sek69

if I'm thinking about it like I believe WWE is, I'm guessing this is the plan: Braun gets sick of the jabronies on his team and walks out and Kane gives the Shield a monster to destroy. Maybe Kane sticks around to do a program with Roman to avenge his bro, but doesn't he still have an election to win?

It is, but the hard part is getting them to see it's not a binary choice of what they are doing now or force feeding. Maybe the workload needs to be better balanced, we know Raw and Smackdown have their own staffs but who comes up with stuff for 205 Live? With all the writers they employ it seems like it shouldn't be difficult to spread the workload to help avoid burnout and raise the quality of all their programming.

To be fair, the further away we get from the territory era the more people write them off. It usually comes down to a combination either "in the end, X promoter lost to Vince so they can't be HOF worthy" which disqualifies everyone who ever promoted wrestling in North America from the dawn of time until the 90s except the Lutteroth family, or not understanding the context of how big a draw a promotion was in a given area. A place like Portland has the added handicap of not having a ton of footage available and what does exist is usually multiple gen copies of stuff stored in Buddy's garage or wherever.

A big part of making a successful babyface star is having a proper heel foil. Austin would be a star no matter what due to his charisma, but he is one of the biggest stars of all time because of Vince. Mr. McMahon is probably the greatest heel character ever created, the way he would bump and stooge made anyone he faced seem like a bigger star because of it. He even did it recently for Owens. There's no one for today's babyfaces to play off of since we've had a decade plus of the Authority castrating everyone and even steven booking that cuts off anyone's momentum. It's all a vicious cycle, or a self fulfilling prophecy. They can't book babyfaces, and their heels end up getting cheered because they end up being the only ones booked worth a damn, so instead of trying to improve your writing it's easier to just say "well heels and faces just don't matter anymore!"

He also mentioned of people on the ballot he sees Minoru Suzuki and Ultimo Guererro as HOF'ers, so process that as you see fit. I don't necessarily disagree but it does kind of come off as the HOF equivalent of the current year argument fallacy.

WWE didn't have much choice but to adopt the idea though, since the last two guys they've tried to anoint as top babyface got swatted back in their faces. Now they're trying to pretend it was their plan all along to create a world where it doesn't matter if someone's cheered or booed when it absolutely was not the plan at the start. We've seen them do this multiple times, they will fight tooth and nail when something doesn't go the way they wanted it to, and then finally when it's clear the fans won't budge the company just pretends that's what they were trying to do the whole time. If the plan was to just make Roman a top star, there were about a thousand opportunities where he could have been turned heel and probably been a much bigger star than he even is now. But the idea was to make him the top *babyface* star, even if that meant repeatedly trying to ram the square peg into a round hole. It was only after years of that not working did we get the "I'm not a good guy, not a bad guy" stuff. They finally just started tailoring his character to the reactions he was already getting, yet all signs point to another WrestleMania being booked to end with him standing tall at the end despite knowing damn well how that will go over to the crowd in attendance. So WWE really shouldn't be lauded for finally being able to create the "shades of grey" world Vince famously mentioned in the 90s. Fans absolutely want to cheer the good guys and boo the bad guys, they just don't want it jammed down their throats in a ham fisted a manner as possible who that would be.

How long are you and other people gonna keep on with this narrative? Do you think Vince was still expecting the crowd to suddenly going to turn around on John Cena after 3 years of him getting booed and them still sticking with him? They were at least smart enough to eventually go the Bret Hart route with Cena and make it part of his character that some people like him and some people boo him. Cena also had several years as the Doctor of Thuganomics at US title level before being pushed as the franchise guy. Roman was framed as the top guy immediately after the Shield breakup when he really wasnt ready to be in that position. Of course the Bryan stuff didnt help, but the biggest issue has clearly been the company seeing fan resistance to him as a bug rather than a feature. Especially when they keep trolling by trotting out the old the fans dictate what we do line when that clearly isnt the case, at least not when their likes and Vinces differ. So no, I wasnt expecting them to give up on Cena back then, and Im not expecting them to suddenly change their minds on Roman either (unless he gets caught with a dead hooker in his trunk or something). Its just amusing to me to see them spend more effort on trying to get people whove made up their minds to suddenly start liking him than they have on literally everything else in the last five years.

None of them were able to connect individually as much as they did as a unit. The company will probably end up convincing themselves that the Shield getting huge reactions means the people accept Roman, only to be puzzled when another Mania coronation gets met with booing.

If you believe that's the whole story. If it is he's really stupid. I get the impression that it was more of a last straw than it being the only issue.

So the WCCW drop is continuing into 1988 amazingly enough. Bonus amazing moment is seeing a pre-Taker Mark Calloway under a mask as Texas Red show up managed by Percy Pringle of all people.

I don't know what was worse, Sister Brayagail with the Black Scorpion voice or Finn having to sell being afraid in his promo afterward. I would have had a "Santino laughing at the Boogeyman" moment if I was in his place.

While true, if TNA of all places could manage to put together the Broken Matt stuff in an effective way surely WWE could manage something. It's not like it would be diverting tons of resources away from developing young guys, just give Matt a camera guy to go fuck around with and have someone edit the footage when they're done.

Damn mobile...anyway Daves confirmed that Neville walked but WWE is not saying hes gone yet.

Yeah, the last few Shane matches my fear wasn't "he's going to die from falling of the cage" but more "he's going to die from a heart attack from moving more than a few minutes at a time". He gets so red even Brock would be all "damn, bro that doesn't look good". Combined with his Mike Rotunda-like sweating just doing a promo on most Smackdowns, it would almost be enough for one to suspect he might be hitting the Columbian slopes.

Looks like Enzo's a certified draw since the third hour of Raw held up pretty solid despite both football and a Yankees playoff game on last night. Probably helped that the football game was a shit fest, but I guess Enzo was able to do the impossible and get the cruiserweights over.

Fears about Sami are certainly warranted, but this is probably his best chance considering WWE is currently has completely forgotten how to properly book babyfaces, Whatever ends up happening to him as a heel it can't be worse than annoying neurotic babyface Sami.

Is there anywhere that has whole Poffo ICW shows? All I can find are single matches and short clips.

Rusev is literally everything Vince usually drools over, a big guy who can work and even can (usually) make the comedy stuff work as well. Yet he remains directionless and the best use they can come up with for him is generic foreign heel. Maybe theres still resentment that they couldnt break up him and Lana.

Another point is that it's easier to look past overbooking if it results in a finish people want. Nothing's worse than a bunch of bullshit that results in the wrong person winning.

Moderation for sure. Each "Dusty Finish" by itself was perfectly fine, but doing it as much as they did killed interest since you could see them coming a mile away.

I think "over booking" gets a bad rap because too often it's done by bookers trying to be smarter than the room and/or reinvent the wheel. There's a difference between booking a match with a bunch of run ins/cheating/plunder that can be fun and entertaining, and there's booking a match because someone just wants to do a bunch of wacky bullshit.

Theoretically there shouldn't be a reason that he can't get regional indies to run together under the NWA banner to benefit everyone, or at least build up a larger territory to be the next super indy, other than getting wrestling promoters to work together is harder than herding cats. At least Billy should have motivation to do something with his investment, and his creative input in TNA was starting to be pretty good until Dixie had to Dixie all over everything.

It's not that Vince hates it, he just doesn't like using ideas he didn't come up with and/or thinks is too "southern rasslin" which in his mind is anything that got popular with JCP or WCW.

Probably no need to spoiler the name since WWE just blasted it across their social media accounts. My only pause with this is having it a three way match was awkward when WCW did it, but WCW at that stage would fuck up a one man circle jerk.