By Dusty Giebink, DEJ Experience Member

The Money in the Bank ladder match is the one contest at this upcoming WrestleMania that I looking forward to the most. It’s the Snickers match of the evening, guaranteed to satisfy the average wrestling fan by being an entertaining spectacle with lots of things going on at once. There will be brawling, weapons shots, high flying, dangerous stunts, ladder-based moves and a whole lot more. Year after year it’s the one match you can expect to have something crazy happen in that would be worth watching the tape for years down the road.

It’s also significant because the winner of the match receives a guaranteed title shot any time in the next year. It paints the picture in wrestling fans’ minds that the winner of the Money in the Bank will pick the most opportune time possible to cash in the title shot opportunity, swoop in and take the belt from the current champion. Edge cashing in his title shot and beating a spent John Cena to win the gold last year (which I called, by the way) is a prime example of this.

So I thought it would be fun to look at the participants in this year’s version of the match and try to determine who exactly will win the match and potentially become the next World Heavyweight Champion. Common logic among internet fans was that Jeff Hardy was going to win the Money in the Bank match and then become champion, but due to circumstances beyond WWE’s control, if that was ever the plan at any time, it surely isn’t at this juncture. So I thought it would be fun to look at the other competitors who are in the match and try to determine which one will be victorious.

We’ll get the easy ones out of the way first. I have gone full circle on Shelton Benjamin in the last year, to the point where I can’t stand him anymore. He only seems to try when he’s either winning, or booked in the Money in the Bank match. The rest of the time he sleep walks through his matches and rests on the laurels of his admittedly impressive past, both in legitimate athletics and as one half of the World’s Greatest Tag Team. There are two things every year that you etch in stone and trace over with your own blood: Shelton Benjamin will do a spectacular move at WrestleMania in the Money in the Bank match, and he will not win the match.

Carlito is a guy who is languishing in the midcards and there doesn’t really seem to be any escape for him in the near future. I’m not sure there should be. He’s another guy who has sort of resigned himself to living with what WWE has given him, instead of trying to make the best possible lemonade of the situation and forced WWE’s hand. If you get complacent because of a lack of a push, you are giving your company no incentive to change their mind about you. As such, Carlito is stuck in “midcard hell” and really doesn’t have much of a chance of winning this, in my house of humble. Carlito’s best bet to a valuable contributor to the roster in the foreseeable future is to maintain his role in a tag team position with Santino. They really have a unique chemistry together.

John Morrison might be one of my favorite wrestlers right now, but he’s about six months to a year away from serious contention for any sort of singles title right now, let alone the World Title. He is currently in a tag team situation with the Miz (I think they are still tag team champions on Smackdown, but since WWE could care less (that was put there on accident, Wade) about their tag team division, why should we?), and so that alone has to weigh in on his chances of victory in this match. If WWE has proven anything over the last few years, it is that they don’t really want to change things in the pecking order unless they absolutely have to.

Chris Jericho’s return has been pretty disastrous, which is why it is funny to me that he has sort of fallen into the Intercontinental Title since Jeff Hardy’s suspension. I think that’s pretty much his ceiling in WWE right now, so I don’t really count on him winning, either.

Which leaves the three top contenders in my mind: MVP, C.M. Punk and Mr. Kennedy. Of them, I’m going to say that Mr. Kennedy wins the Money in the Bank. I’ve written in years past about how WWE seems to have a rubber band policy, where they let the exciting newcomer get a taste of the glory, and then snap him back in to sort of test his resiliency and patience. Some crack under the pressure, like the aforementioned Shelton Benjamins and Carlitos of the world. Some use a bunch of crack, like Jake “The Coke Machine” Roberts. (That satire-style joke was dedicated to El Eric Nelson.) Mr. Kennedy has sort of been in limbo lately, at a point where his career could really go either way. This match seems to be his one big opportunity to prove he has the mettle to be a top star in the company.

Last year, Kennedy won the MITB match and subsequently blew it by losing the title shot to Edge, which for WWE Logic is apparently the same thing as Edge winning the match and continuing his undefeated streak at Mania. How Kennedy handles himself after winning (hey, this is my fantasy booking column here, and I have him winning, darn it) is going to play a large role in whether he actually gets to use the title shot this year, or whether he blows it again and loses the title shot to someone else this year. (And maybe that would be CM Punk, internet fans! He could very well be promoted to Raw or Smackdown within the next year, so it’s an entirely plausible scenario that I neither endorse nor vilify at this point.)

I can’t help but feel Kennedy is one blown opportunity from conducting a mid-ring “shoot” about the bullsh-- of the politics Up North (“We know where he’s talking about!”) and how now that he’s in TNA, there will be nothing stopping him from going straight to the top of the wrestling business. And then, of course, he’ll lose in 10 seconds to Eric Young on PPV, but that’s another column for another time, written by another person. I’m trying not to mention TNA in these things. It’s bad for my karma.

Dusty Giebink is the “D” portion of the DEJ Experience. His columns can usually be found every Friday night on PWTorch.com, but this one is late because of the busy nature of the holiday season. He apologizes for that. He encourages you to read the other DEJ District columns posted this weekend, because they’re all better than this one. Dusty can be contacted on the VIP Forum, or at theaudioexperience@gmail.com.