Loss

Madusa really does seem like she would be an awesome person to know.

He'd probably say they should have gotten the belt onto Rock before the card so it would be a title defense, even if he dropped it immediately after.

I get that, and sometimes I wish it was more sensible too, but both are a satirical take on cultural excess. The biggest difference is that people in wrestling are in on the joke far less than they are blissfully unaware that they are parodying themselves.

When wrestling is great, it's a lot like Heathers.

Dave used to refer wrestlers to DVDVR on the old version of Wrestling Observer Live when they would ask about good websites. He also used to provide comments on the DVDVR 500 almost every time it was updated in his daily news updates. Dean has mentioned email correspondence with Dave before too. So I think it's a site very much on his radar, or at least it was at one time. Honestly, anyone who followed wrestling everywhere in the early 2000s who didn't have DVDVR on their radar wasn't really following wrestling everywhere. The site had a significant impact on the independent wrestling landscape of the time and good reviews helped some guys secure dates.

Is this something new that Dave rolled out? This doesn't sound like something he ran in with back when the issue was discussed last decade. In fact, I seem to recall the Maeda Argument was the one made, which most of us saw as a problem with the Electorate rather than the Candidate. He said it on The Board either last year or the year before.

Liger had a tumor, but my understanding was that it was benign. Anyway, this is horrible news.

Or, if we really are in a new wrestling economy, book for their hardcores and just put the fan favorites over on big shows.

They do seem to be trying to make Paige what she was on Tough Enough and is on Total Divas though, which is a big step in the right direction. She's a force of personality and I thought she was very good last night.

I don't know much about Blackjack Lanza, but in the clipped Mid Atlantic footage out there, Blackjack Mulligan really looks like a larger-than-life charismatic superstar with great presence, similar to Junkyard Dog or Dusty Rhodes.

I don't think it's a great idea, I think it would be tough to practically execute and I am not sure it would work. But for completely selfish and irrational reasons, I would love some type of copy of Orphan Black with one of the women playing 5-6 completely different wrestlers with the storyline being that they were cloned years ago in a military experiment and somehow all ended up in WWE.

Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. It's a WCW-level mistake, even though everyone will forget about it before the end of the week.

It was probably a surprise to those of us who had seen the carpet pulled out from under Benoit and his peers so many times in the early 2000s, but Benoit's Rumble victory and title win was a rare case of WWE planning something months in advance and then sticking to it. Dave mentioned being told about the whole plan as early as October and thinking it was good, but would be much better with Eddy in the Benoit role jumping to RAW and feuding with HHH and Shawn while Benoit stayed on Smackdown and beat Brock.

Just to drop it here, Dave has addressed the criticism of making guys eligible too soon before. He has said he wants people who lived through the era voting on the wrestlers from it as much as possible, because the hindsight perspective leaves voters too open to hearsay and rose-colored memories, and you also have a less knowledgeable pool of voters. I think the opposite is true, as people are much more likely to get lost in the moment and have an inability to be objective about it because it's fresh. The more time is removed, the more rational the thought process. I was mainly just dropping that here because it is something Dave has addressed.

I think it's a viable post-WM direction if Seth shakes hands with the new champion after a great match to tease a turn.

They probably wanted Americans that worked cheap. And if you want Americans that work cheap, Memphis is logically the first place to look.

I feel like it's understood that announcers don't just say what comes to their mind in most cases and I don't have to specifically say that every time I criticize an announcer. But yes, Tony would also on future shows say stuff like that about the light heavyweights, which just reinforces the idea of a title for JTTS types. Announcers were also not micromanaged then like they are now, especially not in WCW, so I think criticism of Tony is appropriate. It's probably fair to say they were given no direction at all. I doubt Dusty cared one way or the other enough to give them any direction in how he wanted them to sell this. The best approach -- I think -- is to not even talk about their size so much (and definitely not compare them to heavies) and instead spend most of their time calling it just like they would a regular championship match. The only differences that should be spoken of are those that favor smaller guys -- faster pacing, more exciting moves ... if it isn't positive, it shouldn't be said. I'm of the mindset that they should get people thinking about these guys as credible wrestlers first and foremost, not small guys first and foremost. And why should viewers care about a title where the competition is limited to guys who can't beat anyone worth beating, especially if they are throwing that in our faces? How does being champion help them at all if that's the framework? Whether viewers "know" this or not, the idea here was supposed to be to change perceptions, not to further emphasize any negative perceptions that already existed.

The talk now, by the way, is that Undertaker is not going to retire at WM32 because he still feels like can continue to wrestle. So I have no idea what they are going to do with him at this point, especially if Sting's neck makes him unlikely.

Oh, I think the world title match will be 3rd from the top at best. The show will be sold on HHH-Rock and Undertaker-Brock.

WWE doesn't really place the same emphasis on mystery partners as its fans. Remember when Chris Jericho's much-hyped mystery partner after Edge's injury was The Big Show?

I don't know who should win since everyone seems to be on a treadmill. I think it will be Rollins-Brock in the title match with Undertaker costing him the match, Undertaker actually announcing entry for the Rumble for the first time in years and Brock retaliating by getting him eliminated to set up their WM rubber match. Then Reigns will win (and the crowd will shit on it yet again) and go on to beat Rollins at Wrestlemania.

I anxiously await the day that a recovered password email is posted as a guest editorial.

It would be cool to also get his columns that appeared in The National.

One possible issue is what makes one house show more valuable than another that it is where an angle or title change occurs? Part of the whole WWE experience is being given an equal opportunity to see those things go down along with everyone else. I do know the positive is it would increase the buzz theoretically where people tuned in Raw to see what the hell is going on after reading about it online and it could create an uptick in movement where there is a bigger sense of urgency to catch the show in your area but it is a tough call to unite people with the WWE Universe tagline and then only 750 in some backwater town in Iowa got to see Rollins lose the WWE title to Too Cold Scorpio. Saying it worked in 1995 doesn't mean anything now. As the business model and the presentation model adapts to the changes in the world, so should expectations. It's an experiment worth trying. The sky won't fall, but it will either positively affect house show business or it won't. They're at a point where it wouldn't be the worst idea to start throwing some out-of-the-box ideas at the wall. Some will stick. They can repeat those until they no longer work. Some will fail. They can avoid doing those again. I think where we often hit a point of disagreement is that I think you are of the mindset that they should never try anything different unless it's a guarantee that it will work. I think about their all-time biggest flops, something like the Lex Express or Diesel push. Both were failures. In both cases, a bigger failure would have been a refusal to even take the risk at all. None of us know if it would work or not. But it's a low-risk, high-reward proposition. And if they start broadcasting all of their house shows on the Network (or even just taping them to air a monthly highlight show if there is an unexpected classic match or they decide to experiment), then they can choose how they present it to their audience at large. Like any idea, there's a right way and a wrong way to pull it off. Whether it works or doesn't, the hope is that before anyone writes off a second attempt wholesale, we try to figure out not just if it worked or didn't work, but why it worked or didn't work. It could just be a promising idea that needs tweaking. Or, as you inferred, it could just be a fundamentally flawed idea. This was the naysaying I was referring to before, and I think it has also been the go-to mentality within WWE for a while now, which is one of many things that has kept the company from growing. No wrestling company -- no matter how sharp the people are running it -- will ever bat a thousand.

What WWE has as an ace in the hole is that they take their show on the road. If they are promoting themselves well in each market, which they usually do, that's probably their best chance of attracting new fans. I like the idea of making some type of premium WWE Universe membership that includes the Network, discounts to live events (with a refer-a-friend incentive included), exclusive merchandise and so on. If you get the hardcore fanbase really excited about WWE, they will tell people about it. That's the one advantage of catering to them. If we get to a point where WWE simply doesn't have enough hardcore fans to sustain the company, I think they could place a renewed interest on live events by doing more big angles and title changes on the road, shooting on-location angles during promotional events like autograph signings and showing highlights the following week on television. They could also throw up the complete versions on the WWE Network immediately or even after the highlights are shown on TV to lure people in. I think we're nearing the time where it's time to re-think the idea that everything needs to be live. I am not saying RAW should be taped or anything like that, and I realize that a huge part of WWE's appeal to television networks is that they are live. But the priorities of the three-hour infomercial might need to be shifted to include more recaps of house shows. And I do think within the next decade, we are going to see either a collapse of television as we know it or a dramatically different model. There are hints of it already. When that TV rights revenue starts drying up, WWE is in trouble unless the Network is on fire.