I seem to always blame booking for trying to protect John Cena at all costs, since he's "the face of the company".
I mean, a guy like UT or Kane can lose cleanly and still look good and make the other guy look good, but somehow WWE Booking feels like if Cena loses he will collapse down to Funaki levels and nobody will care about him again.
I don't even get his gimmick. He's not a marine, not a rapper, WTF is his persona supposed to be? A motivational speaker? He doesn't freestyle anymore, doesn't pump his reeboks up, doesn't wear chains or anything like that. To me, they seemed to have stripped Cena's whole gimmick away to just being a walking WWEShop plug.
There was a match that I remember seeing vs Chris Jericho, where Jericho laid down ALL of the offense during the match, but seemingly in the final minutes of the match, Cena gets in his offense which appears to be literally 5 fucking moves and the match was over, making Jericho look really weak.