Who will win the 2015 WWE Royal Rumble?

The conclusion of Sunday’s Royal Rumble felt inevitable for most of 2014. Roman Reigns had nearly won last year’s Rumble before he was sent over the top ropes by Batista to end it, and that was meant to be a preview of things to come: it wasn’t Reigns’ time yet, but by setting an eliminations record that the crowd was audibly thankful to witness, he had taken a step towards becoming a major player in WWE. His popular stable, The Shield, broke up later in the year, giving him the opportunity to move out of the tag division and into the singles realm, and his push as a badass handsome prince with a show-stopping wink continued unabated through the summer.

Until Reigns was hurt, anyway. A mid-September hernia requiring emergency surgery cut short his feud with former Shield member and fellow WWE golden child, Seth Rollins, and also cost Reigns much-needed time and practice both on the mic and in the ring. When he finally showed back up healthy in December, Reigns still had the look, but he was rusty and painfully awkward in his promos. He wasn’t coming off like someone who should win the Rumble and get the chance to headline on the industry’s greatest stage, WrestleMania, an event that would likely see him exit as WWE’s champion. Those are supposed to be the perfect moments with the right wrestlers at the right time. Reigns will likely be that right wrestler someday, but it’s unclear if he’s ready now or will be by March 29, and his bosses need to figure that out soon.

Reigns could still triumph in the Rumble -- WWE has bet on him for this long already, and there are still a few months for him to justify all of it. Then again, he might not! The fact we don’t know is something of a breath of fresh air, really, and not just because it’s unclear if Reigns is ready to be the guy and that makes us all a tad uneasy. The last two Rumbles were about as obvious as could be -- as enjoyable as they were as they happened -- as WWE had already all but announced the winners beforehand.

If Reigns wins this Sunday, it could go a little something like this.

The 2013 Rumble featured a WWE championship match between the part-time Rock and then-champion CM Punk. Rock was back for a reason, and that was to headline WrestleMania as champion once more and then, because symbolism, pass that old torch to someone else. Like, say, the guy Rock fought at WrestleMania the year before in what was billed as a once in a lifetime match, John Cena. Technically, they weren’t lying: one of them was a title match, and the other wasn’t. Totally different!

Anyway, if you assumed Rock was winning the title -- and you likely did, because why else was he there instead of making much more money filming a movie? -- then you also assumed Cena was going to win the Rumble to earn his shot against the Rock. Good Rumble and all, but if you were paying attention you could see it telegraphed. There were odds to be overcome, y’all, and only one man to overcome them.

The following year, Batista was brought back as a good guy and crowd favorite during Royal Rumble season, a plan that failed spectacularly when the crowds realized “Bootista” was a thing they could say to the guy they didn’t want to be in his position. When it was announced before the Rumble that actual hero to the people and wrestling fans with eyeballs everywhere Daniel Bryan wasn’t even going to be in the match, an already obvious winner in Batista became that much more so. Even while Reigns bounced around spearing everyone who came within 10 feet of him, you knew that in the end Batista would come away victorious.

So yeah, even the tiniest bit of indecision about who is going to be the last of 30 men in the ring this Sunday is progress. Daniel Bryan is actually going to be in the Rumble this time around -- he won his spot officially with a match on Thursday Night Smackdown and everything! While he already had his WrestleMania Moment last April, when he defeated his nemesis in the Authority, Triple H, to earn entry into a championship main event match that he also won that same night, that whole run was truncated by the need for neck surgery. The Daniel Bryan story can be told again, with Bryan winning the Rumble and headlining WrestleMania once more, then getting an actual run as champion. There are very few fans who would be upset about this, because Bryan still gets the loudest reaction of anyone in the company, and showed back up as on-fire in the ring as he left.

It’s actually something of a safe decision, as at least WWE knows fans would be down with it, but a safe decision might be what’s necessary if they want to delay the whole Roman Reigns’ arrival on the big stage by six months or a year or whatever it ends up being.

Bryan also isn’t the only guy they could look to that would make the fickle fans in Philadelphia and at home thrilled on Sunday. Dolph Ziggler was looking like a possibility as a Rumble winner for a time, as WWE was making him into someone the bad guys just couldn’t put away no matter how much of a beating he took. He’s a fan favorite, the kind of guy any crowd would get behind, and seeing him fight his way through the Rumble until he can barely stand up would make for an incredible moment for both Ziggler and WWE -- much like it did when they used him this way during the Survivor Series’ tag-team elimination main event.

Ziggler was recently fired and rehired (in storyline) by the power-mad Authority stable, and had to wrestle to win his own spot at the Rumble as Bryan did, so there is still some potential for Ziggler to come out on top as he’s been kept around in a major, time-consuming angle for months. It’s nowhere near the odds of Reigns or Bryan, mind you, but if they wanted to swerve us all and make a huge segment of the fan base happy about it, he’s a guy for the job. Ziggler has toiled in the mid-card for too long, and is ready for the main event scene: his work cannot scream this any louder, and neither can his supporters.

If you need a reason to adore Ziggler, then do it because Stone Cold says so. (Photo credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Then there is another former Shield member in Dean Ambrose, who WWE has had in a seemingly never-ending feud against Bray Wyatt for months. Ambrose is a low-probability candidate, but if his archenemy Seth Rollins ends up winning the WWE championship on Sunday in the triple threat match against John Cena and Brock Lesnar, it sets up a perfect rekindling of their interrupted feud. Ambrose still needs to get revenge on Rollins for turning on both him and Reigns, which broke up the Shield and strengthened the Authority, and he still occasionally remembers that Rollins stole the Money in the Bank briefcase (a free pass to fight a championship match that can be used at any time so long as a referee is available) from him by cheating back in June. Again, it’s low-probability, but WWE already knows Rollins is good to go and so is Ambrose: if they don’t want to redo the Bryan story, want to save Ziggler’s moment for SummerSlam, and aren’t prepared to commit to Reigns just yet, this is an avenue they could take.

Your most likely bets are still Bryan and Reigns, and maybe not in that order. There are plenty of fans who feel Reigns isn’t ready yet, but even more of them are swooning every time he opens his mouth or shows up on camera, regardless of what weird, cartoonish garbage WWE has him spewing in his promos. That might be enough to stick with the original plan, but at least this once the original plan isn’t the only one on the table.