Timbo Slice

It's in Cleveland.

It was more like, "Let's keep the same guys on top and give them millions while burying our only marketable homegrown star and give away the company's biggest match on Free TV."

That's the problem with Bryan. People love him but they won't spend the money on him so he doesn't get the push. Little kids are out there buying Cena shirts and Batista pops the big rating. That's where WWE is looking towards. People that bring in the money either in advertising or merch. Pretty simple. Not saying it's the right mentality at all or anything. Just saying that WWE believes in their stars making the money to go along with their push. They don't want to push someone they don't think will bring in as much money as other guys.

Basically. Orton won the MITB and then it was pretty easy to see what would happen at that point. Cena was going to need some time off so they decided Orton should have the belt until Cena came back. Then Batista decides to come back and they figure they have something easy to build to with him and Orton. If there was any audible whatsoever, it would have been on Bryan/Wyatt. They decided on Wyatt/Cena before Bryan joined him. Bryan is just stuck in the middle. Since they're prepping Wyatt for Cena, they'll need to put him over Bryan on Sunday. If they want a Brock/Batista money match, SummerSlam is the earliest. So then Bryan would be stuck facing Sheamus or Orton again or what have you. Maybe Reigns if they split him off. That's what the plan is now. Bryan's stuck just below that top tier. Batista being in the fold and them putting Brock in WWE title story lines is going to keep him in that bottom tier unless they decide to give him a Giant Killer run, which isn't likely.

No chance. And it's not that the WWE is out of touch. It's that they put a bunch of shit in motion, and then while it was happening, Bryan got WAY more over than they thought, Batista jumped on, etc. So then they just moved the pieces accordingly. The only true wild card is Reigns. He's the guy WWE is ready to strap the rocket to. But the combination of the huge ratings boost, people popping big for him live and him being one of Hunter's boys has Batista in the catbird seat. And most likely, it'll be Brock vs. Batista at SummerSlam. So this pipe dream about Bryan being anywhere near the WWE title over the next eight months is just fanboy frustration. Bryan's popping crowds, selling merch, doing well in ratings and is slowly becoming a public figure. At some point, there will be no choice.

Taker should return in the Rumble with revenge on The Shield in mind, which would set up him vs. Reigns. If that's not the case, Reigns winning the whole thing works, too.

Bryan is like Ron Burgundy doing Dodge commercials. He can say whatever he wants in regards to the company not getting behind him and it's gonna help bring in more attention. For the people who don't get the reference (and I'm thinking basically everyone did), the president of Dodge said that because of the rise in sales of Dodge cars after the Burgundy commercials ran, Burgundy could say literally whatever he wanted and it wouldn't matter because the product was moving. And he did. They shot like 70 commercials and ran almost all of them, even if they had Ron say ludicrous things about the cars. When Bryan makes a public appearance, him saying something bad about the company works within the storyline. It'll get people talking about the product, and therefore tune in and (gasp) make him a draw.

NOAH had shit for challengers early on. It wasn't so much that Akiyama was a heel early on. Misawa was presented as a punk upstart to Jumbo, yet he was able to get over on him and was a made man when he pinned him. It was that NOAH wanted something definitive, and by doing that, it didn't go over nearly as well. Akiyama was never really positioned as the ace of the company. I don't think it was because he wouldn't have gotten over well, but more because whoever had the book at the time always thought there was someone better, and then (outside of Kobashi) that person bombed on top. It's hard for the fans to see him as a future ace after the start he had when three months later he was losing to Kobashi and then losing to Misawa in the GHC tourney semis after that. Then, when they DID decide to put him over, they had him make two NJPW defenses instead of giving him a long title run against NOAH wrestlers, and then had him drop the title on a fluke to Ogawa so that Misawa wouldn't beat him again. From there, he played second fiddle to Misawa and Kobashi before they decided to go with Rikio instead. When that happened, it was the beginning of the end of NOAH being a viable promotion.

Yeah, of those bonuses, those are plenty of "5-star" matches there. Good lord.

Sorry for the late response. My list was as follows with the honorable mentions not really ranked in order but there for posterity: Matches of the Year 1. Regal/Ohno - Taped for April 10, NXT 2. Rhodes Brothers/Shield - Battleground 3. Regal/Cesaro - Taped for December 25, NXT 4. Punk/Brock - SummerSlam 5. Zayn/Cesaro - Taped for August 21, NXT 6. Ibushi/Nakamura - August 4, NJPW 7. Casas/Dorada - June 2, CMLL 8. Rhodes Brothers vs. Ryback/Curtis Axel vs. Rey/Big Show vs. Real Americans - TLC 9. Bryan/Cena - SummerSlam 10. Shield vs. Team Hell No/Undertaker - April 22, RAW HM - Tanahashi/Ishii - August 2, NJPW HM - Cena/Rollins - December 27, SmackDown! HM - Daniel Bryan gauntlet vs. Swagger, Cesaro, Ryback - July 22, RAW HM - Cesaro/Ziggler - August 26, Superstars HM - Rush/Terrible - January 22, CMLL Wrestlers of the Year 1. Antonio Cesaro 2. Daniel Bryan 3. Goldust 4. John Cena 5. Sami Zayn 6. William Regal 7. Negro Casas 8. Roman Reigns 9. Seth Rollins 10. Dean Ambrose HM - Big E. Langston HM - Rush HM - Cody Rhodes HM - C.M. Punk HM - Tomohiro Ishii

I think it's interesting that sentiment has made the Chi-Town match the favorite. It's weird to call a match that goes that long a sprint, but it felt like one. They were all brilliant. It's splitting hairs in a lot of ways. Flair even said in his interview with Austin (rather quickly, I might add) that Chicago was his favorite, and it makes sense. It started off the feud, everything clicked, hot crowd, all that. I found it interesting that he went the full monty on the 8/22/85 Jaguar/Lioness match when the Chig/Devil match is regarded as the better match. Jaguar tearing apart Asuka for the entire match was definitely fun, but Chig and Devil put on a 40 minute slugfest with a pretty awesome ending for the time.

Fuck the ending. It had the best tag match all year. If the rest of the show featured a two hour and 30 minute Randy Orton promo where he read the 1992 Encyclopedia Brittanica, it would still be better than any major TNA show.

Dire state of pro wrestling announcing as it is, I'm more than willing to send someone a tape if it gets to NXT. BATTLEGROUND got worst show? Seriously?

Yeah, after the show was over and I was thinking about all of our lists, the fact that none of us had Punk/Cena on there was really weird. I know I just plain forgot about the match. I was too busy counting up Cesaro and Bryan and Rhodes Brothers matches.

So does Sandman go the Roddy Piper route and just slam Witherspoon or does he load up the glove with water and crush him with it?

There's nothing wrong with being successful in only one place so I don't get that.

Because Dylan made the power hitter reference about Nakamura, I think Punk and Nak are actually very similar in the long run. Both very flawed, but when you need them to put it together for a big match, there are few people that can touch him.

Action Bronson's "The Rockers," where the hook talks about dropkickin' like Marty Jannety. EDIT: Missed Ricky's post. It was snuck in there at the bottom of the page.

Netflix removes content because deals to carry that content expire. This is all footage WWE owns the rights to. HBO keeps all of their series on HBO GO all the time... it's not like the Sopranos disappears some months. This won't keep me from subscribing... I'd have been subscribing to 24/7 for years if I'd ever had the option. But it's still a backtracking on the big talk they were doing about the library. Some stuff does fall off HBO Go from time to time. Those are movies, though. All of HBO's original series programming remains. They do hold back on some of the sports series, though.

I think I might take on all the matches Ray posted as a little project. Could be fun.

I think my favorite thing Akiyama does is that he knows how to have big matches in the right spots. Like he had this awesome match with Sasaki at Korauken in either 2009 or 2010 that was one of the best matches Japan produced that year, and it didn't have to be. They went out and decided to work a big-time match and it went off beautifully. I'll say this about Jun: Very rarely did I come away from a big-time match with him on it where I thought he didn't look good.

They're a part of the Authority storyline so them coming back just extends that out. Seems like something that's more temporary than anything.

It's buggy and the layout is weird. I think the best part about the original design was that the features were all there on the front page. Now they're trying to differentiate the subjects. I'm wondering what 538 is going to look like. Good chance this is a template test for Nate to work off.

Obviously, there's ways around it. The numbers for this are bullshit from a household standpoint, but WWE is actually correct in comparing subscription rates to MLB as opposed to Netflix. No subscriber out there is going to be on the level of Netflix when it comes to content at this point. As far as the unanswered questions go, I might as well offer my opinions: This seems like an obvious "yes" to me. You can't really expect this to be thrown in to the mix without trying to gauge its impact on the overall revenue for the company, especially considering they're expecting so much out of the move. Too much expected money is a part of this. See above. Considering the type of content they provide, it should be expected that they work on a transition first before exploring the outside markets because the key for them is to take the fandom they have now and get them going on the new content. There's the expectation that all those fans who watch RAW and SmackDown! each week are totally gung ho for it, but I would spend the money to make sure the transition runs smoothly. That won't take nearly as much money as an outside marketing campaign, and considering they can use WrestleMania as the draw, I'd expect a split like 60/40 in terms of outside marketing. Not nearly as much marketing will be needed to get the fan base they've built involved. Hell, it might be closer to 70/30 in favor of outside. In 2012, MLBAM reported $620M in revenue, up from $300M in 2006, but they got that number from multiple streams. That spike had to do with the app development and video streaming interfaces that were either non-existent or in their infancy in 2006. Considering that the revenues reported held steady in 2013, it seems like they figured out a way to keep the reoccurring costs stagnant. The one-time costs this year are really going to take a hit on revenue from the start. The problem is that this is only a SINGLE revenue stream, though. 10M people downloaded the WWE app since it was released almost 2 years ago, which is a great number, but not unbelievable. Let's say the Network app hits something along the lines of $50-75M on gross across all platforms due to a heavy initial adoption, tapering off as the year goes by. Is this thing going to be in the black by Q1 2015? If you're assuming $20M in production costs, then upkeep with servers and the building of your library, will WWE be able to say by the end of the year that the Network itself is profitable? I doubt it.

I could see him getting a concussion after that double back superplex. That seemed pretty damn snug.