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Network isn't mentioned in the document on that link. Business Wire press release also doesn't mention it: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tune-advisor...-190000600.html Did they change something?

I don't even think Dave thinks in terms of sophisticated positions. John To them sophistication boils down to whether or not you're "smart." They consider sophisticated fans to be the ones worried about "logic" in the Daniel Bryan-Wyatt angle, instead of ones willing to go with it because they expect some awesome promos and skits along the way. The default position among hardcores for 20 years has been "the booking is awful" and "my guy is being buried." The insistence on being smarter than the booker has caused the internet fan to miss some awfully cool stuff that was right under their noses. It's 30 years: it's been there since the dawn of the sheets. In turn, they've also not-missed a lot of shit right under their noses. Jim Herd thought the Ding Dongs were awesome. Hardcores thought they sucked. Hardcores were right. If one wanted to study Hardcore Consensus vs Booker Consensus over the past 30 years, I suspect that Hardcore Consensus would have the winning %. That's even when factoring in being wrong about a lot of WWF stuff in the 80s. John

Strictly when partnering: Kawada > Misawa Kawada > Taue Misawa = Kobashi Misawa > Jun Kobashi > Jun I thought Kawada did a bit more of the dirty work in the pairing, letting Misawa hit the role as Jumbo's top rival. Misawa also felt banged up through a lot of the partnership. Misawa and Kobashi is closer. Misawa at his best in their pairings felt better. In turn, Kobashi was the guy who brought it every time out, put on a show every time, and probably was in his best balance of health & ability & role as at any point in his career. He was a bit "too good" to be the #3 on the side earlier, and by the time he got to be a #1 he didn't take to the role well initially, and when he became an Ace and comfortable in the role his body was broken down. Misawa from 5/96 - 12/96 partnering with Jun probably was as good as he every was in terms of tag work. A bit banged up, but not falling apart... even without the TC (which he dropped the day after their first major match together), he hit the perfect notes of being the Ace of the promotion with a partner who was quite a few levels below himself and a lot of the guys on the other side. Jun was pretty good paired with him in that stretch, but Misawa seemed to hit all the right notes of covering him, timing things perfectly, and climaxing on 12/06/96 with probably as good of a stretch in a match as he ever had. Kobashi & Jun was a strange, oddball partnership with Jun moving away from Misawa to another #2 role with a partner who gave him less than Misawa had. Kenta was always going to put on a show, which made it really odd as to the point of Jun going over there: it didn't make him look better. Maybe the > should be removed because Kenta was clueless of his role in the partnership relative to how Misawa had been with him and Jun, or how Jumbo had been with Taue. But at least a clueless Kenta still was trying to put on a show, while Jun's career sort of came to a grinding hault until Misawa tried to push him as Kenta's rival. John

Who was the kid jumping around in the ring?

She and Vince got Trip over after he initially bombed at the top of the cards (to the point that they took the belt off him in a panic in favor of Show), then she & Mick carried Trip in the Trip vs Foley feud, and then she carried Trip in the Trip vs Rock feud. Then she kept Trip over because she was banging him. Trip is a HOFer because of her. John

Every dollar is the same. Ric being Ric.

I don't even think Dave thinks in terms of sophisticated positions. Especially in a conversational sense. He tosses stuff out, with the filter limited to "can I say this or is this a non-public item", with the side variation of "how can I say this without being explicit about it". I don't know Brian as well, but from what I've read of the Fig4, it also never struck me that he worried about being sophisticated. Dave at least tends to not like stuff that he doesn't like, and likes stuff that he does like. At times with jaw dropping levels of thought in it. "Well... I liked it." John

Dittos. Awesome stuff

See... that was easy.

I don't know why he spends so much time defending his coverage. Two sentences and be done with it: "I've covered it from the start, going back twenty years. More of my readers over the year have enjoyed the coverage than disliked it." He doesn't need to go beyond that. John

I'm trying to remember if there was anything in the WON about this having to go longer because the Flair-Barry had to go shorter due to Barry's knee injury.

Hard to say that he's an NBA guy. He's written as much about MLB (Red Sox and other stuff) and the NFL (Patriots and loads of other stuff) as the NBA. To a degree he's been able to get away with stuff in writing about the NBA that he hasn't been able to with MLB and the NFL: (i) it was less advanced in quality high end statistical thinking, and (ii) far more superstar dominated on most key levels than the other two. It's far easier to read his stuff on MLB (such as the Red Sox book) and find stuff where he's just plain wrong / off base / ignorant because sabermetrics and other forms of thinking deeper about baseball has been around for about a quarter century by that point. He also with the basketball book brought the "history" of the game to a younger, newer generation. Admittedly a lot of it was glossed over, because even with 800 pages (or how many ever hundred it is), that's an impossible task given what all the book was trying to do. But at least he also laid out the other books folks could read to pick up on stuff like the ABA or the early days of the NBA, etc. It makes him come across as more of an NBA "expert" than most because he knows who Cliff Hagan is. I think in the end he is what his moniker says: a Sports Fan. The NBA is one where he's been able to give the impression of staying ahead of the curve and having "depth", while with the other two he's clearly behind the curve and just winging it as a "fan" who thinks he has insight.

Does anyone read Simmons for the gambling advice? I always took that shit as skim material, instead looking to see if there's any halfway decent riff that pops up in the middle of the "Weekly Picks" article. I think we've hit on Simmons being past his peak as a writer earlier in the thread. When making that point, or agreeing with it if someone else made it first, I did point to some recent pieces of his to show that occasionally he could still churn out the quality piece or the entertaining one when the stars aligned. I'd have to read back up the thread to refresh my memory on the ones I pointed to, but I'm pretty sure they held up as decent... don't recall anyone running in to point out why they were shit. As far as other writers... The movie critic is better than expected. His year end Top List was more varied and non-US Centric than you'd expect from a place as US Pop/Hip Centric as Grantland is. Seems he has a good deal of freedom to write on what he wants. Andy Greenwald is the primary TV guy, and also seems to have a lot of freedom to write what he wants to. I think he's like pretty much any critic/writer that you come across in the base sense: you like what you agree with, and tend to roll your eyes at or skim what you don't like. He's a bit too fixated at times on the notion of the Golden Age of Television Drama, and given his age (born in 1977), one gets the sense of why: it's what he cut his teeth on. But he's quite prolific and broad on what he writes and covers, so he's going to touch on various things you watch in a given year. The stuff I end up finding good or entertaining tends to be pretty decent. Even a throwaway piece like his Trade Machine ones have some thought to them, and do on a level make you think about a show in a creative way. Brian Phillips tends to be all over the place in what sports he writes about, and at times will be on a streak of just tossing throw away stuff together... which even can have something buried in them you're glad was point out. But there are some where he chews into something more, like the Di Canio piece, or even the Ozil one before it, where he's working over something interesting. I may not agree with some of it, but to disagree you've still got to give some thought to what he's tossing out, and how you see it, and think a bit about it. I think that tends to be the case with most of the "best" of Grantland: they tend to be all over the place, there's a lot of throwaway stuff, there's a lot that doesn't interest, there's a lot of skim material, but there's also some good stuff there. Often all from the same writer. Lowe is one of the few who is consistently top notch. But he also is narrow in focus (NBA Hoops), and at a time when the came is evolving rapidly on the knowledge base side. With Baseball, we went through this back in early to mid 80s. Lowe is at a really good point to be writing about Hoops, and be obsessed with it.

That's a really great analogy. Except shit in your mouth isn't exactly like spending a couple of minutes reading an article. One is no big deal... with the other is shit in your mouth. A couple of minutes to read an article. That's nothing. I watched every episode of Sopranos, and I think the series went to hell at some point in the 3rd season. I spent two hours watching Oliver Stone's Savages, and that is far worse of a movie than Shoemaker's writing. We all watch and read and participate in a lot of stuff that's bad / mediocre / boring / subpar. 2-3 minutes on a Shoemaker piece is nothing. Good lord... I watched Ohio State play tonight, and I tend to spend the entire college football season watching 8-12 hours of games each Saturday while actively trying to avoid Big 10 games unless it's an upset special of a team Lacy and I hate. Which is what tonight's game was all about... and it was still painful to watch OSU. 2-3 minutes a week on Shoemaker is that much of a life altering chore to you that you think not only you should skip it, but that the rest of us should as well to avoid becoming Snuka and killing our girlfriends? Tourture? I had a five hour flight delay this Wednesday, spending it sitting in those shitty airport seats that are meant for 30 minutes tops for your rear and back. Then 5+ hours on the plain, reminding myself why I haven't flown AA in a decade with their shitty, squshed chairs. Then an hour drive home past midnight on a day when I woke up at 7am ET / 4am PT, trying to stay awake and not look like a drunk for the Chippers to pull over. Then crawling into bed with a massively sore back, a muscle pull in the right arm and hoping the crib will heat up quickly since I'd set the thermo low while out of town... and trying to doze off... A couple of minutes of Shoemaker isn't torture. A couple minutes a week catching up on what nonsense the likely most read wrestling writer in the country is tossing up is pretty easy. I think most of us hear have read deep thinking, scholarly stuff either in our college days or in our professional days, or both. This is just a place where folks are shooting the shit. At time people put some thought into it, and we hash stuff out back and forth. But you're wildly overthinking things if you believe anything on the site is remotely at the level of deep thinking of say what I was re-reading before going on vacation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roman_Revolution If the place was at that level of writing and deep thinking, there would be no posters as it would bore the shit out of everyone. And that comes from someone who finds Syme's work rather interesting even if it's a chore (and well nigh torture!) to get through.

The Snuka/Nancy Argentino case is as sick the Benoit case. It's just that the WWF was able to cover it all up, which allows them to avoid the disclaimer. Which is yet another reason why it's as sick: Snuka's walking around, and Vince is essentially an after the fact accomplice in covering it up... some sick shit. Let's not build up the Benoit case as the most heinous thing ever, and pawn off the Snuka case as some low level thing. They both sick, comfortably high on the scale, but not remotely close to the worst that any of us have read about.

It's also kind of funny that he always points to Boxing and MMA as being the outside of the box to study for Pro Wrestling, when those two things draw flies compared to the real big business / genres in Sports and Entertainment. Peyton Manning averaged 26.4M viewers per game for his four NBC appearances. That's not counting his drawing on other networks, like 28M+ on CBS against the Cowboys, or 27M on Fox against the Eagles, or 26M against the Giants, etc. Hunger Games: Catching Fire all on its own is going to make more in revenue world wide than the WWE... more than the WWE and UFC combined in 2013. Now granted, I'm not sure that the WWE wants to their content to be like Hunger Games, and the last time they had someone as over as Peyton Manning was Hulk Hogan in the 80s (because frankly even Stone Cold wasn't *this* over). But... It's likely that the WWE can learn as much from other forms of Sports and Entertainment than Boxing and MMA when it comes to promoting product, shooting their product, producing it, connecting with their fan base, having a sense of what's getting over with people in the country right now, and how to connect with their business partners... rather than just obsessing about Boxing and MMA. After all, the NBA this year is going to sign a new set of TV contracts that crushes what the WWE is going to get, and puts into context what a pot to piss in UFC is relative to big time sports. You just... mighta... sorta... wanta... broaden your horizons beyond the small bubble of Combat Sports and Fake Combat Sports.

Doesn't say that she plays a heel, like Chael would cop to. Just said (i) she liked wrestling heels like Piper, and (ii) always was booed in her international judo career. Wildly different from Chael playing a bullshit Character to get over.

I don't think she needs to be a "heel" to draw. Nor do I think she's as phoney as Chael was, who at this point it total bullshit in playing a character in promoting his matches. Rhonda is just an asshole when it comes to fighting, and a fair number of things in life. She's not playing. There's no doubt the UFC is happy to pimp up her being an asshole. They'd be happy to pimp up a nice personality from her if it was charismatic.

It's basically Top Star Vet (Kawada is now the Top Rival to Misawa) vs Rookie. Jun still hasn't hit the anniversary of his debut yet. So it makes sense for Jun to be working basic stuff.

Aw... the classic old "If you don't like it, why do you watch/read it" meme. I can't speak for anyone else, by my reasons for reading it are pretty simple: 1. I read Grantland regularly 2. I'm a Wrestling Fan 3. he was chosen to be The Wrestling Writer at Grantland 4. of course I'm going to click on his pieces when they pop up there I find Barnwell's pieces hit and miss: some good, some decent, some skim material, some a waste. But I'm an NFL Fan. I read Grantland. Barnwell is their NFL writer. So I'll click on his stuff when it pops up on a visit there. Not complicated. As far as "deep thinking"... we're the board that had a thread on 1984-92 Hogan really being a Heel that was nothing but jokes on Hogan... and that's before there even was that subthread on cartoon characters and what an asshole Tweety Bird was. We tend to talk about all sorts of shit, some of it "deep thinking" and some of it just busting balls.

Ask Meltzer to confirm that.

That has always been my biggest gripe/bitch about Meltzer. I guess when you have been in the business so long you think everything is a work and face/heel crap. I believe he said that Lebron James turned heel when he did "The Decision" a couple years ago. The idea that the last 3 months of Ronda Rousey being a complete bitch and hated was part of some "storyline" or "building a character" is just laughable. Sometimes being a jerk means you are a jerk not pretending to be one like a "heel" She understands how she needs to stay relevant and make money, a lot of what she's done has been pre-mediated. Don't get me wrong, she might be bitch too, but she knows by playing a role she will be remembered more as well as knowing that being the "heel" champ and have challengers "chase" her for the title could make her more money than just being a "white meat babyface". This seems to be working well. More chatter about Rousey than Weidman after the show. GSP was an awesome drawing Heel Champion.

Others pointed out that it was dull as hell. Mad Dog and Jesse pointed out that Bryan was a good interview with Cabana and Alverez (holy shit?!?!). Shoemaker is just a shitty interviewer. Like I say, there could be a lot on the cutting room floor. It's possible that Shoemaker tried, and Bryan wasn't going anywhere interesting with the responses. It's also possible that Shoemaker is a shitty interviewer (which has been the case in the past), and Bryan just checked out and slogged his way through the interview. The result was a Tiger Beat level piece. Is the bar low in wrestling? Sure. But I don't think Wade is the only person who can get some interesting responses out of folks. John

Yep. Dull as hell would be one way to put it.

Question #2 is stupid. Question #3 is stupid, but Bryan saves it by working around the stupidity. The 2K14 question is fanboy-o-rama. We get three straight questions on the beard, which would be stupid on it's own, but is magnified by copping to beard questions being stupid in asking the very first one. The Life on the Road question is stupid: we've heard that shit a dozen times, Bryan has nothing fresh to add to it, and it makes one wonder how bad the questions on the cutting room floor were if that made the cut. The last one is a silly fanboy question, and Bryan's answer is a fanboy's hardon of a response. There's a stunning lack of insight in the piece about how Bryan got from slogging around the indies for ages, to getting to the WWE, to the process getting over in the WWE, to suddenly being on top. It's not that the surfaces are slightly scratched, but that they're not delved into. This basically is the quality of an interview that you'd find in USA Today. Perhaps Shoemaker was overly controlled by the WWE in what he could ask, or Bryan is a totally shitty / uninteresting / unenlightening interview where it's like pulling teeth to even get these keepers form him, and if we saw the rest of say a 30-45 minute interview Shoemaker had with him we'd get why this is the "good stuff". But... shit... the questions are mediocre, and the responses are a bit pedestrian. Note: I don't dislike Bryan. I actually think his career story in the business is a pretty damn interesting one if fully mined, either with Bryan being open, candid and expressive... or if a decent writer ate up the topic at length. Much more so than Punk's career story. So I actually wanted to get some interesting stuff out of this. Instead... this is weak shit, both in terms of questions, and in Bryan being terribly insightful.