sek69

Is there any reason ROH seems to keep women around to work houseshows/dark matches but never puts them on TV? It made it look weird on TV this week when Veda came out in her wrestling gear to second Moose for his match.

Counterpoint: Ambrose has been pretty goddamn over as a babyface despite being booked like shit most of the last year (or two?).

The thing with NXT is no matter how successful it gets, it's still developmental. We've already seen the bloom off the rose to a degree since they have to actually pay guys to come in instead of just waving the carrot of future WWE exposure. I don't see them wanting to toss the money needed to lure the top level indy guys on a regular basis. You'll still see a few coming in, but I don't think we'll get the future dystopia some are predicting where everyone who gets any sort of buzz gets stashed away in NXT forever.

Funny how people always use the same fish-eye lens photo to doubt the 78k figure when the whole point of that pic was to make the crowd look larger and the ring look smaller.

He likely has more stock, and also he has more tenure than anyone at the top except Vince at this point.

Hope no one in a mainstream media outlet assigned to do a puff piece on the WWE HOF finds the photo of the 'birds with the Confederate flag face paint.

The "skinny fat" line was great, as of course that would be the sickest burn HHH could throw at someone not as obsessed with physique as he is.

I get what you're aiming at here, but a mic worker as shitty as HHH should never be considered the new Dusty regardless of the reason for comparison, He's the Buddy Landell to Dusty's Flair.

That reminds me on Shake Them Ropes, I think it was Jeff who said he would bet that at some point in the next few shows Dean Ambrose will be saying how he respects Triple H in the build to their match.

Hunter is smart in the sense that he knows what moves to make to ensure he comes out of any feud looking better than anyone else. He's making sure he gets the babyface reaction when he brawls with Roman, He makes sure he can get in lines no one else can say (like saying he thought Dean's craziness was just a gimmick) or no one is allowed to react to. His character never shows weakness that isn't immediately retconned the next day, and somehow this is the guy who's going to cement Roman as the new ace?

If i were being snarky I would say at least kids like Cena whereas no one likes Reigns, but I'm not so I won't.

It would be neat if they put up some Freebirds footage up on the Network to celebrate this occasion.

What makes the Roman deal slightly different is that now instead of being a delusional and or insecure rassler trying to keep his spot, he's office now (both kayfabe and real life) so those tactics come off even worse now. It's funny to see Dave argue "well they had to do the beatdown to cover for Roman's surgery", which is kind of beside the point since him needing surgery didn't mean Hunter had to pound his head to the table in a cadence the crowd to chant along to or do crotch chops. No one denies Hunter's smart business wise, are we really supposed to believe he doesn't know what he's doing here?

They've already done it. He's the evil heel authority figure on Raw and he's lovable ol' Dad on NXT.

So even if you accept at face value that Hunter is trying to get himself over to make it a bigger deal when Roman beats him, it's still worth pointing out that he only seems to do it against Reigns. I don't recall him do anything to get face pops when he was beating up Ambrose.

To me it was part genuine surprise, and also the result of not being on TV for nearly 7 years. He's a reminder to a lot of people of a time when wrestling was fun.

There's no reason someone like Summer Rae can't be the next Alexandria York.

Anyone watch the Stone Cold Podcast with Big Show? I thought it was one of the better ones they've ever done. Funny moments were Austin going into his famous Dusty impression to do a version of Hard Times when Show was describing his lack of money when he was in college, Show getting hit by a feelings avalanche when they showed a photo of his late father, and Show for some reason having to hide his face with a towel every time he drank a beer. He was very open with his opinions, told funny stories of how Vince and Austin got him to fire up as a giant, and had a pretty honest assessment of his career,

Wrestling Observer Live is free every day M-F with a two hour show on Saturday. Bryan and Mike Sempervive host, and they often have guests from ROH or LU. Dr. Lucha does a segment once a week and Dave calls in on Thursdays for a recap of the newest Observer. The only downside is they have callers that are reminiscent of Howard Stern's Wack Pack, but lately they've been roped in to their own segment that can be easily skipped since Bryan posts the shows with commercials edited to the WO site the same day.

At the NXT house show tonight, they did a dirty dancing tribute dance. It was glorious. I don't know where it's leading to but I approve Tonight's show was interesting because it felt like the changing of the guard. It seem obvious that Enzo/Cass/Carmella and Sami are headed to the main roster probably after Mania.I thought Bayley might be too but I think they will hold off on that till they get a new top babyface woman that isn't Asuka. The two women that could fill that role are Liv Morgan and Adrienne Reese. Adrienne had a cast on her hand so she might be injured. Liv has a lot of potential. She even does the Matrix move.. It seems they are setting up Asuka to be the one who wins the belt, since she's been mowing everyone down and they did the angle where she was petting the belt after saving Baymella.

I do think he went above and beyond what he was asked to do. Was he asked to be rough with the newbies? I'm sure he was. I doubt there was any directives to do naked wrestling though.

That reminds me, the Jim Cornette/Jimmy Hart "heel manager with a prop he hits the faces with" rasslin' trope is one of the few that hasn't shown up in NXT yet.

I doubt we'll ever see Kurt Angle back in anything but a non wrestling role.

Sounds like scalpers must have grabbed a lot of the available tickets and are probably going to take a bath like they did on NXT.

Little of column A, little of column B I would guess? Either way I'm sure they'll make it rain with comps to make sure the place is filled up.