By Richard Gardner, Torch specialist

Daniel Bryan is no more. After surprisingly being eliminated from NXT this week, Bryan Danielson expressed his dissatisfaction at the way events had unfolded for him, and announced that he was reverting to his real name.

In storyline terms it's been an incredible decline for The Artist Formerly Known as Daniel Bryan. In the opening weeks of NXT, it felt as though the show had been created as a vehicle to introduce him to WWE fans. His first match was a competitive battle with Chris Jericho, who was World Champion at the time. The first Pros Poll, which ranked the NXT Rookies in accordance to their progress, confirmed this by placing him at number one. Daniel Bryan was being booked as a quirky underdog with exceptional wrestling ability, and this seemed to work for the first few weeks.

However, there is a fine line between being booked as an underdog and booked as a loser. Bryan was being touted as a world-famous independent wrestler by the announcers, but WWE fans who were sampling his work for the first time were watching him lose week after week. WWE needed to give Daniel Bryan his first win, but instead he was putting over the likes of David Otunga and Darren Young, and eventually the fans stopped caring. After all, how easy is it to get behind anyone with a win-loss record of 0-10?

The format of NXT has changed significantly over the course of the season in ways that have not helped Bryan or the rest of the NXT Rookies either. While the matches with monitored win-loss records remain, the first few shows featured reality TV-style vignettes in which the Rookies sat down and spoke naturally about their reasons for entering the competition, allowing the audience to get to know them a bit better. Further sit-down interviews over the course of season would have allowed the audience to understand the motivations of the NXT Rookies, facilitating their character development.

The vignettes have been replaced by a series of bizarre challenges. The challenge where the Rookies had to cut a one-minute promo in front of a live crowd was a good idea in theory, but the rest of the challenges have made for terrible television and had little relevance to what it takes to be a WWE Superstar.

Daniel Bryan's only real chance to get over with WWE fans was to wrestle. The makeup of the challenges did him no favors. He may have been the best wrestler on NXT, but when it came to keg-carrying or drinking soda, he wasn't even a good performer.

Bryan's dynamic with his WWE Pro, The Miz, also suffered towards the end of his run on NXT. What started off as an interesting dynamic deteriorated as their feud failed to progress beyond The Miz beating Bryan up after he had lost a match. It didn't help that Bryan failed to prove The Miz wrong on NXT.

By the time Daniel Bryan actually won a WWE match, it was already too late. Pinning Santino hardly represents a significant achievement, as Wade Barrett probably gained more by losing to John Cena on Raw two weeks ago. And, the total lack of reaction to Bryan's first win said everything about the way he has been booked.

This will surely not be the end of Bryan Danielson in the WWE. There is a place for him on any roster in the world. But, the promo where he castigated the "Daniel Bryan" character was an admission by WWE that he has been booked incorrectly.

The futures of both Bryan Danielson and WWE NXT are unclear as of this writing. Hopefully WWE management has sufficiently learned from their mistakes to ensure that both will be a success in the future.

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