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Dan G had it on his 1974-81 misc NJPW TV set: DVD #7 [Total time 108'49"]1978 December 14 : Osaka Pref. Gymnasium WWWF Heavyweight Championship / Backlund vs Inoki [W=36'18"] 1979 February 23 : Chiba Park Gymnasium IWA World Tag Championship / Hoshino, Yamamoto vs Hamaguchi, Inoue [K=7'42"] 4400 Fujinami vs Singh [W=7'44"] 5144 April 17 : Pennsylvania Handicap Match / Giant vs Paul, Harl [W=5'03"] 5647 WWF Heavyweight Championship / Backlund vs Rods [W=7'39"] 6424 WWF Jr. Heavyweight Championship / Fujinami vs Rodliguez [W=15'57"] 8021 NWF Heavyweight Championship / Inoki vs Volkoff [W=14'41"] 9502 April 27 : Yokohama Culture Gymnasium Fujinami vs Brisco [W=13'47"] 10849 It didn't air on orginal Sammy. My comments from last year after watching it: If you don't have that set from Dan, I'd recommend it. John

Thursday night games can't get changed either. John

Deny, deny, deny. Joh

Oopps... responding to something old.

The NFL *does* slot the schedule in a fashion to draw. It always has, and we all know this. The problem, which Bob pointed to, is that the "who-plays-who" aspect of the schedule is not something the NFL manipulates. The game-making / match-making aspect it done according to a publically known policy that's practially bianary in its brainlessness. The NFL can't "book" a Vikes vs Colts game last season simply because Farve went to Minny and Farve-Manning = Ratings. The only way that game happens is if the that happened to be the year the Colts division played the Vikes division *and* the two teams were lined up in how those divisions matched up under the rules. Where the NFL does manipulate the schedule is if they got lucky and that game was spit out of the scheduling program. In that case, it's 100% certain that the NFL would make sure that game is in PrimeTime on NBC. They would also make sure that it wasn't scheduled the same week as something like a rematch of the two Super Bowl teams from the prior year (in that case it would have been PIT vs AZ in a Big Ben vs Warner match up), or some other marque match up that they might want to put on NBC. They also manipulate the schedule so that certain Big Ratings matches up that happen twice a year are split between "Conference Network" (Fox with NFC and CBS with AFC) and "National Network" (mostly NBC for the biggest, but also ESPN to a degree). By that I mean: Pats vs Jets happens twice a year because it's in-division. New York market, Boston market, Brady, Pats... drawing power. The NFL tries not to give one of them to NBC and one of them to ESPN, because that would take from CBS two of their best rated games. The NFL also tries not to steal both the Pats-Jets and another strong AFC game (say Colts-PIT) for both NBC and ESPN in one week, which really hoses CBS. If it's a week where they're lifting Pats-Jets for NBC, it wouldn't even be surprising to see that something like Colts-PIT isn't even on the schedule, and instead ended up on a different week... so that it could be on NBC. Those are the types of things that the NFL does. They get spit out the Slate Of All Games that will be played in a year. *Then* they starting placing the match-ups into different weeks and different slots based on (i) what draws, (ii) keeping each of the networks happy, (iii) in the end some match-ups just have to be put into slots because there is no other place for them, and (iv) to leave the NFL with some flexibility for Weeks 11-17 to work the Flex Scheduling. So who-plays-who is out of the hands of the league. "When" and "where" they play is something the League and the Networks control, with the League knowing well enough that they need to keep all the networks happy, and not just NBC's primetime slot. Why? $1.1B ESPN $713M FOX $650M NBC $623M CBS NBC is 21% of the current network contracts. The NFL, the smartest batch of guys in the sports business, knew long before anyone else that you want to bring as many networks to the table as possible to get them all a taste of the meal. More at the table means more $$$. That $$$ only comes if they all are happy and think that they're getting value, part of which is not seeing NBC get *all* they drawing games. The NFL is masters at this. John

Reggie Wayne & Marvin Harrison = Jon Fitch Randy Moss & TO = Tito In a sense, Wayne & Harrison are/were greater than Fitch. On the other hand, Moss & TO are greater than Tito. Moss was/is a sublime talent, generally thought to be the best of his era, and was on pace to top all of Rice's records if he wasn't as big of prick as Tito was. When was the last time Wayne got cut? Four teams have literally gotten rid of Moss because he wore out his welcome: they just wanted him gone. A fifth will soon join the others. Four teams traded for him / picked him up because they thought he could help him win games, not because they thought he could sell merchandise or get them on primetime. Seriously... does anyone think Bill Belichick gives a shit about merch or TV? His owner is a businessman, but Kraft also knows that no one outside of Boston ever gives a shit about the Pats when they aren't a Super Bowl contender. Doesn't matter if they have gun slinging QBs, which they've had a lot of in Plunkett, Grogan, Eason and Beldsoe. It's being that high end contender that made them one of America's teams. Tom Brady didn't become a star because he's banging models. He became a star by winning a Super Bowl in his first year as a starter. And his third... and his 4th. *Then* people started giving a shit if he was banging models. In the long history of pro football, guys like Tito get cut and thrown away all the time. Joe Montana was kicked to the curb in Dave's very own Bay Area because the 49ers wanted to win more than have the most famous player in the game QB them. Steve Young gave them a better chance of winning at that point. They did the same to Jerry Rice when it was time to go. After a few good years across the bay, the Raiders kicked Jerry to the curb. Namath, Unitis... freaking Kurt Warner couldn't get a job after two MVP's, a Super Bowl ring and another trip to the Super Bowl. I'm sure that Dave is going to say that Kurt was Jon Fitch boring, but that's wrong: Kurt was one of the most exciting gunslinging QB of the era, the definition of "exciting fights". OJ was kicked to the curb in Buffalo when they found a mark to take him off their hands, then Bill Walsh ran him after his first year in SanFran. The list is endless. There are plenty of Jon Fitch types who had long careers with one team, or only left via Free Agency because of a better offer. The NFL is a business. Huge business, and run like a business. No doubt about it, and TV tries to sell personalities. But it's not a great sport to use for a Fitch/Tito analogy, especially when you don't regularly follow the sport. John

If they finish Top 4, they get an automatic bid. But looking around, there no longer are enough other teams to block out even a #5 Stanford. Looking at the At-Large, if Oregon & Auburn & TCU win out, it looks like this: At-Large #1: TCU (automic) At-Large #2: Big 10 #2 (likely OSU) At-Large #3: SEC #2 (Arkansas to Sugar) At-Large #4: ? Conferences can only send two teams, so the third Big 10 one-loss team (Sparty) is shit outta luck, as would be a two-loss LSU from the SEC. The ACC and Big East only will get their auto slots for their champs. Which leaves the Pac 10, the Big 12 or Boise/Nevada. Boise/Nevada isn't going to get a slot. If Boise had run the table and things broke elsewhere as they have, I suspect that what some other writers have said is correct: the BCS would have made a spot for both TCU and Boise. Leaving out a TCU at #4 would have been too risky to the Bowls and BCS to get away with. The Bowls don't want a playoff, and that would have made the calls for a playoff even stronger and more innevitable. Boise lost, so that's moot and they'll get bounced despite still being in the Top 10. Which leaves the Big 12 and Pac 10. Nebraska-OU in the Big 12 Championship will send one of them down to three-losses. Oklahoma State will be two-loss as will be Mizzou. Ok St will have lost to both OU and NE, so it's a hard sell. Mizzou is something of a sleeper, sitting 14th in the BCS *before* OK State's loss. But it's likely that neither Ok St nor Mizzou will finish comfortably in the Top 10. There just isn't any way that if WI jumps Stanford for the #4 spot that the bowls would screw over a #5 Stanford for a two-loss Mizzou. There's a delicate balance of getting all the conferences to agree to work together in the BCS, and to get the Bowls to work together. The Rose is already biting the bullet to take TCU rather than Stanford. If you turn around and screw Stanford and the Pac 10 out of a BCS payday (which Stanford shares with the conference), you've pissed off both the bowl that was the hardest to get to join the party (the Rose) and one of the two conferences that was the hardest as well (Pac 10 and Big 10). At a time when the Pac 10 and Big 10 have no love for the Big 12 and SEC. You have a lower ranked SEC team (Arkansas) and a lower ranked Big 12 (Mizzou) getting the big paydays. Basically an invitation for war, at a time when there almost was war in the past off season. The bowls get that, as to the conferences in general. TV does as well, and it's not like Mizzou is a TV draw, while Luck is getting the push as the #1 pick in next year's draft. Stanford really was only getting screw over if there were several viable alternatives, which while Stanford, the Pac 10 and Rose Bowl would have been annoyed over, they would have accepted. Now? There isn't an alternative to an 11-1, #5 ranked (at worst) Stanford that only lost to the #1 team in the country. John

I think we see why Dave is so off on his "sports" facts: his friends are fucking idiots. The Pac 10 has locked in agreements with the following bowls *if* they have enough teams eligible to fill them (i.e. teams that win 6 qualified games): PAC-10 No. 1: Rose Bowl (vs Big Ten No. 1) PAC-10 No. 2: Alamo Bowl (vs. Big 12 No. 3) PAC-10 No. 3: Holiday Bowl (vs. Big 12 No. 5) PAC-10 No. 4: Sun Bowl (vs ACC No. 4) PAC-10 No. 5: Maaco Bowl Las Vegas (vs. MWC No. 1) PAC-10 No. 6: Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (vs. WAC) If Stanford lost, they would have been 7-2 in the Pac 10. Other than Oregon, every other Pac 10 team already had at least 3 losses as beating Stanford would have left OSU at 5-3 with Oregon on deck. In other words, Stanford already had 2nd place in the Pac-10 clinched. Which means they were guaranteed going to the Alamo Bowl. Reality check #1: the Pac 10 doesn't even have enough 6 win teams to fill all of those commitments. So there hasn't been any doubt that Stanford was going bowling back when they won their 6th game back in October. Only Oregon (11-0 with a game left), Stanford (11-1), Arizona (7-4 with a game left) and USC (7-5 with a game left) have six wins in the Pac 10. ASU is 5-6 with Arizon left on the schedule, but ASU has two wins over Championship Subdivision teams, and only *one* of those can count towards your 6 wins, so ASU effectively only has "four" qualified wins. Yes, some dumbass in the ASU Athletic Department scheudled two Big Sky teams rather than one Big Sky team and say a Mountain West or WAC jobber. See... this is complicated stuff. Reality check #2: Stanford was 8-4 last year... and went to the Sun Bowl as Pac 10 #4. It's possible that Dave's Friends are as big of Fucking Idiots as Dave is making them come across as. But it's far more likely that Dave just didn't get what they were trying to explain to him because he doesn't follow college football at all. What they may have been trying to explain was that Stanford was at risk of being shutout of one of the four BSC Bowl games because they don't travel well. That was correct, but *only* because the Rose Bowl was/is at risk of being forced to take TCU (and formerly Boise) because the Pac 10 #1 (Oregon) is headed towards the BSC Title Game. Normally the Rose Bowl would have the right to select a replacement, which it would use to take Stanford to come down I-5 to Pasadena. This is similar to the Sugar Bowl likely taking Arkansas to replace Auburn in the Sugar Bowl. But this is a year where it's the Rose Bowl's turn to eat the BCS Buster if they lose the Pac 10 Champ to the Title game. And since Stanford isn't a great traveling team, there was the risk that one of the other BSC Bowls (Sugar, Orange, Fiesta in addition to the Rose) wouldn't use one of the three remaining At-Large spots (4 - Boise/TCU) to select Stanford. I know this is all a bit complicated even to college football fans, as it takes a full season of tracking all the possibilities for a hardcore college fan like myself to get it. Dave *isn't* a college football fan, doesn't follow it at all, and fakes his way through the comments above based on either idiot friends or not really understanding the complicated points they're trying to get across to him. So... Reality #3: Stanford was always going bowling after Oct 23 when they won their 6th game Everyone who follows college football as closely as Dave follows Pro Wrestling and MMA knew that. I tend to think this is an example of why we find "bullshit" in so many of the Non-Wrestling and Non-MMA analogies that Dave tries to draw in to support his points/arguments. Dave doesn't fully get those other worlds that he pulling in as support, and has to rely on the knowledge of others. At times, those others are just flat out wrong. At times, there's likely something lost in translation as Dave misses half their points. The end result is the utter trainwreck that Dave has above. Reality #4: Bama travels great and draw TV ratings. They aren't getting one of the three open At-Large spots in BCS Bowls because they weren't *succesful* enough this year. 9-3 and 4th Place in the SEC West trumps "business". Wash, rinse and repeat for Notre Dame, which isn't getting one of those three slots either due to going 7-5. College Football is big business. It drives a lot of decisions. But teams need to be successful as well. John

The Dems in the state will love for her to run again, and spend her money to clear the field of a potentially viable candidate. It will make Murphy's path eaiser. John

Representative Chris Murphy is the likely Dem nominee. He was thought as a possibility to run when Dodd stepped aside, and Blum had been thought of as likely to run agaist Leib in 2012. They seemed to flip spots. Lieb has no support among Dems in the state, and his support among independants sucks as well. He can't get the Dem nomination. The Dem establishment may try to clear the primary of folks like Murphy, but that won't keep someone from running... nor from getting enough funding to get on their air enough to get name recognition and votes. If he tries to run indy, he run into a massive problem: the GOP can't do what it did last time, which was abandon their candidate in the general so that GOP voters went with Lieb instead of Lamont. As we saw in the recent set of primaries, the GOP establisment can't control the primaries anymore. The can, and do, control the candidates once they got nominated and get to Washington, as we're seeing with Rand Paul. But they can't prevent a Rand or Angle or O'Donnell or Miller from running against their chosen candidates. Worse yet, the base GOP voters, while in the end voting for whoever gets nominated, aren't very controllable in the primaries. So if Lieb goes indy, he has no Dem base, and over on the GOP side *at the very worst* will be an O'Donnell. And while she's batshit crazy and a joke of a candidate, the teaparty base has no problem with batshit crazy: they fucking nuts as well and bask in the shared insanity of O'Donnell. Add into the fact that the GOP nominee for President will likely be over on the extreme as well. On the other side will be Obama, and for whatever annoyance a lot of progressive like me of seeing yet another Corporate Democrat in the White House, we will come out to vote when the alternative is a right wing nutter. Given those two sets of "base" voters that will be turning out huge in 2012, there is no spot for Lieb. He can run Indy, but he'd finish third. Lieb's ego is such that he might not want to have his final campaign end up 3rd. On the other hand, he flat out hates progressives, and knows that they have a massive target aimed at taking him down as payback for 2006. He might be dumb enough to think that he can fuck over the progressives (and the Dems in general) by running as an indy to draw away enough voters from say Murphy to allow the GOP nominee to win. I don't think that's going to work. Most recent polling that I've seen on Lieb is here from PPP: Lieberman in Serious Trouble for 2012 (pdf) It was conducted in late September, early October. Bleak for Lieb, and it's unlikely that he's going to do anything in the next two years other than piss the folks in CT off more. I would enjoy watching Linda piss away another $50M, though. John

Might pop for it... might hate it. You never know with kids, especially if she gets shit from friends about it.

You kind of feel sorry for this girl as it's going viral. John

Gorrilla was possibly confusing Adonis' tag titles: AWA = Adonis & Ventura WWF = Adonis & Murdoch Since Dick was gone and working for the other promotion, they couldn't mention him. In a sense, Gorrilla was putting over Adonis as he wanted to, while avoiding talking about a wrestling with another company, while putting over the WWF's top color commentator. Some great ju-jitsu there. John

Who is The Cancer? John

Sean did not shit in my sandwich, or my Korean BBQ. Really... given the circumstances, his memory is staggeringly good to have remembered my name 14 years. I doubt the other folks who were there would have remembered me even a few years later. All of on this board joke about him being a source for Wade, but he probably read the Torch back when I wrote for Wade, and that perhaps is why the name stuck when it probably wouldn't otherwise. John

That is... odd. I would not have thought he would remember me given the circumstances, which I may have mentioned/joked/alluded to online in the past. Wow... his memory is staggeringly good if that's the case. John

Dave can be highly critical of Josh Gross, but people who are critical of Dave are [fill in the blank]. FWIW, when people wonder if some of us value Dave's work, it's useful to remember that we still pay for it. We don't pay for the work of the guys infront of the curtain at ESPN or Yahoo or our local papers that we read online. How many here have ever bothered to pay money to Scherer? It's not like Dave has been discounting the WON over the years. But we still do value it enough to drop a dime on it. One can like and value something even while they are critical of certain items within it. I always thought Bill James had his head halfway up his ass on Pete Rose & Betting. But the shelves at home are full of his books, and I sub to his site. John

What's the quote? Link & time stamp? I'm trying to remember anything that I've said about Sean in the past several years that would have hit his radar. I haven't been relevant for close to a decade. John

I think they were all using everything. Remeber Kerry's dope bust: http://www.hack-man.com/Wrestling/NewsArti...9-VonErich.html Quite a score on his honeymoon. I think they all had a taste for coke. From all the reports, it was exceptionally common and popular in the promotion. Hard to think David, Kevin and Mike weren't regularly. John

Why would Dana be rethinking Brock-Mir. I suspect that the reason Dana thinks that Mir is the right opponent is because: * Brock can beat Mir to rehab himself * Mir rehabbed himself by beating the now-useless Cro Cop * Brock can beat Mir to rehab himself * Might as well cash in on Mir a bit before he loses to someone else * Brock can beat Mir to rehab himself * Mir can talk trash enough to draw marks to buy the PPV * Brock can beat Mir to rehab himself John

Yeah... someone needs to come up with "The Shamrock List" for MMA = Pro Wrestling. John

This stuff should be in the Dave thread, or in the More Wrestling Than Wrestling thread. John

My head hurts reading that. I love Jerome's breakingof Godwinn's law, with the De Gaulle shit having me in stitches. John

Everytime you think TNA can't do something dumber, that do. John