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Miz has been booked just as strong, if not stronger than Kevin Owens. Were the nWo comedy heels because of this?

I'm glad we could have this discussion about how Metlzer was right in calling Miz an upper card guy instead of about Meltzer calling him a "comedy heel" which was you know kind of the whole point.

Saying that Miz is a not "comedy heel" is not arguing semantics it's saying that he in no way is a comedy heel. The upper card part is fine but the "comedy" part of the statement is ridiculous and absurd. If Dave is trying to say he's a comedy heel because of the skits where he and Maryse dressed up as Cena & Nikki Bella then that would make nWo a stable of comedy heels because they impersonated the Four Horsemen that one time. He's been involved in personal & intense rivalries with Ziggler, Ambrose & Cena over the past year not doing a fucking comedy gimmick like Planet Stasiak.

Let's change this rather pointless and stupid topic of discussion into something we CAN prove which is that Miz was called a "comedy heel" in a recent Observer which is either a very strong adherence to the "Miz sucks" narrative that Dave likes or an admission by Dave that he really isn't paying attention when he's watching WWE television because Miz hasn't been a comedy heel since the days when he was making some people think Damien Sandow was the next big star in wrestling.

Getting jacked and cutting good promos is pretty much what Vince's idea of grabbing the brass ring is though.

How exactly did JBL go "batshit crazy" on him?

Otunga is going to be shooting a movie for 6 weeks he's not being "replaced" it's a fill-in.

I don't look at the tag division on Smackdown as anything but a victim of not having enough time. Smackdown has been trying to keep nearly everyone on the roster involved in some kind of issue unlike Raw where a lot of guys just kind of float aimlessly (the way for example Sami Zayn often did on Raw) which has come at the expense of the tag division. I'm not sure how they can really fix that except doing a better job of cycling everything so maybe if the WWE Title feud gets a lot of time one week, the next week it only gets a little.

I guess that would make sense as to why Mauro would be making some kind of deal to never talk about the issue then because he's been anointed by wrestling twitter already as a perfect person incapable of having done any wrong in this situation.

I tweeted pretty much the exact same thing about that. What I didn't know is that Shibata wrestled someone who died of the same injury they are now (apparently) doing an angle around. That's almost like WWE doing an angle based around someone falling from the ceiling.

Anyone acting like Smackdown got decimated is over reacting. They really only lost two people who were REALLY contributing to Smackdown to being good and that's Miz and Alexa Bliss (who is gonna be replaced by Charlotte and that is an upgrade) Bray Wyatt has been the worst thing on Smackdown for over a month now so getting rid of him is fucking GREAT. Ambrose is unreliable, he's bad more often than he's good and even if he was kinda maybe sorta the "top" face on Smackdown he sure as hell didn't feel like a top guy on the show. What else did they really lose? Apollo Crews and Kalisto weren't really doing anything, Rhyno & Heath Slater already had their peak and weren't gonna ever get as over as they were, Curt Hawkins was just a jobber and likely will be replaced in that role by Jinder. So really they don't need to get some crazy infusion of talent. They will probably pick up Charlotte, Kevin Owens, Cesaro & Sheamus (or New Day), Jinder Mahal and probably another woman and another low level person like Titus or Curtis Axel and be just fine. They still got AJ, Nakamura, Luke Harper, Baron Corbin, Randy Orton and part time Cena. And Mojo who I suspect is about to get a big push and convince all you non believers.

Matt Jackson of the Young Bucks bitching about getting blocked by someone is hilarious considering he vanity searches so he can block people who even say anything slightly negative about him.

So you've never been in a workplace where some guy gets on everyone's nerves, even if he's just being himself, and people give him shit for it? Nothing about that is exclusive to wrestling. We've still never been given any real indication of how Mauro specifically is supposed to have been bullied except for the stuff that JBL said on Bring it to the Table and the usual back and forth stuff between JBL & Mauro on Smackdown (which is not nearly as bad as the shit Byron gets on commentary) Everyone can cite all these specific examples of JBL doing something to Edge or Steve Blackman or Justin Roberts but ask "What did JBL do to Mauro?" and you get "Dave said he bullied him."

There was also that thing with Chris Masters where Chris was in rehab and when he got back on Raw HHH shit on him for having lost a bunch of weight

The Spoiler/Brody thing could also be something where Birkholz went in and added commentary way later for some type of video release. As far as I know Birkholz never did any commentary until really late, like the last year of so of the promotion.

Lawler kind of summed up his reasons for not watching wrestling that he's not a part of as "If you're a plumber, when you get off work do you really wanna go watch another plumber fix pipes?" Obviously not all wrestlers share that same feeling on it but I don't think it's crazy for anyone in wrestling who is already spending most of their time working for the wrestling business not wanting to use their free time to just watch more wrestling. As far as Cornette goes he said he didn't watch WWF in the 80s because he didn't like it. Seems pretty simple I mean plenty of people watch a ton of wrestling on this board and don't keep up with modern WWE because they don't like it.

I'd say an overwhelming majority of people who have only ever watched WWE & only use Facebook/twitter to talk about it online would know those terms, yes. It doesn't take much for there to be crossover in the discussion between people who only watch WWE and the hardcore "watch everything & keep spreadsheets of it all" types and it's not like those terms are super difficult to understand and pick up.

The word heel is really not even "insider" knowledge anymore when you have some fucking goof like Dolph Ziggler making his twitter name @HEELZiggler and doing Q&A's using the hashtag #AskTheHeel

I don't know if there is anyone talking about WWE on twitter that doesn't know that kind of term regardless of whether they've ever gone to a wrestling news site, message board, whatever. But they also don't fit the usual definition of "smart" fan where they are going to give star ratings and talk about work rate either.

I think the message board thing is less relevant than ever (exception to PWO of course) because most people are on Facebook and Twitter nowadays. So even if someone likes the WWE Facebook page or follows along with their hashtags (as is pushed on TV) then they'll be exposed to a lot of different stuff that 'casual' fans of the past wouldn't have. To me casual fan used to be synonymous with fans who weren't online but now that everyone is then even the most casual watcher can easily be exposed to 'internet wrestling culture' or however anyone wants to categorise that. It's a whole different ball game. There are a lot of people I follow on twitter that don't watch anything other than Raw/Smackdown but tweet a lot about WWE so this also skews the whole dated idea of what a "casual fan" is.

On twitter where I follow a lot of people who went this year, I haven't seen any "WrestleMania was too long" complaints from anyone who was actually in the crowd at Mania. They give you breaks to go get something to eat, go to the bathroom, etc & not really miss anything (even if everyone REALLY loves to complain about the yearly musical act, that's probably a big reason it's there) so this whole question seems to be based around some people watching it at home not wanting to sit there and watch for 7 hours straight. The great thing about that is, you don't have to. WrestleMania immediately goes on demand as soon as it's over, so if you watch the first 2-3 hours and you're getting burnt out just stop watching and go back and watch the rest of the show later. I honestly couldn't even imagine having tried to watch this year's show live because I actually quite enjoyed it this year but I also didn't watch any video packages and skipped most entrances so spent far less actual time watching it even if I still saw the whole show.

Using the term "casual fan" to describe those people is pretty wild. Even leaving out the tape trading part that is, at a bare minimum, like 90% of the WWE audience. Yes. Casual fans will always make up the vast majority of the fanbase. And I agree with that description. The word "casual" really doesn't seem to fit though since there are a lot of people who fit that description that are hardcore WWE only fans. There really isn't anything "casual" about their fandom except that they don't watch other wrestling & they don't go to message boards. WWE draws 60,000+ fans to WrestleMania every year and people swear up and down that "there are no casuals at Mania" but ain't no damn way every one of those people is a message board person.

He actually said "much sole searching"

This is a definition that I think is fine and makes a lot of sense but it's almost never how it actually gets used.

He was shitting on dudes w/podcasts acting like wrestling experts and said "If you were an expert somebody legitimate in the wrestling business would be hiring you not AIW"