sek69

Well one thing about having Steph be involved with the NXT women is it does make it harder for the Kevin Dunn types to do their usual bury job to Vince if she's positioned in the middle of it. That's actually quite an underrated aspect of modern WWE. The longer HHH asserts himself as the Heir Apparent the sooner the time will come where she's going to be in a position where she has to side with either Vince and the status quo or Hunter and how he wants to present things going forward. As much as people tend to dislike her it can't be easy having to be the balance between your dad and your husband.

The IC title match has been scrapped from the PPV, at least it was the last time I checked on WWE.com. I'm guessing they probably think Ryback might be out for a little bit so Cesaro was moved into the "we won't completely ignore this guy" level.

Regal tweeted a photo of an old British wrestling poster of a show he and Liger worked on together back in the day, trying to spin that he just made a phone call to an old pal and this isn't the beginnings of a run on ROH. Considering he's in HHH's inner circle I wonder if he was asked to try to put out the fires of internet rage.

They basically see ROH as direct competition to NXT for the internet fan market, and I don't think that's inaccurate. It is peculiar to see them apparently lash out so hard at the company that was more or less the real source of talent that made NXT a favorite to begin with.

Is that in the newsletter? I don't see it on Twitter. He replied to a thread on the board about it: He also said another source told him something is coming up but Dave thinks that person might not know he already knows about the building thing.

So... the same stuff they did in 1984? They were doing it up through the 90s too. The only building WCW could run during the Monday Night Wars here in Pittsburgh was the AJ Palumbo Center where Duquesne University plays basketball.

According to Dave, WWE is calling around to arenas that book ROH in order to get exclusive deals for those buildings to run NXT shows only.

I wonder if that's really her father or just some nut, sadly you can never tell when it comes to women (celebrities or otherwise) on the Twitters.

Scientology gimmick for Lana? What's going on here?

This is true but the NXT women's title is by far the best. The tag titles look like something that would come with knockoff wrestler figures from the dollar store and the NXT title looks like it was sketched out using lego blocks.

It's just amazing how Cena, arguably the most Company Man person in the history of wrestling, turns completely emotionless when sitting at the commentary table. It's happened several times now, he's like a real life Michigan J. Frog.

It was kind of a bummer knowing how WWE Creative works to see that the best idea they seemingly had for Sasha was to put her on Team People of Color with Naomi and Tamina. If she's going to have to be in a group she needs to be the clear leader to be able to get over her BOSS gimmick and not be positioned as the Young Girl of the "veterans".

Maybe it should be taken as a sign that WWE is really serious on making women's wrestling important when Steph gets to emasculate (or whatever the female version of that would be) their babyfaces too. Nothing like going from having Paige being on a one person campaign to take down the Bellas to have her need Mom to get some new friends to play with her.

When I saw this on TMZ I lost all respect for him. This. Once I heard that, he went from harmless wrestler con artist to disgusting human being.

Well of course he's not as good, no one can out-Vince Vince, that's just the vibe it seems he's going for.

I think the issue is not so much that Vince has rules for announcers, it's more that he changes them on a whim frequently for no apparent reason. Plus as we've seen with Byron Saxton the announcers are frequently browbeaten until either they become too gunshy to be able to show any personality and/or have any passion for their job beaten out of them. Just look at their most tenured announcers now: Lawler: Doesn't even bother to watch the shows he's not on and offers little other than the occasional joke to remind people he used to be funny once. JBL: Vince's on air avatar who is the only one allowed to speak freely without being yelled at, frequently steamrolls other commentators. Titus shutting him down on Raw last week was one of my top moments of 2015. Cole: After his heel run burying every babyface on the roster, he's been reduced to a catchphrase generating machine that is eerily similar to 80s-early 90s Vince minus the IcoPro suppliments.

The funniest part about that memo leaking is that if/when Vince finds out about it his takeaway would be to have the announcers take shots at the internet rather than realizing the vast consensus being people find his company's commentators to be painfully overproduced.

Navigation complaints I can kind of understand (look at WWE Network still being clunky on most devices), but aspect ratio? Surely people weren't expecting 16:9 on 40+ year old footage.

So from what's available, has anything come up to disprove my theory that Mil Mascaras is like an inverse Hulk Hogan in terms of effort put forth outside his home country? 95% of the US based matches I've seen him in were underwhelming and probably most of his quality Mexico stuff was in the era before footage was widely available.

100% agree with all of this. Announcers being left alone was a tremendous improvement, no one's going to think Cole is the next Gordon Solie but he sounded like a human being instead of WWE Catchphrase Bot 3000. It was so refreshing to watch a WWE show without the 90s MTV zoomy shakey-cam bullshit. The Japanese crew wasn't perfect but it was worth a few missed shots to not have to worry about becoming violently nauseous during a heat segment.

Since I don't get El Rey here, I watch the Unimas version and man is it hilarious the lengths they are going to censor Catrina's cleavage. They added a black bar on her chest to fill in the down-to-there cut on her outfit, and when the action would spill out of the ring near her they were doing obvious post-production zoom ins to avoid showing her too much on screen. I'm not unfamiliar with Mexican TV, hell the edecanes in CMLL wear more revealing outfits than she does, so it's amusing they feel her boobs are too hot for TV.

I realize Sr had Billy's run planned out to the day, but it seems like he kind of had the mindset that since he was a placeholder champion there wasn't a reason to try to maximize the money he could draw during that time. Reading the list of matches in the OP made it clear to me other territories had him in more interesting and money drawing positions than Sr did. Of course this could me being blinded by my own biases here since I find that era's booking terribly bland overall. I mean, obviously it worked for them since they ended up building the foundation of the largest wrestling promotion in the world today, but watching 60s-70s era WWWF (with a few exceptions) is not my idea of fun times.

Also, man is it disheartening to see Lana go from Ice Queen in charge of the monster Rusev to being reduced to the middle of a property dispute and catfighing with Summer Rae.

Not that it disproves anything you said but Rosa is with Adam Rose now.

I would have thought a Bruno rematch would have been a big MSG match. I realize Graham won the belt in Baltimore but it seems like it should have been a no brainer to do the rematch in NYC. Also it seems like VJM actively worked to make sure SBG didn't have much chance to get super over. All the appearances in the actual WWWF territory proper were either against guys who were mainly tag team guys or people like Bruno and Gorilla who were nearing (or at) the end of their times as major players. I kind of understand why SBG was so upset now, guy was clearly the most charismatic person in New York by far and the guy had to go outside the territory to get booked like a proper world champ. Considering the era he was in, it probably would have been too much of a kayfabe break to come out and say that so we ended up with the bizarrely bitter guy we know today.