The OC featured AJ Styles, with Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson positioned as his sidekicks. The group had some successes—perhaps most notably setting up Styles to win one of his best early WWE feuds against John Cena, and move up the ladder. However, the group never developed that much traction, and despite featuring celebrated talents, it’s an easy faction to forget even existed in WWE. Particularly after the success that the same principle players had enjoyed together in Japan, how could they not thrive as a unit WWE?
WWE’s OC Didn’t Have Continuity
Rumor had it that when WWE signed Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson to come in as a tag team, the company tried to buy the Bullet Club name from New Japan Pro Wrestling. It would be a reasonable enough thing to do, given that with this team and AJ Styles, not to mention Finn Balor, WWE had a number of the biggest names affiliated with the faction under contract. Moreover, The Bullet Club was probably the most popular and successful heel stable since the New World Order not to have been created under WWE management.
Without The Bullet Club name to work with, though, WWE essentially ignored that that group had tied the talents at hand together, and instead settled for vague allusions to them teaming up earlier in their career. The OC lost its name recognition and, with it, a lot of the credibility they might have enjoyed, as it instead felt like a more random assemblage of wrestlers. Moreover, they were relatively fresh faces to fans who only followed WWE (only Gallows had an extensive history with the company, and WWE mostly eschewed his past efforts).
It only compounded matters that The OC didn’t enjoy much continuity within WWE, only working together on and off for few-month stints as it was convenient to storylines, making it difficult for fans to buy into them as any sort of fixture.
The OC Didn’t Have Proper Factions To Feud With
There’s a place for the story of a faction outnumbering someone who dares to go against them. Different versions of The Four Horsemen worked this angle against Dusty Rhodes and Sting, and Vince McMahon’s Corporation did it with Stone Cold Steve Austin. Nonetheless, factions tend to thrive with other factions to go head to head with, as DX warred with The Hart Foundation and The Nation, or the nWo went up against WCW on the whole, as well as The Horsemen and Dungeon of Doom subsets of the roster.
The OC had a few six-man feuds—going against John Cena’s team with Enzo Amore and Big Cass, or Roman Reigns and The Usos. However, these clusters felt largely contrived for the sake of putting on six-man tag team matches as opposed to one proper faction going up against another. While the immediate storylines and matches were fine, they didn’t add to a sense of The OC really being a legitimate stable.
Gallows And Anderson Couldn’t Get A Consistent Push
When Gallows and Anderson first appeared as a team in WWE, making their surprise debut on Raw, they looked like a dominant force, taking apart The Usos and hitting them with The Magic Killer finisher. Their mystique wore thin quickly, though, as they proved only somewhat effective backup for AJ Styles against WWE Champion Roman Reigns.
The Good Brothers had some pushes over the years to follow, including two tag title reigns that totaled eighty-five days, and winning The World Cup at Crown Jewel 2019. Their momentum was never all that sustained, though, as they vacillated from being the top team, to getting lost in the tag team shuffle.
While it’s possible for a stable to succeed with a middlingly successful tag team in its ranks, it’s much more difficult for that to work when—like the OC—the group only has three members. The inconsistency of Gallows and Anderson’s kayfabe accomplishments limited how seriously fans could take their faction.
They Didn’t Have The Bullet Club Name
A big part of The OC’s ethos came from their history working together in New Japan, and presumed link to The Bullet Club franchise. When WWE couldn’t get its hands on that intellectual property, and given WWE’s reluctance to do much by way of acknowledging outside wrestling promotions, the Bullet Club name went unspoken on WWE TV.
So what was “The Club” or “The OC?” As far as WWE was concerned, it was simply three guys who were friends, who achieved mixed results according to their varying talent levels. Any shock or awe of this group banding together in WWE was nullified when they couldn’t tap in directly to the The Bullet Club's history, and the results were a lukewarm response from fans.
The OC can’t be knocked for its talents, and its no small thing for a faction to feature a WWE Champion. Nonetheless, The OC fell fall short of its potential in WWE for how its story was told, how the talent involved was booked, and what fans knew about their backstory. The successes of The Bullet Club itself, and more recently The Elite in AEW, have underscored just what The OC might have been.