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I remember Wild Pegasus, who eventually came here. Not sure about Pegasus Kid... but I'm getting older. John

No shit. Though I wonder how much of it is a duplication of what Lynch has. Someone should just make the offer to Dave: duplicate and/or replace everything he has from the 80s through mid-90s. Most of it would already be on dvd, so it's just a matter of replacing. Or hell... does Dave even want the old stuff anymore, and would he be fine donating it to a collector.

I forgot how fucking great this thread is. Also, am I the only one who doesn't think that if Will decided to ever to a "Here Are The Matches That Capture What I Hate About Brody" that it would be one of the greatest things ever? John

Baisden... Baisden... Baisden... I must be getting old because I can't remember him.

As did I. Buried in my Pegasus e-mail account are a number of e-mails from him. I want to say that he migrated briefly to Classics after tOA.

No one at all is saying that this isn't a funny thread or that we all can't enjoy it. Our current collective Bob Brown PWO obsession warranted a joke. Which, as I thought, Dylan and Bix at the very least would get the reference and would enjoy. John

The first team Shula was the head coach of was #1 in the NFL is passing. His first 7 teams: Yardage Pass: 1-2-3-4-2-3-2 Rush: 9-5-9-10-11-8-14 Shula was a pass happy coach. Then his talent at Miami got loaded with runners, so he went in that direction. Then his runners left and/or coked out, so he went in the direction of passing. Ebb and glow. His 78 team didn't actually pass much: they were 22nd in the league in attempts, out of 28 teams. What they had was two exceptional downfield WR in Stallworth and Swann, so they skied in Y/A and were decent in Yards at 11th. Same formula the next year: 9th in attempts, but a lusty Y/A that ended up with them 2nd in Yards. They started to revert back in 1980, and by 1981 were 23rd in the NFL in attempts despite having a Bradshaw start 14 games. If you look at the direction the NFL headed in the 80s, Noll got more and more conservative over the years. Other teams went out looking for QB who could sling the ball. Other than Malone with the last pick of the 1980 1st round, Noll didn't use a #1 or #2 pick on a QB after the NFL opened up the passing game. Bubby Brister with a 3rd in 1986 and Neil O'Donnell with a 3rd in 1990. I think your head would spin at the people he passed over in those years... Marino is the tip of the iceberg. Noll just didn't care about the passing game. He fluked into something when the rules changed, and was one of the few teams with two exceptional WR who could exploit the change. They made Bradshaw and Noll look like more of a passers than they really were, and things quickly reverted back. Well... then there's Noll's investment in WR for his QB. Probably best not to look at who he was drafting in the 80s at WR. Louis Lipps was it. In his 1990 and 1991 drafts, he bagged Chris Calloway, Eric Green and Jeff Graham, but they did nothing under Noll. O'Brien wasn't too bad of a QB, and would have done better most places other than NY. In fact, my recollection is that Shula and the Fins liked him, and would have taken him if Marino was gone. That was a good team he would have been dropped into, with a good coaching staff... I think he probably would have had one of those Boomer or Simms level career that was pretty serviceable. The trick with KC is whether O'Brien would have survived the Mackovic and Gansz eras to the Schottenheimer years. You look at those Schott teams QB'd by DeBerg and Kreig, and O'Brien could have handled them perfectly well. At his best, O'Brien was a fairly smart QB, low INT %, good Completion %... that's kind of what Schott at the time wanted out of his QB: Don't Fuck Up. But getting through Mackovic and Gansz in one piece? Mackivic did fluke them into the post season with Bill Kenney and Blackledge splitting the QB duty. O'Brien was much better than those two. Would have been interesting. Eason would have gotten banged up. We do tend to forget that he was terrific in 1984 and pretty good in 1986 before getting banged up. John

And yes... I'm dating myself with that reference. Dylan and Bix might be the only people who've been around long enough to remember him.

I'm starting to wonder if this is a bit like the old, infamous BarryWindhamRevolution poster who was just a bit to obsessive about a specific wrestler. John

I was a fanboy as well... enough to do online leaguing with the game, which eats up an insane amount of time. But there were almost always things that I wanted to do when simming that the game wasn't flexible enough to let me do. Example on the older game: You couldn't set specific PH/Platooning patterns on how the in-game AI Manager would use your bench. So if I'm starting my RHB Catcher against a LHP, and the other teams switches to a RHP... the AI Manager might use my LHB Catcher to PH for the pitcher (burning my LHB Catcher)... or use some other LHB PH to PH for my catcher (burning that LHB PH). What I really wanted some sensitivity on was that my LHB Catcher would specifically PH for my RHB Catcher: 1-for-1, not burning any other players, etc. More than that: the ability to set *when* I want that to take place. If we run the LHP in the 2nd inning, that means we've put some runs on the board... I'm fine letting the RHB Catcher play a few more innings, and eat another AB or two. What I'd like to be able to do was set that for: * specific guy to PH for him if * after X innings * score differential options That's a lot of shit. But those are decisions I make when I'm actually playing a Game rather than Simming it. It's a minor thing. But there were several dozen things like that still in 6.5. There were also all sorts of dumb things I'd see my own AI Manager do in games when looking at box scored / PBP. There were times when I wanted to play out all 162 games + the playoffs, and there were other times when I just didn't have the time to invest, and wanted to Sim stuff out and know the AI Manager was doing what I wanted. You invest time in building a team... you want it used how you envision. On the flip side, it was 100 times better than say the old Tony Larusa or Earl Weaver games in the flexibility of being able to set the AI Manager. Just needed more.

Then you played it wrong! Real men take some team in the Conference (or personally, Wrexham as I support them) and make diamonds from coal with no money due to diligent scouting, hard work and tactical knowledge and lose days of sleep as it's more addictive than smack. I actually lost relationships due to the time I spent nurturing 16 year old Finnish lads I got on a free for Cefn Druids on CM01/02. I did that as well. There was no Conference at that time in the game, so it was down to the "4th Division"... which was the 3rd at the time behind EPL-1-2-3. Brought Crewe up to the top, won the EPL, won Europe... and then really didn't care enough to continue on. In contrast, as a United Fan, I was playing with United Playes. As they aged and "retired", I would go pick up their "kids" (i.e. the player would regenerate into the game as a 16 year old with the same nationality and skills but a different name). Then I would have fun spending years developing Peter Schmeichel 2.0 until he was ready to take over as United's keeper. Or 2.0 versions of guys that I loved such as Roberto Baggio. But... The game at that time had a 30 season cap on it. And after 20+ straight Win Every Game seasons... or getting to the mountain at Crew... it did get boring.

Cena has never handled this issue well, even when he should expect it coming. See this Wade Keller editorial, for example. Clearly, he knows he has to say he's cool with homosexuality publicly, but one gets vibes that he's not altogether comfortable with the idea. Good piece by Wade.

Yeah... Dave's piece is rather weak. He want through a list of guys, none of whom was publicly out to the Fans while they were working in the WWWF/WWF/WWE. You'd kind of think Dave would see that when putting together the list. As far as the WWF being "pro gay rights" for years, their outward facing portrayal of this on TV and PPV has been... not good. I mean... look... Mitch McConnell is queerer than a three dollar bill. Everyone in DC knows it. And it's entirely possible that within his own bubble that Mitch has a "live and let live" attitude. But his outward facing words and actions for his entire political career have been... well... pretty damned fucked up towards LBGT rights and acceptance. Okay, let's be honest: Mitch the Political Character has been a straight up bigot on LGBT issues. And that's what we really judge him on. Not how he acts in the closet at home with his beard wife. But his actions working the Mitch Character. In turn, the WWF/WWE has been... pretty not-good on their TV. At times, pretty fucked up. Does Young being open like this help change things? One could hope so. It's pro wrestling like politics, and I'm pretty jaded about both. So cross my fingers, and hope it leads to the WWE getting better on.

Kelly was perfectly fine, and we shouldn't forget that Marino lost badly in his one SB... and then never got a team back. We also should remember that if they got Marino, they wouldn't have: * drafted #1 over in 1985 to pick Bruce Smith The Bills drafted #1 overall by going 2-14 in 1984. That same season, Marino set new NFL records in yardage and TD and led the Fins to a 14-2 record. It's safe to say that the Bills wouldn't have been 2-14 in 1984, and never gotten the anchor to the defense. No Smith, even Marino isn't taking that team to the SB with any regularity. Wait... who was the other anchor of the defense in the SB seasons? That's right... * have their "future picks" look as attractive on October 31, 1987 to get in on the Eric Dickerson deal The Bills were coming off 2-14, 2-14 and 4-12 seasons in which they "would have had Marino" as their QB if they took him. Their #1 picked in 1988 & 1989, along with their No. 2 in 1989, looked attractive to the Rams in the old "The Bills Are A Shitty Organization And Those Could End Up Good Picks" fashion. Of course the Bill didn't want Dickerson. They wanted Cornelius Bennett, who was the #2 overall pick in the 1987 draft and was refusing to sign with Indy. The Bills don't get either Smith or Bennett if they had Dan. The irony is that the Fins had a good defense when they drafted Dan, just a weak offense. It's why they Got Good again so fast: Dan cleaned up the offense in a major way, while the defense remained good... well... wait... Until it collapsed to #26 in points allowed in the NFL in 1986 and the Fins went 8-8. The defense was largely shitty-to-mediocre the rest of Dan's prime, with the exception of a flukey 1990... when the Bills still lit them up for 44 in the playoffs, a second win in four weeks over the Fins and Dan. If the Bills draft Dan, they get a strong passing game, who knows if Thomas develops into the beast he was (since Dan never developed any RB who sustained that level of play), and the Bills defense would have sucked hard. I think the Bills made the right call on Kelly. That's from someone who is a Marino Fan far more than a Kelly fan. Jim was the right QB for the offense they developed, and his trip to the USFL actually worked out perfectly in letting the Bills address their defense as well as the offense. There was a terrific ESPN documentary on this recently. It's not just Blackledge. Tony Eason went #1-15, and Ken O'Brien went #1-24 to the Jets. His wonderlic wasn't a problem. His attitude wasn't a problem. He had a "off" Sr season at Pitt, and every (I mean *everyone*) thought he was a coke hound. Even the Raiders and Al Davis passed on him because of the dope rumors... and lord knows that half the Raiders were smoking dope, popping pills and doing lines. That's how bad the coke rumors were: this kid is going to blow up. The ESPN doc covers it to a degree, but misses a larger element: there was a lot of coke and other shit in the league at the time. Just like there's a lot of "other shit" in the league right now. There's an acceptable level of Other Shit that any number of teams are willing to accept, as long as the player is (i) functional, (ii) can fake their way through dope tests, and (iii) isn't getting busted by law enforcement. And on that last one... there's a tier system. LT could get busted by law enforcement... just not every season, or every few weeks. Dude needs to be functional. But there's that LT factor. The Giants were willing to accept it because he was so freaking good, he was functional on the field, and he wasn't the giant trainwreck that Hollywood Henderson became where he stopped being functional. Of course ESPN doesn't want to touch on that... they can't really touch on that. So they couldn't touch on just how bad the rumors about Marino were that even the RAIDERS wouldn't take him. That off Sr year, and the swirl of rumors were such that the Raiders (and others) saw him in the declining Hollywood Henderson stage, not in the Lawrence "We could give a fuck is he's snorting up Peru because he's so fucking good" Taylor stage of his career. Did those teams fuck up? No doubt. But when the Raiders of that era don't take you... it's a bit like someone leaving the WWE with a dope problem that's so bad that even TNA won't take you. No, they didn't take him because of Terry and because Chuck Noll wasn't high on him. Which blew up when Terry got hurt and had his career end early in 1983. Also need to remember that Noll ran that show through the end of 1991, and never went to a high power passing offense. Marino wouldn't have been MARINO if he went to Pitt. Noll would have kept him as a 3000 yard passer with 20-25 TD. A lot of those teams had QB who weren't old. There were perhaps 10 or so real destinations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Pro_W...33;_Keishō And bottom half of this: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/akiwrestl...tlinggames3.htm With the top being the related US version. That Royal Road Succession sounds kind of fun. It's the equiv of Road to WrestleMania in the US version. I was long past playing non-PC video games by that point, so I don't know if the US version was fun to pass through.

"The first worked Super Bowl was Super Bowl III. Pete Rozell needed the AFL to win to help get over the merger, and the Colts were told to lay down. The Colts got their win back by getting put over the Cowboys in Super Bowl V. Don Shula was asked to look at the lights again in Super Bowl VI to help create the America's Team gimmick for Dallas, as the Cowboys had always jobbed to bigger teams prior to that and no one took them seriously as a main eventer. Shula's reward for doing two major jobs that Rozell wanted was the monster push in 1972-73: back-to-back titles with the Undefeated Season which Rozell promised would never be duplicated. Every generation of NFL Creative since then has been trying to get out from under that deal Rozell made with Shula, but whenever any team gets close, Shula whips out the contract and exerts Creative Control. The most famous being in 1985 where Shula finally forced the Bears to lay down to Shula's old team the Dolphins on a Monday Night Football classic. The Patriots in 2007? Belichick tried to swerve the NFL, but the Giants shot on them with the Tyree pass to save the NFL billions in a breach of contract case Shula was prepared to file the following Monday. The famous Popping The Champagne spot by Shula and the 72 Fins has become their way of flipping the bird at NFL Creative trying to screw with them. It's like Red Auerbach's lighting the cigar to prove he was in control of the NBA Book whenever any upstart tried to pull a power play, but that's a story for another time." -Dave Meltzer, Football Observer Newsletter John

The Pats win was the 4th in 5 years by the AFC. The turn around for the AFC started when the Broncos beat the heavily favored Packers in SB XXXII. Not clear if it changed anything in relevance either. Less than 2M more people watched the next SB. The Rams spiked viewership by 4.7M viewers in 2000, and 2.5M viewers in 2002, with of all things a dip in a SB with the Giants in it in between. SB viewership is an odd duck: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013...6-1-tweets.html There are some things that clearly drove viewership up, such as Farve-Elway in 1998. But there are other things like Seattle-Pitt drawing 4M more than Pats-Eagles the year before (Pats an iconic team by that point, and two massive markets relative to Seattle and Pitt). The Peyton spike in 2007, the undefeated Pats the following year, the Peyton-Brees two years later... those make season. The huge spike up for Pack-Pitt the next year makes less sense, especially in light of the modest jump the year after that for the Pats-Giants rematch that was (i) rematch of a recent classic, (ii) New York market, (iii) rabid Boston market, and (iv) Brady. For everything the looks obvious, there will be odd jumps and then things the look obvious where there isn't a jump or as much of one as you'd think. Your head will hurt thinking about it. John

http://www.cagematch.net/?id=2&nr=1439...mmick=Bob+Brown 1984 tour. Dan has him listed as "Brower" here: DVD #7 3/31/84 1. Jumbo/Tenryu vs. Dibise/Brower 2. Hansen vs. McGraw 3. Baba vs. Hansen 4. Inoue vs. Dragon Some additional dates in the 70s: http://www.cagematch.net/?id=2&nr=1439...Brown&s=100 I don't think any of that turned up on Classics.

I haven't played any of the versions of OOTP from the period they joined the Football Manager folks and then split back off. I want to say 6.5 or so was the last version I played, and the final version we used in out online league. The AI was mediocre and the ability to sim-control your club (rather than manage every at bat) was something that needed more work. That said, it was a fun game and career mode let you have a lot of fun building a team over the years. Things like Cato let you track your data better as well. Suspect that they've gotten better and deeper since then, and run with their own equiv of Cato. I haven't played Championship/Football Manager past 2.0, which is way back in the late 90s. It was a shitload of fun, though again the AI was too easy. Of course I played as United, so you had that strong base to begin with, and then could pick off most anyone you wanted via transfer and had loads of money to do so. The "challenge" quickly moved from Win Everything to Win Every Game within a few seasons. TEW is the one that's been around for more than a decade, right? When ever I'd read about it and get tempted by it, that game always struck me as 90% of what in that type of a pro wrestling game... but the 10% missing was mostly in the make/break range for me, making me feel like I didn't want to spend a hundred hours toiling in it to not really get what I wanted. If that makes any sense? :/

The post-match is my favorite WWF moment of the 90s... quite possibly my favorite WWF moment ever. Bret just nails it, Owen if off the freaking charts in how he plays it, and that Bret look out at the crowd when they hug is epic. On top of it is what Loss says: they gave us a good match 12+ minute match before getting to the post match, and it had all that "partners breaking up" tension to it which those two played off of well. That's one of the nice things about the Yearbooks, or Will's Heart Foundation set: the angle / mic spot is what's remembered, but in these you get to see the whole thing. I think we're all more appreciative of 15+ years later of good matches like that, and it feels like Free Money to be the "lead in" to such a cool moment. John

Tim Evans mentioned him in the pre-thread, but it's worth mentioning him again... "It is complete bullshit that no one has mentioned me yet in this thread! You marks have always hated me and don't give me the credit I deserve!"

The old Super Fire Puroresu games on Super Nintendo. This one was probably the most entertaining: You had the long path of working your way up, including a match that you simply couldn't win that would send you off. Kind of cool stuff with Maeda and Maeda's sister, and if I recall Rick Rude was your US buddy. The "suicide" aspect at the end of that story is something lost to a gaijin who doesn't read Japanese. Most of the rest of the story could generally be grasped. I think the one right before it or after it had a challenge to beat pretty much everyone in the game, including working through pretty much every fed, passing through them more than once if they had large rosters (i.e. they broke the roster up into different chunks). And working through legends as well. I seem to recall Thesz & Gotch were the last two, and quite the bitch to beat. I think that one also was one of the very early games with an edit mode where you could create your own wrestler based on existing the large number of wrestlers in the game, modifying them, assigning them moves, etc. I recall creating a Destroyer variation simply updated to what his offense /holds likely would have been if he peaked in 1993/94-ish rather than the 60s/70s. Nothing nutty like giving him the SSP, but I think I gave him a variety of suplex... his wrestling background would have had something like the German that everyone in Japan was whipping out in the 90s. It was kind of fun to then take him through the game, I think paired up with Jumbo. The New Japan and All Japan *specific* games were far crappier than playing the NJ and AJ players in Super Fire. There was an AJW game as well, and I recall it being as mediocre at the AJ and NJ games. Oh... and it was always entertaining to take Brody outside and toss him into the barriers until he juiced.

He was just a brief blip to humor Inoki, which Choshu smartly navigated. At the same time as the Russian stuff was going on, Choshu was wisely getting Vader over as the real top gaijin, keeping himself hot (since Inoki was wandering over into politics and Fujinami got hurt), and elevating Hash and the next generation... and identifying the new King of the Juniors.

I tossed out Sid in the pre-thread discussion, and forgot to mention him when trashing Nash. Sid is another perfect pick. John

Holy shit! Best pick ever! John