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I guess Marty must be making headway with that working relationship.

JR with the Wild Eyed Southern Boys reference getting a pop from me.

I hope the dummies who say there's no psychology in Bucks matches are watching this.

Time for some Cowboy Shit!

Darby has that special something, and kids seem to be into him too.

Dustin watching his Velveteen Dream tapes, out here trying to steal the heel's wife.

Good match to kick things off too.

I usually look forward to Mania just for the spectacle of it all, but this is definitely the first US PPV I've been hyped for based on the matches in a long time. It feels refreshing to have a card full of matches that all have a reason to exist other than "we have a PPV every month so we need to fill up space".

Xavier Woods posted pics of his cosplay of Powdered Toast Man for PAX East and it shows why he's a treasure in this world.

That and there's also been more than a handful of stories from folks who washed out in WWE saying they had run ins with Cena that derailed them politically. As a one off you might think it was sour grapes or someone looking for a reason they didn't make it, but after a while you tend to notice a pattern.

So WWE sent out a survey about Super Showdown, like they do for all their PPVs, and it was interesting when I said I didn't watch. They asked why and gave a whole laundry list of reasons (inconvenient time, matches too predictable, buying non WWE PPVs, etc) except for the obvious reason most people would give for not watching this particular show. There was a spot at the end where you could give your specific reasons for not watching, so you could still tell them why. I kind of feel bad for the web team people who have to deliver the results to management.

I get the impression that New Japan financed the latest Fire Pro game so I would assume there's contracts involved.

So Kenny was asked about an AEW video game and he replied the company gives the fans what they want, and they are asking for something in particular (referring to the AKI engine from N64 era WWF games like No Mercy) that is going to take time to get worked out. If they pull that off it'll get a bigger pop from me than anything that will happen at the PPV (and I'm really looking forward to the show).

Anyone else notice that WWE's social media accounts have their own version of weird WWEspeak? Every tweet has to have RANDOM CAPITALIZATION mid sentence like a text version of Vince yelling in an announcer's headset to make sure they really ram home the focal points. Once I saw it was in every tweet it quickly became one of those things I couldn't unsee.

Plus being the main figure of the first legit competition in 20 years and (so far) carrying the ball expertly would put him ahead of Goldberg in an importance sense without all the other stuff. Some people are stuck on his last WWE run not being all that great, but history has pretty much shown to be mostly on the company and not Jericho himself.

Not that it wasn't largely useless and un-needed already, but going out there and basically announcing Roman vs Goldberg makes the Elimination Chamber a total waste of everyone's time.

Someone get brother KawadaSmile some lotion for that burn.

Goldberg generally hasn't looked too bad (by his standards) in his US matches since coming back, it's probably not a good idea for him to keep doing matches in the SA heat at his age but clearly at this point WWE isn't concerned with the quality of those shows.

The Wyatt Family vs the Shield faceoff was a legit holy-shit inducing moment the crowd was going nuts for. Also I thought the brawl with the New Day at the Wyatt Compound was stupid fun even if if was clearly WWE doing a discount Broken Universe idea. I get the impression a lot of the problems Bray runs into are from Vince and/or the rest of creative not "getting" his ideas and not knowing what to do with them. Like I can't believe it would have been Bray's idea to invest all that time and effort into a new gimmick, get Tom Savini involved in design, and then have all his matches in a stupid fucking red light that doesn't let anyone see a thing.

Conversely, I didn't expect that Ricochet would actually win or anything, but it did him no favors to go out there and get Kofi'd either. He was supposed to be one of the guys Heyman was trying to build Raw around, I wonder if he tried to suggest having a competitive match and Brock decided that didn't work for him brother.

I mean, it's the best match for Roman in terms of star power but not when you consider Bill's best matches had to be kept short in 1998 let alone 2020. I suppose it's better than having Bill do another match in Saudi heat and nearly kill someone due to exhaustion and/or concussing himself, but I don't really want to see Mania turned in to series of 30 second matches because the old men involved will gas out too fast.

It's that, and also the abject failure of the WWE to create new stars so that only names from the past can draw money.

Truly this is his "well the trains ran on time" moment.

Ric's long been a glaring blind spot in Dave's coverage, and that seems to have passed down to Charlotte. It's not so much he favors her, but if Charlotte ends up being some kind of HBK level pain the ass backstage, I wouldn't expect him to be the first to report on it. I will say though that it seems despite her being a clear company favorite, there were some plans involving her that obviously changed due to the rise of Becky. I wouldn't be mad if Charlotte had a realization he has the pull to nix some of the bullshit that has been going on with the booking of her character.

Charlotte Uber Alles, brother. No one can stop the path of Woo (and also Vince's hard on for blondes with big fake'uns).