Here are my awards for the Best of what I watched in 2025:
•Feud of the year for the first half of 2025 is Larry Zbyszko vs Lord Steven Regal. I may have underrated those matches. I loved them. American Wolves vs Steenerico is probably second feud at June. Jim Duggan is a feud machine and his feud with Buzz Sawyer & Dick Slater in Mid South 1985 is pretty great. Ted DiBiase vs Duggan probably takes the cake though.
•Biggest Surprise of 2025? The whole year felt like a surprise, am I right!? Talking wrestling, I think there's some truth there. I watched a fair bit of wrestling. Much of it was outside my comfort zone. The shoot style sampling project was a blast especially when looking at it with a different tactic. I surprised myself by watching a ton of American wrestling with WCW and Mid South being two of the big projects of 2025. So, I think the biggest surprise was digging my teeth into teeth into WCW '94 and Mid South '85 (especially) and having an excellent time.
•Meiko Satomura & Ayako Hamada are the joshi tag team of the year. Although there's not as many matches of theirs, they feel most like a top tier tag team... they were putting on classic, big time matches. They feel like they belong in that mid to late 90's AJW level. Men's tag team is between Yoji Anjo & Yoshihiro Takayama and Masahiro Chono & Hiroyoshi Tenzan. And I'm going to pick ChoTen for their work in New Japan 1995.
•My wrestler of the year starts with Regal in '94, Davey in '09 & Satomura in 2002. For quality of matches alone KENTA in ROH 2009 deserves recognition. Then I'm thinking Yoji Anjo for his consistently great working in UWFi. I have to consider Hiroyoshi Tenzan for his break out 1995. I think I'm going to stick with my frontrunner from June, Ted DiBiase. He's the complete package in 1985 Mid South Wrestling.
•Bryan Danielson is a perennial Best Match Watched contender and it's no different this year. And honestly, I don't know if I really am a big  fan of his anymore. I think I'm over-familiar. But that should be evidence of the quality of the nominated bouts. I'm not swayed by favoritism or nostalgia there. Those matches are that good. And the front runner is Bryan Danielson vs Davey Richards (Final Countdown: Boston 09/25/09). I think the other contender is Ric Flair vs. Terry Taylor (06/01/85). It's a match that I was absolutely transfixed by. I'm not really interested in long matches anymore but I stuck with it... and I knew that it was a longer one. Yup, I'm going to say Ric Flair vs. Terry Taylor (06/01/85) was the Best Match Watched in 2025. It just had everything. For the full list of the best matches watched in 2025, go to: https://wrestlingdreambattles.blogspot.com/2025/12/best-match-watched-2025-big-list.html
Upcoming projects that are in progress and looking to complete early 2026 are:
•All Japan 1986
•New Japan 1990
•Zero One Wrestling 2007
•Ongoing but periodically updated stuff include Tajiri You Might Have Missed, New Japan 2010 as well as more Shoot Style Sampling. And classic Ring of Honor projects...I'm going over a couple in my mind. Thanks for reading!