goc

I very much dispute the idea that "almost anyone can understand the machismo behind this motive." Maybe 1 or 2 as a "machismo" thing but not when it goes on for the length of time some of those ridiculous forearm/chop exchanges do. Especially when it's almost universally maligned by even the hardcore puro fans and apparently among native Japanese wrestling fans as well.

Nothing in lucha is harder to understand than the Japanese wrestling trope of willingly standing there and allowing your opponent to forearm you in the face or chop you repeatedly in the chest.

I really want Roman to win the Universal title at Rumble and Braun to win the Rumble. If it doesn't happen, those two fighting for the U.S. title is going to make whatever the Universal Title match is look 2nd rate by comparison.

Yes that is accurate. Owens decided to do his best Killer Brooks impression and grind the match to a halt with headlocks and chin locks.

I liked the tag titles match and thought the finish was great. Really dug the Zayn/Strowman match and thought it had good storytelling and did everything it set out to do. I thought the women put on a clinic on how to have a great WRESTLING match that isn't just a 50/50 bomb throwing no selling festival of 2.9 kickouts. LOVED that match and think it's honestly one of the best WWE matches of the year. Sasha tapping with 2 seconds left was really stupid, would have worked a lot better to do that with 45-30 seconds left and then have Charlotte not be able to put her away to break the tie. But that's really the only flaw in the match for me. The rest of the card was either forgettable or downright bad. The main event stunk and was easily the worst match Roman Reigns has had on PPV and no real surprise to me that it was with Kevin Owens who I find to be really NOT good. Royal Rumble has a fly-in crowd just like Mania.

The one thing I hate more than the obligatory capitalistic fake-joy of the über consumption party know as Xmas is someone, anyone, using the following argument about *anything* : "You'll see when you'll have kids.". I deeply despise the social injunction of reproducing as much as the patronizing that goes with it, as if having kids was some kind of magic trick a human being was supposed to go through to have a purpose in life and understand whatever meaning of it. Fuck kids. Well, not litteraly of course… But you get the drift. So yeah. Fuck Xmas. And fuck you Mick Foley, you Xmas-tree masturbating Santa Claus look-alike creepo. There. There are no year end awards on PWO so you can stop competing for "most miserable person on the board" any time now.

Yes.

I'm pretty sure NickH was talking about "matches that had been previously uploaded that aren't on the site anymore." not about uploading full cards.

How many of the promoter's kids do you actually think this applied to? As far as I can remember it's pretty much just Mike Von Erich that got pushed way harder and faster than he should have.

I actually googled during the show to see if he was a real news anchor because he was so good in it.

Seems like USA Network is doing just fine and are probably quite happy that Raw & SD are helping boost their overall ratings average. http://www.sescoops.com/usa-network-touts-the-success-of-wwe-raw-smackdown/

I don't know why wouldn't buy it. Miz made it known going all the way back to his MTV days on Real World that he is a huge wrestling fan and the WWE guys can ask for DVDs (and I guess probably now digital copies of stuff) in the Vault to watch on their own. I'd especially believe that he's watched old Bockwinkel promos because he has probably put more work into improving that aspect of his game than just about anyone else in WWE.

It seems like Gabe and WWN were the only ones they were really willing to shell out money for. Tommy Dreamer, who is known for getting worked by promoters, dropped $65,000 of his own money to upgrade equipment so he could be on FloSlam while other promotions like Beyond & PWX put a show or two on FloSlam but didn't agree to anything long term. Beyond still has their own service and PWX is going to do a live iPPV with Highspots Network this weekend. It seems like promotions are trying to leverage the best deal possible out of the groups trying to create an umbrella streaming service like Highspots Network and FloSlam, then you have Powerbomb.tv still floating around out there waiting to pop up, so no one seems to be running to FloSlam to create a long term deal at this point unless they're going to get big money thrown at them like Gabe did. And hell, good for them they're smart to take a wait and see approach to FloSlam because it always seemed like a very risky business venture to me with that price point and the limited amount of customers that even exist for such a service.

You got me. I now realize that there's nothing Randy Orton can teach anyone. It's not like he has any experience dealing with Vince McMahon, how to talk to him, when and how to approach him, whether it's better to take certain issues to the writers or to Vince personally or anything of that nature. You're right there's really NOTHING that Randy Orton could teach anyone coming into the company from the indies.

Congratulations on being the only person who has commented on that Orton quote that "gets it." As if the only thing there is to learn from veterans in WWE is "what are some cool moves I can do???"

El Corsario is also the future TNT/Savio Vega.

I agree with this but then you've got people complaining that Smackdown doesn't have enough "good, long matches" on TV because they actually spend a lot of time building up multiple feuds instead of putting 90% of their focus into whatever the next PPV main event is going to be.

I don't disagree with this at all. There's really nothing about WWE TV that is "can't miss" right now. If you miss Raw it's not like you really are going to miss some big storyline progression. The biggest surprise they've done in the past year was HHH's return to help Kevin Owens win the Universal Title and like 4 months later we've still had no real follow up.

They certainly do, and Meltzer for one regularly points out how even with the slide in ratings, USA's overall network ratings would take a tremendous hit absent WWE programming. Its a very different universe than 5, much less 15, years ago. But given how TV money is the backbone of the company its undoubtedly a top concern with an eventual renegotiation on the horizon and no desperate suitors forcing USA to ante up. I'm not talking about someone like Meltzer who I know actually understands the overall trend. I'm talking about the hot take kings of twitter & message boards who regularly go off about 'THE RATINGS ARE SO BAD!!! WWE IS FUCKED!' without adding anything else to the conversation. There weren't any other suitors driving the price up on the last round of negotiations with USA and they still got a significant increase. It's not like the rest of television is gonna make some big rebound while only WWE ratings continue to go down.

Do any of the 'WWE'S RATINGS ARE DOWN THEY ARE GONNA BE IN BIG TROUBLE' types actually bother to pay attention to the overall TV landscape? Ratings are going down across the board, WWE is still the highest rated show on USA Network, helping to boost the network's overall average. It's still one of the top 25 shows on cable. They are not in a bubble here, people are cord cutting more and more. To the point where ESPN tried to bully Nielsen into retracting a report it had that said ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers. Nielsen ratings are becoming more and more outdated as they fail to measure the growing ways people can watch TV without cable or satellite. Nielsen isn't factoring in Hulu, Sling TV, Playstation Vue or whatever else is out there.

Definitely not, unless they were in the crowd last night.

The live broadcast definitely cut out during that match and according to my twitter feed the replay is exactly the same so yea doesn't sound like they had the best set up.

But if they didn't start 205 Live HHH wouldn't have a chance to take a bunch of mark pics with people's indie faves.

Cena to Bryan at SummerSlam 2013 and Reigns to Rollins at MITB this year immediately come to mind.

I definitely would argue that AJ is the 2nd biggest full time male star in WWE behind only Roman Reigns*. He definitely seems like more of a star than Seth Rollins despite them investing FAR more television time into Rollins in his title run in 2015 than they have in AJ's in 2016. *Yes, I realize Roman Reigns gets booed when he's supposed to be a face but people react to everything he does at a different level from anyone else in the company. "Correct" reaction or not his reactions are the biggest.