Live coverage of WWE Royal Rumble 2015

A hot crowd in Philadelphia welcomed WWE to town on Sunday night for the 2015 edition of the annual Royal Rumble pay-per-view event. Each year, the winner of the Royal Rumble wins a guaranteed title shot in the main event of wrestling’s version of the Super Bowl, as the Road to WrestleMania officially begins.

The Royal Rumble is generally the most can’t-miss match of the year for the WWE, and Sunday night’s iteration was no exception. With 62 days until WrestleMania, let’s take a look at how the chess board is set up at the moment.

There were only a couple of possible Royal Rumble winners coming into the event, and the man who’s been earmarked as WWE’s next big star pulled off the victory in Philadelphia. Roman Reigns, who set the record for most eliminations last year, won his first Rumble by last eliminating Rusev.

The Rock made an appearance at the end of the show, helping Reigns dispatch of two men he eliminated for good. Kane and Big Show, the two veteran enforcers for The Authority, had teamed up to eliminate all of the fan favorites from the Rumble. Rusev tossed both of them, but they came back into the ring to beat Reigns after he appeared to have won. But The Rock played hero, coming down to the ring to help Reigns clear out Show and Kane.

It might not have been Kofi’s most creative avoidance, but having the Rosebuds catch him and put him back on the apron was pretty creative.

Look, we know this wasn’t running the guardrail or leaping off a chair -- but you can’t eat filet mignon every day.

The Bella Twins are back to working together as heels, and it’s going pretty well. They took care of Natalya and Paige pretty comfortably at the Royal Rumble, with the losers barely getting any offense in.

Instead of setting up a Divas title defense for Nikki, WWE opted to go the route of a four-woman tag team match inspired by Total Divas storyline. Paige is new to the E! ‘reality’ show this season and she’s made friends with Natalya for no discernible reason. Paige’s character has become more of a goof-off whose age is emphasized a bit more, which ... well, it’s something. She’s on TV. We can’t complain. She also makes fun of Nattie’s purposely obnoxious husband Tyson Kidd, and we can only pray this will lead to a match.

The Usos retained their WWE Tag Team Championship at the Royal Rumble, and their win might mark the end of title challenges for the team they defeated, The Miz and Damien Mizdow (neé Sandow).

Because WWE’s tag team division is mostly in shambles, these two teams have been feuding over the titles for a while, since they don’t really have anyone else to wrestle. The good news is that these are four excellent performers, so it’s been a pretty entertaining run. There was a weird storyline involving Miz trying to get Jimmy Uso’s wife Naomi into a music video, and more recently, the Usos won the titles from Miz and Mizdow on Raw.

It’s been a weird debut for the Ascension, but they finally have their first win over an actual WWE tag team ... even if it’s against a couple of old guys. They beat the New Age Outlaws in the first match of the Royal Rumble card.

The Ascension have been steamrolling people in NXT for a while and spent the beginning of their main roster career steamrolling local athletes. They tried to break up an old guy party at the Raw Reunion show, but then got beat up by all of those old guys. That set up this match, which isn’t a typical PPV-kickoff. WWE’s been rolling with fan favorites known for their wrestling in this timeslot for a while, so the Outlaws’ placement was a bit of a shocker.

He’s in Philly, will we see him tonight?

Tyson Kidd and Cesaro are the best new tag team in WWE, and they might be heading for something really fun after beating The New Day on the Royal Rumble pre-show.

The New Day and the Kidd-Cesaro team haven’t had a lengthy feud, but they’ve had a slew of pretty fun TV matches over the last few weeks. Hopefully this serves as a blow-off match to get one of them to bigger and better things.