Dylan Waco

Unless something changes dramatically with the way WWE books him and utilizes his appearances, this Brock signing is great for Brock, but bad for wrestling.

I expect Brock v. Reigns to be good. The quality of the match isn't the issue

I know for an absolute fact that Robison acted as a stooge which is funny considering his background

I voted low enthusiasm but I'm not sure that's really accurate. I am always somewhat excited for Mania and I am this year as I would be any year. On paper I actually think this card looks better than last years card did on paper. That said I have so little confidence in the booking that I am looking forward to matches for bad reasons. For example my interest in Reigns/Lesnar basically comes down to seeing whether or not Reigns will turn heel, or if the booking of him has been a political hit. Similarly my interest in Orton and Rollins isn't so match the quality of the match, but whether or not Rollins will be put over in a meaningful fashion or lose clean to Orton. In the case of Rusev v. Cena I expect the match to be great but the finish to piss me off. I don't even think a good finish is possible for Wyatt/Taker. So I am interested in this show for perverse reasons. For that reason it feels weird to say I am enthusiastic for it. But I'm not unenthusiastic either.

Either Reigns is turning heel or he's the victim of the most egregious political hit in the history of wrestling

Well I think Tank Norton could end up working my uncles show, and he's not a guy you want to get on the bad side of either.

Paul Lee is also feuding with my uncle over a benefit show he is running in Ringgold on 4/24

You need to pay more attention to me on Twitter Bill, because I love BCB.

It wasn't an AAA show

I watched a bunch of Gilbert tonight and I think he poses a real challenge. The deal with Eddie is that he's a great worker in the sense of getting over an angle as something huge, and it really doesn't matter where he is place on the card. Watching is mini-feud with Muta from 89 tonight, they did a ton of crazy and cutting edge stuff for the time (Eddie throwing fire and hitting a jobber instead of Muta, Missy Hyatt getting misted in the face by Muta, Eddie getting beaten wildly with a kendo stick at the end of a t.v. show, et.) and that was basically a time filling, under card feud, of little to no importance to the company. When you look at Eddie at his best in Mid-South and especially Memphis the delivery on those angles was just as good, but felt bigger because the promotions were fully behind it. So what you have with Eddie is a guy who had what many regard as the hardest part of wrestling down. The problem with Eddie is that the matches just don't live up to what you would hope them too. Yes he has good psychology. He throws a great punch. He moves around and bumps well. He's a competent wrestler in just about every way really, But there is just something missing in the ring. Don't get me wrong. I really like some of the stuff with Lawler. But for a guy who feuded with Lawler as much as Eddie did it bothers me that I can't think of a match they had that blew me away. I like the Funk and Cactus matches Loss points to above, and haven't watched them in years, but none of them had the feel of true classics to me the last time I saw them. Something like the Power Hour match with Muta is great for what it is, but it still feels a bit underwhelming and the volume of standout or interesting t.v. matches Gilbert has is much lower than you would expect out of a guy with his obvious talents. In some respects I see Eddie as a Memphis bred version of Jake Roberts. Tremendous promo, great at getting over angles, excellent as both a face and a heel, and very capable in the ring - but the disparity between the out of the ring stuff and in the ring stuff is so large that it is frustrating. Eddie was a favorite of mine as a kid. I liked that he was a smallish guy, from Tennessee, who always worked hard against bigger guys. I really want to include him on my ballot. But when I don't know if I can construct an argument for him based on ring work alone that is an honest one.

I watched some Otsuka for the first time in forever today and man alive does he stand out as someone who is unfairly "lost" due to timing and the wrestling landscape he worked in. I'd go so far as to say that in terms of natural talent and range there probably aren't twenty guys in wrestling history I'd rate above him. He appears completely comfortable in virtually any setting, whether he's selling, delivering offense, working comedy spots, working the mat, et. Watching the 4/99 match v. Ikdea it felt like I was watching the Cesaro v. Cena Raw match from last year everyone wents nus for - fifteen years before those two guys did it. That Matsunaga match is also brilliant in it's own way and people should seek it out. It's strange because generally speaking I am a pro-formula guy, and I value innovation less than almost any trait I can think of, but Otsuka comes across as an extremely progressive wrestler in the context of that time. Hell you could dump peak-era Otsuka into today's wrestling world and he'd feel progressive and exciting by comparison to 99% of the guys currently wrestling. I've been struggling to try and find someone to compare him to, but I just can't think of anyone. Mostly I hope the anti-shootstyle votes give him a chance because he was a GREAT pro-style worker and shootstyle worker.

This is probably best served in another thread but not entirely sure I believe it is possible to be "anti-formula" In wrestling

Had some annoying audio issues at times with bad echo, though it never lasted more than thirty seconds are so (That I could tell). Also I lost internet on the back end, so the last twenty minutes are so are skype to phone, i.e. worst audio quality. That said I thought the show itself was really, really good. We covered developmental as a concept going back twenty-five years, talking it's evolution, successes, failures, et. and concluding with the prospects for the future of NXT.

Good promotion. Musgrave and Grimmas both really enjoy the shows. I've seen several matches and even a few full shows over the last couple of years and they rarely disappoint. Regulars include Josh Alexander, Super Smash Brothers, John Greed, Sebastian Suave, Brent Banks, Scotty O'Shea, Tyson Dux, Matt Cross and others I'm forgetting at the moment. Not all of those guys may be your speed, but I think each of them is talented in their own way and some of them (especially Cross) come across as big stars there and are over in unique ways in the Smash setting. My favorite of the bunch is John Greed, who is a big, grizzly looking guy, who is a surprisingly good athlete, a big bumper and a fresh presence on their shows. He's like the best version of Roadblock imaginable basically. I also really like Banks as a heel character though I don't think he's all together there as an in ring performer. They have brought in guys like Hero, The Bucks and most recently Drew Gulak and Biff Busick several times. Other big name guys have made the rounds there too I'm just forgetting them at the moment.

Lots of lucha workers. Casas, Virus, Santo, Panther, Satanico, El Dandy are all guys who you should seek out (there are others, but those are the first six to jump to mind). Would suggest Casas v. Panther hair v. hair from a couple of years ago as it gives you a glimpse at both guys quickly. Virus v. Guerrero Maya Jr. in either of their title matches is a good starting point. Feel like OJ should be the one to recommend a Satanico match though I have an absolute favorite. Perhaps this would be better served in the pinned thread where we recommend five matches for individual workers.

You know as well as I do that the reality is, if the booker says "go out there and give me 15 minutes with wrestler X" then the wrestler's job is to make that happen. I've been critical of Harley Race for working too weak most of the time as champ, I think Flair usually asserts his superiority enough to demonstrate he's the better wrestler or a class above or whatever most of the time -- main exception being his WWF run in 91-2 when he was booked like HTM. But that's because Vince doesn't know how to book a heel champ. I think the first point expressed is a weak one. Flair was the World champ/top star. He had a lot of pull. Promoters/bookers knew how he worked. The reason he worked those sorts of matches isn't because the booker/promoter told him to - it's because it's how Flair often worked. Hell even IF I was willing to concede the point, Flair was part of the booking committee at times, which means he would have been the one booking himself to put on performances like that.

Do you believe a World Champ should be wrestling 15 plus minutes with, giving up multiple near falls to and showing ass for George South because he says "Wooo!" And sleeps with lots of women? Logic is not the only criteria people look at. It is one. If Dory is a logical wrestler but lacks in other things it's shouldn't be hard to understand why some might not rate him.

Just because you make an argument doesn't mean others have to accept it. Flair formula is overstated for a few reasons, but it is a real thing (also not intrinsically a bad thing I would add). Also most of the criticism of Flair on this forum has centered on arguments about logic and not formula. And the "he stunk when he was old" position is primarily used as a tiebreaker when all other things are equal.

The issue isn't so much that all of them didn't conclude (or even continue in most cases) at Invasion Attack - it's that not a single one of them did. That would be one thing if the rest of the card was featuring matches involving marquee names that had real value to them, but the consensus seems to be that this card really lacks that. There are things they are doing that I think are interesting and smart uses of talent (steady integration of Young Lions into "regular" matches, Honma feuding with the Bullet Club B-Team, et.), but not really at the upper mid-card, or top of the card level.

I eventually want to write a long piece about the art of list making, the process of it, et. and I may come back to this thread then to expand upon this point more - Matthews is a worker more people should know about. He is a guy who has toiled away in Southern indie promotions for years, working hard every night against a huge variety of opponents. He is one of the most consistent wrestlers of the last decade. I have watched dozens of his matches and can think of maybe one or two I would call "bad" neither of which was his fault. He is the master of the "good" match in the sense that he can and does deliver quality wrestling matches almost every time out regardless of circumstance. The promotions he works for are not super indies, so he doesn't get the hype of others and they tend to book around more traditional models where he sells his ass off as an underdog (which he is great at) and then makes his comeback. As a result he's never booked to deliver a "classic" but he almost always reaches the expectations I have for him. He is a good traditional style mat worker, has good timing, works great underneath, is one of the best I've ever seen on the indies at consistently getting the crowd into his matches, and he is a rock solid bumper. He bridges the gap between "new school indie" style and "old school southern" style better than any other wrestler I can think of sans Goldust. The knocks against him are that some of his offense can be really "indie" and he lacks the sort of blowaway great matches you ideally want out of someone for a list like this. But he's the sort of person I WANT to include, and when there are only so many HAVE to include spots I could see squeezing him in with one of my last two picks. That last point is something I will write about at length later.

I think the AJPW guys tend to have the same "you can't criticize them!" qualities Flair has with certain people. On the point about criticism of others, I would note that every criticism you mentioned of Hanson and Funk is a criticism I've seen before. In the case of Funk the criticism regarding his selling and goofiness is something that has been used against him multiple times, with some even arguing he's not great at all, let alone GOATC. That argument is not a new one, nor do I think it is underrepresented. That said I think there is something to the argument that Flair criticism is over represented - a byproduct of Flair "discussion" in general being over represented. In no way am I saying people shouldn't talk about Flair, but it would be interesting to hear new arguments or more detailed ones. At times you and Loss have both done this Parv, but I think there is a tendency to always slip back into the volume of great/good matches argument. By the same token I think there is a tendency to pick on Flair because for many of us Flair as the de facto god of wrestling is a lazy position that isn't expanded upon enough. It's a cycle and probably an unproductive one but it's been going on for decades. Having said this I would note that not all flaws are equal. You can point to flaws in any wrestler, but if you think the flaws of one are worse or more numerous than the flaws of the other, you are probably going to conclude that the wrestler who's flaws are less bad/numerous is the superior wrestler. For many I don't think it's that Hanson, Funk, et. are flawless or not capable of being criticized so much as it is that their flaws are seen as being not as bad as the flaws of Flair. To Winged Eagle's question about Great Match Theory - I just think it's wildly uninteresting and narrow. The idea that you can reduce assessment of a wrestlers talent to a counting game strikes me as silly and defeats the purpose of a discussion in the first place. This doesn't mean great matches don't matter, but rather that WHY the match is great should be at least as important as the fact that the match was great when talking about the individual wrestlers involved. Appeals to volume alone evade the details of the performances all together and tell us little. I also think Great Match Theory has way too many inherit flaws to it to hold up. For example, what is more important, ratio of good/great matches, or number? Is someone with 100 good matches out of 200 that have made tape worse than someone with 300 good matches out of 1200 that have made tape? Or is it the opposite? If you aren't talking about what each performer brings to the table it's impossible to say.

No Will trolling

I absolutely loathe the idea of "anti-Flairism" as a contrarian impulse because it advances one seemingly simple explanation at the expense of a far simpler and much less condescending explanation - Flair, and Flair discussion, are wildly overexposed. Flair is a great wrestler and I would never say otherwise. But if you asked me to make a list of 100 wrestlers who I would actively seek out the work of to watch at this moment he wouldn't be on it. I'm not even sure he makes to top 200. I've seen tons of Flair, I've discussed him to death, I've analyzed him to death. I know what I like about him and I know what I dislike about him. It's not just that Flair as GOAT is old hat, it's that the arguments both sides put forward have largely stayed the same, and the footage for other great workers who haven't been debated for an eternity has never been this rich and/or easily available. Flair "isn't new," and he is competing against things that are "newer" in the sense of being seen for the first time by many. But even going beyond that he's simply competing with MORE. There is absolutely no reason to believe that people prefer Stan Hansen over Ric Flair solely because they are watching the Colon matches for the first time now, and we saw the Kerry Von Erich matches Flair had fifteen to twenty years ago (or longer in some cases). In fact it may be that people prefer the Colon matches because they see them as better matches, that just now became available. New found access to something may lead to overrating, but it does not necessarily lead to overrating. I would also note that the idea that one is close minded for not accepting Flair as an intrinsically great all timer - which is often how criticisms of Flair's work are greeted - is transparently ridiculous. The open minded position is not to argue that a handful of guys are obviously top of the heap guys, and everyone else is fighting for what's left. The open minded position is to look at everyone, try and assess them individually, and see how they fit into the criteria you have established for this project. Much of the debate about Flair is really a debate about criteria, and that's one that I think is interesting in and of itself, and is likely to tell us more about individuals lists than where exactly Flair or Bock or whoever shows up on them. I understand why Flair advocates would be frustrated by the fact that he is someone who gets picked apart by his critics more than others, but that says nothing about whether or not the criticisms of Flair are true or valid. I don't disagree with OJ's point about broadening out the criticism and analysis to a wider range of figures, but I'm not sure he and I would even agree on what that means. In any event, I find Great Match Theory to be increasingly less persuasive, and I usually leave arguments with hardcore Flair advocates having a lower opinion of Ric than I did going in. Maybe that's reactionary of me, maybe I've just tired of it, maybe my aesthetic tastes have changed via persuasion from the other side. But I am probably less likely to rate Flair in the top ten now than at any other point in my life as a fan.

My thoughts also copied from VOW (will add more later) I said this on Twitter, but it seems like this show is being set up as a referendum to see how much value Styles and Ibushi have as top of the card guys. You can say what you want about the rest of the lineup from a quality and freshness perspective (and there is some stuff that I actually really like from that angle), but in terms of strong support matches for a main event involving relatively untested main event attractions this is remarkably weak. I haven’t bothered to look at CageMatch, but I can’t imagine there has been a weaker top-to-bottom card Sumo Hall show in a long, long time. Even more puzzling is the fact that they failed to use the show to payoff on logically built angles/stories they seem to have been developing (Yano/Tanahashi, Makabe/Ishii, Honma/Shibata, Kojima/Tenzan, Liger/TM IV and yes I know some of these are the smaller shows of the tour). In fact in terms of the stars are used, the logic of the match-ups, and even (to some degree) the nature of the main event, this show is eerily similar to Mania. I think there is a strong argument they should have booked Nak v. Naito or something of that sort on the undercard, but one thing I will say is that coming out of this show we will know whether or not Ibushi is ready to be a top tier guy.

C/Ped from Rob McCarron at the VOW board. NJPW Invasion Attack 2015 April 5, 2015 1. IWGP Championship – AJ Styles vs Kota Ibushi 2. Kazuchika Okada vs Bad Luck Fale 3. Katsuyori Shibata & Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Kazushi Sakuraba & Toru Yano 4. Tetsuya Naito & Hirooki Goto & Togi Makabe vs. Shinsuke Nakamura & Tomohiro Ishii & YOSHI-HASHI 5. IWGP Tag Team Championship – Doc Gallows & Karl Anderson vs. Michael Bennett & Matt Taven 6. IWGP Jr Championship – Kenny Omega vs. Mascara Dorada 7. IWGP Jr Tag Championship – Beretta & Rocky Romero vs. Nick Jackson & Matt Jackson 8. Tomoaki Honma & Satoshi Kojima & Hiroyoshi Tenzan vs. Tama Tonga & Yujiro Takahashi & Cody Hall 9. Komatsu & Shelley & KUSHIDA & CNJ & Yuji Nagata vs. Sho Tanaka & Taguchi & Tiger Mash & Liger & Nakanishi Some notable Road To matches… 3/21: Tenzan vs Kojima for NWA Title 3/21: RPG Vice vs Komatsu & Sho Tanaka 3/22: Liger vs Tiger Mask for NWA Jr Title 3/22: RPG Vice & Gedo vs Young Bucks & Omega 3/23: Komatsu & Sho & Dorada vs Young Bucks & Omega 3/26: Time Splitters vs Jay White & Komatsu Only March 29, which features the most house show of house show cards, is scheduled for New Japan World. AJ Styles is on the whole tour, main eventing each night in tag matches. RPG Vice and Young Bucks are in for the whole tour, while Bennett & Taven appear only on Invasion Attack.