sek69

Alright, fair's fair. WWE remembering what Daniel said when he turned heel was a surprising consistency moment. Also lol @ Sami and Nak caring about the world being heel characteristics.

He was basically a Dean Malenko type shooter/badass. I get no one really watched 205 Live but it was some fun stuff and just reconning it all away is wack.

Gotta love them throwing away all the character development Drew Gulak did on 205 live so he can go back to being POWERPOINT GUY on Smackdown.

"There was a muscleman in a suit who kept firing me" Rambling Rabbit owns.

Big Dog out here dropping truth bombs on Corbin.

Dave told a story yesterday about going to wrestling shows as a kid and how Roy Shire's territory was a high workrate territory and had some of the best workers of the day. He mentions talking to the Mexican kids he'd meet there and how they thought US wrestling looked so fake compared to lucha while Dave thought the opposite. He said it was a teaching moment for him where he learned the wrestling you grew up with is "real wrestling" and anything different looks fake by comparison. The story was in context of the other day being Dave's 60th birthday and him explaining why he's more open to modern wrestling than a lot of other folks his age (*cough* Cornette *cough*).

In the Britt Baker hype video talking about her Pittsburgh roots one of the photos that were shown was of her with Cole. I saw that on the big screen in the arena and wondered if it made it on TV or not.

The issue is that wrestling fans look at the overall number of viewers, but TV networks look at key demos way more. I think AEW ended up ranked #4 in 18-49, and TNT would care about that more than had they finished lower but had more overall viewers. Now that the NBA is back, it should be interesting to see how much synergy there is considering AEW has exceeded TNT's expectations so far.

They will be on Saturdays, not sure what the cable price is. Bleacher Report is the streaming option.

Catching up on Impact and I just watched the Brian Cage-Melissa Santos wedding and it was the most wrestling-est wrestling wedding ever and it was awesome. I kinda wish I could have had Jim Mitchell officiate my wedding.

...but Madison isn't a Hart family member? Or am I missing a joke here? I do like what the current team running IMPACT is doing, it's just a shame they are doing it with the Chernobyl of wrestling companies most people won't want to give (yet another) chance to.

Yeah both shows did pretty good against strong competition. I think a lot of people were expecting much lower drops from both shows.

AEW: 963,000 NXT: 698,000 Going up against the World Series and the start of the NBA season, I was expecting both shows to drop more than that. AEW is still almost tripling in the key demos, but we should all remember NXT wasn't getting super high viewership on the network so 700,000 on cable TV is probably ten times the viewers they ever had prior.

Cain is definitely a bigger fan of lucha than WWE, but I can't fault a guy for going where the money is.

It wasn't a complete sellout, but I would say it was probably at least 80% full not counting the section they left empty for the hard cam/lighting. That's something they are doing differently than WWE. At WWE shows the hard cam is usually on the floor in front of the first row of elevated seats, at this show AEW had the hard cameras (there were 3) placed in front of a row of seats halfway up the section off the floor with lights arranged around them. There was another empty section on that side at the start of the show but it filled up during the first match.

WWE shows have been provably bad and AEW has been a breath of fresh air by making booking choices that used to be commonplace but haven't been in 20 years. Saying it's a matter of "WWE bad, AEW good" just diluting a legit discussion to absurd extremes to cover for the fact WWE has problems that need to be addressed. NXT was really good last night. I have no faith anyone on that show has a chance in hell at succeeding on the main roster for obvious reasons. That is not a "WWE bad, AEW good" argument. There's letting things play out and then there's expecting the scorpion not to sting you when it's been known to do so for decades,

I'm a fair man, so I'll give him credit for mentioning on today's show that just maybe "Pittsburgh is a bad crowd" is just something he's been told by WWE people and that if you put on a good show you'll get a good crowd.

Yeah Cain pulled out of the testing pool and told UFC he retired, so he's going to stick around.

I really want to see Private Party on a AAA show after their match tonight, flippy dudes vs luchadores is a great combination. Speaking of, it was nice to be able to scratch "see the AAA Megacampeon in person" off my wrestling bucket list.

Also after the main event Kenny stopped PAC from Pillmanizing Mox's head, then Hangman came out to challenge PAC for a match at Full Gear.

Just got back from the show, wow was that a fun experience live. Since they don't stop for commercials it was way faster paced than being at a WWE TV taping. There were only two points they stopped, once was before the Cody promo where he was having fun messing with the crowd by getting them to chant different things then saying "you know we're in break, right?". The other was before the main event where Justin Roberts asked people to show off their signs and one was "Sorry about your dead birthday horse". It's also funny how every time WWE is here for TV or PPV, I have to listen to Dave go on and on about how Pittsburgh is a bad, dead crowd. That certainly wasn't the case tonight, people were into every match and it really had the feel of an early 90s ECW show where the crowd feels "this is our show" instead of waiting for the next time the company fucks them over.

The marketplace already did though. They don't have a good record drawing the second time in a market, so running a house show loop seems to fly in the face of what they should have already learned from the shows they've already done. I'm also guessing these shows are going to largely be LA Dojo and Young Lion types filling the card as well, which won't do much to put butts in seats.

Because like it or not it's a major event now since the Saudis want it to be on the level of a Wrestlemania.

The Spiritual Advisor is Jocephus's manager on the indies. I suppose they are going to do a deal where he goes to her to turn things around since James Storm keeps punking him out.

I get that announcing is a personal taste thing, but Justin Roberts always came across as someone who made AEW seem legit rather than a retread. Then again I grew up on the Fink and everyone since has come across as second tier, so it's possible I'm just biased.