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Ishii and Rocky coming out with Best Friends is some "did my edible kick in early?" shit.

MJF doing his best coked out Roddy Piper in Mid Atlantic impression.

The "Bryan Danielson Murders the Dark Order Tour 2022" is going to be amazing.

As great as he is as a babyface, he's somehow he's even better as a tweener/heel.

That's the state motto for Virginia, since it's a popular place for weddings (I was married there too).

Fightful is reporting the Briscoes are backstage at Dynamite. Says they are just visiting, but I can't imagine they aren't at least listening to what TK has to say.

John Cena is also the last guy WWE pushed as a top guy before the BRAND UBER ALLES era, so yes he is pretty much the last guy left who can noticeably move tickets for a reason. I suppose Roman has shown to be a TV ratings draw so there's still that, but even that only matters nowadays as a metric to gauge if the TV partners will be happy or not. But yes, I'm not saying we lower the standards. Like Al said I think it's a fair statement to say that most people of the last 20 years in WWE aren't trying to hit the metrics the people before them were. It's not too bad now, but I could easily see it becoming an apples and oranges situation trying to compare someone who spent their career selling tickets to someone working in a company solely focused on TV rights fees.

Most Survivor Series have that "we're pushing this as a big show because it's the second oldest PPV after Mania but we don't really have anything important to do" feel to them.

AEW went out of its way to make sure Bryan and Suzuki was available on YouTube, if that match happened in WWE, it *may* have been a Network Special back when they were trying to get people to sign up, but with Peacock we'd probably only see snippets of it.

WWE still makes a big deal about SummerSlam too, and since there's usually a Saudi show in the fall now that pretty much took Survivor Series' place as one of the Big Four. Honestly, one could make the argument that the only purpose Survivor Series ever had was to fuck with JCP's shows and get them to move Starrcade to December. Once that happened, you can tell Vince really stopped caring that much about it.

Yeah what worries me about Bron is the stuff he'd benefit from learning the most he'll never get taught at the PC. I just get afraid Vince will see him being awesome in NXT and get a boner to push him ASAP on the main roster way before he's ready.

Watching NXT after watching some recent New Japan, it really is striking how different the training methods are. In New Japan, guys look like perfectly acceptable pro wrestlers after like 6 months. They usually still need more seasoning, but you can see they all have the basics down pat. WWE has people in developmental for YEARS and either folks don't ever get any better, or if they do they get everything they learned get taken away on the main roster.

So I noticed in the WO update, WWE did another batch of trademarks and most were obviously future NXT names, but they also did "Scrap Iron" too so it looks like this angle is going to lead to Adam Pearce putting on the boots again.

Wow, I just had a legit Obi Wan "that's a name I haven't heard for a long, long time" moment

I've always maintained it's not really fair to hold candidates that came up in the last 20 years to the same standard as before since the business has changed too much. When the HOF started it was fairly easy to determine if someone was a clear draw, did they sell tickets/merch/PPVs or not. Numbers were what they were and it was probably the least subjective part of the process. Now the largest company in wrestling survives on TV contract money and PPVs are just a lure for people to sign up to WWE Network/Peacock. The only direct number we really have to gauge wresters on is merch sales, and there's no correlation between that and drawing power.

Women from the Sherri/Madusa/Luna era get shafted because they had the bad luck of having their primes in an era where mainstream US wrestling didn't give a shit about women's wrestling. Sherri and Madusa at least have their AWA run and even that kind of goes against them because the company was doing their slow motion car crash into bankruptcy.

I suppose with the passing of Judy Bagwell, Ric decided to step up and fill the "parent meddling in their kids' career" role.

I think Montez vs Otis could be a fun HBK-Vader style match as a one on one.

Yeah that spot in the Lucha Bros/FTR match when Fenix came off the top rope, jumped off the ass of the dude taking the piledriver and cross bodied the other guy probably wasn't the most realistic move ever but it was one of the coolest looking things I've ever seen someone do.

With travel starting to open back up, it seems like New Japan would be a good landing spot for a lot of folks. They have the NJPW Strong shows as well as obviously a lot of holes to fill on the main roster as well. Speaking of landing spots, Jay White's deal is up soon too and he's been pretty vocal about seeing what's out there. Not sure if he's just trying to get a better deal with NJ or if he's actually considering what other options are available to him.

I'm starting to come around on the IWGP World title. I'm not in love with it but I don't hate it either. That being said, if Okada makes good on his promise to bring the old belt back, I won't be upset.

The more I see Ren Narita, the more he seems like a guy that's really going to get over with the crowd as the native stoic badass that always seems to work in Japan but no one's really done in NJPW for a while.

Man, watching Chris Dickinson's injury and usually when someone (most famously Eddie himself) gets hurt on a Frog Splash it's on impact but it looked like a muscle tore as soon as he pushed off and his leg just kind of flopped in the air.

THEY DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

That was great.