Former Writer Reveals When Kofi Kingston’s WWE Title Loss Was Planned

A former WWE writer has provided some information about when the company decided that Brock Lesnar was going to end Kofi Kingston’s title reign in 2019.

One of the most memorable and happiest moments for WWE fans in 2019 was at WrestleMania 35 when Kofi Kingston beat Daniel Bryan to become the WWE Champion. While it wasn’t the main event of WrestleMania, it was an all-time great moment for a guy like Kofi Kingston that worked for WWE for a decade before that match. It will forever be remembered as KofiMania.

Kofi Kingston would go on to hold the WWE Championship for 180 days, which means six months, with significant wins over the likes of Randy Orton and Dolph Ziggler.

On October 4, 2019, the first-ever WWE Smackdown episode on Fox aired with Kofi defending the WWE Title against Brock Lesnar. Nine seconds later, Lesnar hit an F5 on Kofi to become the WWE Champion yet ago. It was a decision that upset a lot of fans that wanted to see a more competitive match instead of Kofi Kingston getting squashed.

Dave Schilling was a WWE writer in 2019. In an interview with Fightful’s Jeremy Lambert & Joel Pearl, Schilling revealed that WWE planned Kofi’s title loss to Lesnar many months in advance.

“I was there in 2019, I was on the home team on SmackDown. The thing that we were the most concerned with and most involved with was KofiMania. That was a storyline that traded on a lot of attitudes about race and ideas about who should or shouldn’t be the champion. I never felt like that storyline was disrespectful.”

“I never felt that storyline was treated in a way where Kofi came off as a ‘token champion.’ That was a great storyline and I’m very proud of the small part I had to play in that. We can debate how it turned out in the end, when he lost to Brock Lesnar, which I found out about in April. We were talking about, ‘the plan is first SmackDown on Fox, Brock is going to come in and win the title and it’s going to be a quick match.’ “

“That’s exactly what happened after I left. That’s the way it turned out. The writers in the room with me, were always incredibly aware of what we were doing and why it was important.”

Brock Lesnar would go on to carry the WWE Title into WrestleMania 36 in 2020 when he lost the championship to Drew McIntyre in front of no fans at the WWE Performance Center due to the COVID-19 pandemic shutting things down at the time.