Loss

WWE has deliberately adopted the idea with their top guys that it's more important that they be strong than liked or disliked. I think it's a good move. Reigns isn't the only one that applies to lately, by the way. Braun and Brock sometimes show babyface tendencies, as did Samoa Joe in the Lesnar feud. When you're booked strong but they stop caring if you're specifically cheered or booed, maybe that's how you know you've made it to the top in WWE. I think they gave up on trying to get people to "like" Roman a long time ago. Now it's about people agreeing that he belongs at that level, whether they like him or not.

If those numbers are a good indicator of proportional interest in everything right now, it's a sign that WWE is pretty in tune with their audience, although they really need to heat up Smackdown.

I'm not sure Vince has had a good grasp of irony and camp since the 1980s, sadly.

I'll move all of the threads too.

Yes, sorry, work has been crazy this month thus far, but I will do it now.

I think he can be right and still be a heel. What wrestlers say is almost less important than how they say it. His delivery, as I said, was sincere. I believed he meant it. He was just still likable Sami Zayn. That aside, it's a work in progress. Hopefully he'll get new entrance music and his promo style will evolve.

Sami was convincing in his sincerity last night, but I kinda thought he didn't come off heelish enough, be that angry, sniveling, jealous, or delusional. Dude has gotta dig deep for some motivation instead of cutting promos like a trial lawyer. A lot of people grow into that after turning though.

So fill me in. I've only been casually following the build. Was Sami Zayn involved in the build to this match at all? I saw some discussion of Smackdown teases of a turn.

We have to remember that it's 2017 WWE. If he's turned heel, he will still be cheered and still wrestle the exact same type of match. His opponents will change and he'll probably get more scripted promo time. He might also make some cosmetic changes. We should just call it a repackaging. AJ Styles has turned twice in less than two years and nothing about him has particularly changed at all.

It can be a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet. A pawn and a king.

They already did this in 1991 with Virgil's "sister" Virgilina. I'm looking forward to the second version if that's true. Zayn strikes me as a natural babyface in a traditional pro wrestling setting, but that kind of shit doesn't matter so much now, so he might make it work, and he's going nowhere, so it's worth a shot if that's where they're going. That said, who knows? They teased Ambrose turning on Reigns for months in 2015 and never did anything. Teases mean nothing.

I think the perception is that gimmicks and run-ins and all the rest are something delegated to lesser workers who can't have an engaging match without lots of shortcuts, which those things are considered to be. Think cheap heat, kinda like heels insulting the local city or their sports team. So I think that's where the dislike comes from. Run-ins, ref bumps, etc. are not inherently bad, but I think bad performers need them more than good performers as a rule. I agree that matches don't need clean finishes all the time, especially on TV. In fact, we get too many of them, and the end result is guys getting beat way more often than they should and too many guys not being as strong as they should be. If matches in a series have inconclusive finishes, but lead to a final match that has one, that's kinda what wrestling is and is a-ok with me.

I say that realizing I've had some changes in thought on all of this over the last few months. Maybe it's time we realize that pretty much everyone views wrestling as a performance now and treat it that way, accepting all the positives and negatives that come with it instead of trying to fit a babyface-heel model from the past into present day wrestling when it just doesn't work. WWE already takes the mentality with their top guys to book them as strong more than to make them liked or disliked. So maybe we're the ones who are late to the party.

Heel heat theoretically translates to higher interest in the match, and thus higher attendance and network subs. So I'd say both are equally important. As I've put forth many times, I think the reasonable way to deal with it would be for it to be understood that heels sacrifice their merch sales to make the matches work, so because of this, they should get the lion's share of the payoff for the match itself. Under that model, babyfaces make more on merch, and heels are more tied to how business is doing.

I think the issue is that we've inducted Cena, and we've inducted the anomaly stars from his era that snuck through like Rey and Bryan. We've inducted Lesnar, and long ago, the holdovers from the previous generation that were still around during this time like HHH, Undertaker and Shawn were inducted. Now we're in this weird era where there aren't very many stars. So what do you do? Maybe we really are at a point where moving forward, cases will pretty much have to live and die on work. A much more interesting team to consider than Arn and Tully who I think have a stronger case and that I'd like to see on the ballot is the Hardys.

I definitely think that's one way to look at it, and it's probably the answer to the question as I raised it. But the reason I raised it was more to bring up that I think there's this subconscious idea that liking less wrestling is a sign of better tastes. I just don't see it that way. The fan who is harder to please isn't so much the fan who always has a point, or whose recommendations are always going to be good. But I do think we've biased, without intention, having "higher standards" over having better standards. I'm not sure I'm formulating this in a way that makes sense or if this is even the thread to hash it out. Just something on my mind.

I don't think my tastes have changed so much as they've expanded. I definitely find that the more wrestling I watch, the more wrestling I really enjoy. I often observe that the more wrestling people watch, the less stuff they really love. It's possible "I didn't like this as much as Loss" is the most frequently used phrase in the Match Discussion Archive. That's not always the case, as I do see some people - Dylan comes to mind - who only love more stuff as they watch more stuff. But disappointment, or at least lack of admiration, does seem to happen more often. I'm curious why that is.

Arn and Tully were a tag team all in all for two years. They worked on top for one year of that, during a time of decline, and had only one program (Midnights) that could be argued as having drawn decent houses. Even that was second from the top from the red hot Flair-Luger feud. There's just not a case. They were a great team, but no.

My God, go away, Curt Hennig.

All of the companies were pretty open about giving Dave access to their talent for interviews when he first started on Eyada. I don't remember any particularly controversial interviews, but for whatever reason, that changed drastically after a few months. But still, yeah, there are people he should be able to have on semi-regularly now since they're retired or semi-retired.

I always thought that was true too, and maybe it is to an extent. But there was no surge of great promo guys that followed Austin, Rock, Foley, Jericho, and the great veteran talkers that still worked on top in WCW.

He doesn't see himself that way. He just thinks he's in line with consensus, not realizing it's more that consensus is in line with him.

The criticism is that he gives NJPW matches 5* matches all the time and not WWE matches, which is funny because I waver on whether the U.S. has had a ***** match since 1989. Depends on the day.

There is discontent with Dave's views on wrestling that gets expressed frequently enough that he responds to it, often pre-emptively. Dave will sometimes tweet about nameless and faceless people who think the Young Bucks and Will Ospreay are killing the business with their working style, and is quick to point out that guys like Shibata and Ishii are probably the best sellers in wrestling, which a lot of people don't get because they think there is only one way to sell. There is also the other discontent, not to be confused with this, that focuses on him underrating WWE at the expense of New Japan. Still, Dave has said match ratings are the least important part of what he does. There's no way he doesn't know his reader base sees it very differently, though. The only way to counter this is to relentlessly publish a weekly pro wrestling newsletter for nearly 35 years, even during death scares, the loss of family members, sicknesses and personal injuries, marriages, birth of children, and whatever else.