Sasha Banks Is WWE’s Mainstream Star
The Boss appears in The Mandalorian.
The new season of the Star Wars mega-hit The Mandalorian has dropped, and it features a familiar blue-haired Boss to wrestling fans.
Sasha Banks is set to get one of the biggest pushes of her career both in and out of the ring off the heels of winning the SmackDown Women’s Championship from Bayley in a classic Hell in a Cell. Her star continues to rise outside the wrestling world where she’ll be featured in the second season of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus.
While the stars seem to be aligning for Banks right now, she’s been ready to carry WWE for years.
In 2015, Sasha Banks and Bayley had a match that defined an era of women’s wrestling and cemented the NXT brand at NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn. In 2016, she and Charlotte Flair main evented Raw in a Falls Count Anywhere Match for the Women’s Championship, generating the second-highest ratings of the Fall season, trailing only behind the return of Goldberg. In 2019, at WWE’s Hell in the Cell pay-per-view, she and Becky Lynch put on a classic that not only lived up to the brutality of the gimmick, but also told a great story.
In all of these instances, Sasha Banks has proven that she can handle the ball. Yet, each time it seems like she’s finally going to realize her true potential, she’s been held back.
An imperfect comparison to Bank’s career is Russell Wilson’s in the NFL. Wilson is as talented a quarterback as there’s ever been in that league. He has all of the tools: he can throw, run and is a cerebral player who almost always has the right instincts. Wilson has won a Super Bowl and carried less than talented teams to the playoffs, yet he hasn’t even received a single MVP vote in his career.
Sasha Banks can relate. Despite all of her accomplishments, all of her skill, all of her talent, she still hasn’t fully been recognized by her company for her greatness. It sounds absurd to say that a now six-time Women’s Champion hasn’t been given her just due, but this is the case when you analyze her title reigns. Banks has spent a total of 108 days as Raw Women’s Champion through her previous five reigns with an average reign length of just 21.6 days. Now compare Bank’s reigns to other top women during this time period, and it’s clear Banks has been treated differently. Literally every other Raw Women’s Champion has had a reign longer than Bank’s longest reign, and no one in the history of that title has had a shorter reign than Banks (eight days).
Now that she’s the newly crowned SmackDown Women’s Champion, the time is now for Sasha Banks to finally get that defining run at the top of a main roster women’s division.
For years she has proven to be a star outside of wrestling as well, with her having made appearances on popular shows that’ve done big numbers on YouTube such as Wild ‘N Out (two videos with 9.4M and 3.1M views, respectively) and Hot Ones (4.9M views), along with walking the red carpet at the BET Awards. Her family pedigree certainly helps with her being Snoop Dogg’s cousin, but she also presents herself as a star independent of that. She has a presence that is undeniable and makes her standout among the most talented roster of women WWE has ever had.
And anecdotally, there have been very few wrestlers over the years that my Mom has stopped and watched for an extended period of time if she saw them on TV. Banks is one of them and I’d never doubt a Black woman’s intuition.
During the contract signing for the Women’s Championship match at Hell in a Cell, Banks emphasized just how big her star is.
“I am Sasha Banks and my name is bigger than your title.”
She wasn’t lying. It’s time WWE realizes the type of star it has and start treating her like that’s the case.
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