued that The Shield was broken up for a reason, to preserve the legacies of other groups like Evolution or DX, both of whom had WWE executive and part-time performer Triple H as a member. That theory is supported by the fact that Triple H was so instrumental in the on-screen aspect of the Shield’s demise.
Here’s a look at a few other groups The Shield could stack up against.