sek69

I see it as more a reaction of "oh you push *this* little guy but not the little guy we like"

I thought Dave was on the verge of being willfully ignorant by continuing to tow the WWE line even after the #2 show of the year just got roundly shit on by a city that can't be hand-waved away with the "it's a smark town" excuse.

The best part of the show was as everyone was leaving, the arena staff was passing out flyers for the Smackdown taping in June....that had Bryan's "Respect the Beard" logo as the whole front side.

I felt bad for poor Rey, as soon as he came out there was such a palpable feeling of "aww fuck this" in the building. Jesus could have came out in that spot and got booed just as bad. People were doing the Yes chants outside in line to get into the building and all the way up the escalators. It certainly isn't just hardcores or whatever vocal minority they want to pawn it off as. It was something being in the crowd for Orton-Cena, not only did they do the usual chants but in my section there was "Boycott Mania" and "end this match" chants. It was bizarre seeing a championship match get shit on like it was two geeks in a 9:30PM match on Raw.

Sometimes I think that on some level this whole Bryan deal is just some kind of meta trolling of the fans by WWE/Hunter/Vince. First they job him out on NXT, then they spend months having the announcers bury him as a geek, then they seem to be recognizing his ability and give him a title run only to lose in 18 seconds to a Friend of Hunter, then he's in a wacky big guy/little guy tag team where he has a inferiority complex, then they give him a clean win over the top ace of the company only to eat a Pedigree in seconds, then after dicking around with taking the title off him they stick him in a wacky heel faction only to turn him back in a couple weeks, It seems pretty clear when you look at it that they never had any intentions of making him anything more than perhaps a Santino level guy who gets a few more wins than the usual comedy act.

It's so puzzling that WWE seems hell bent on ignoring the fans with the excuse of "well Bryan doesn't move ratings/merch" when they've spent over a decade establishing that the WWE brand is bigger than any individual star. Cena was the last guy given the complete "this is the man" push, and the only others who actually pop a rating are returns of guys from before the current mindset. If they don't want to make him a top guy, I agree with Loss in that they really should stop dicking the fans around.

I always thought it was his passive-aggressive way of pointing out big jacked up and/or roid guys tend to look silly when they run.

I think it started to change around the time Hunter and her overthrew Shane as the heir apparent. Ever since then it seems she wants to be seen as the woman who's the boss of all these tough rassler guys.

So I finally got around to downloading the latest DLC pack for WWE 2K14 and was amused to find Ultimate Warrior had a higher rating in the game than Bruno (93 to 92).

I was there too, and it had a real car wreck quality to it. Especially since from where I was sitting you could see Taker getting more and more pissed off until you could see the point he realized there was no way to salvage the match. He just got this look on his face like "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck" which just cracked me up. Plus when all the babyfaces came out to celebrate Angle's title win, he was *still* visibly pissed off.

I would think the idea would be twofold: keep the search functions from blowing up like mookie said, and also to keep the choices from being overwhelming during the launch period. It sounds weird, but if you give people millions of choices from the start they end up not watching any of them since your brain gets too overloaded to choose. I would suspect the content will expand as the service goes on, my only fear is if it doesn't take off like gangbusters it might fall in to the WWE 24/7 ghetto of being ignored.

I believe the main injury happened in a match with Sting in Japan where he took an awkward bump on the elevated ramp/stage thing they were using for the show. Everything else seemed to stem from that.

What does "confirmed" mean? Story on the front page of WO com where Dave says Bryan got a concussion? I assume that is sufficient for your needs.

So it was confirmed Daniel Bryan suffered a concussion at some point in the cage match and doesn't even remember much of what happened. Considering WWE tends to depush people who get concussions, guess it's time for Internet Hysteria: 2 Electric Boogaloo.

If you've ever seen Dave's collection, he has hundreds of unmarked tapes/dvds so it's probably a matter of it being a huge pain in the ass to even find anything let alone sell it/get it transferred to digital.

I think he's getting irritated with having to answer the same network related questions a million times.

The best part of Dave going on about Bryan not being at the network announcement was Alvarez repeatedly mentioning "yeah, but he was a heel then", only for Dave to bring up Alberto Del Rio being there. Because heel who's a well spoken member of an ethnic group they covet as an audience is the same as a guy shown on TV as a member of a brainwashed swamp cult.

My spider sense started to tingle when Kane volunteered himself to be the keyholder for the cage match. What better way to make sure Bryan finally gets his revenge by having his buddy (who's bigger than both Rowan and Harper) standing guard. I wonder if the timing of this has anything to do with the Michigan St basketball team doing the YES chants last week.

OK, that was pretty fucking cool.

Well it led to Orton freaking out and beating up Cena's dad (again) so at least there was a storyline reason.

I'm not sure that belt was for him, I thought they made it a while before they revealed it but were afraid to replace the spinner belt because kids bought tons of replicas.

Has anyone clarified if the Raw episodes uploaded on the Network are full or the edited ones that go on Hulu Plus now?

Ryback has been having a quasi meltdown off and on all day on Twitter.

This is something I've been saying: launching the network, particularly with including Wrestlemania, seemed like they were risking thumbing their nose at the sugar daddy. That's why I didn't think they'd want to launch before they had the TV rights negotiations wrapped up. But they did, because they figured they had to launch in Road to Wrestlemania mode. Its a gamble but that's how McMahons roll, I guess. My guess, given (i) how much they pay for WWE content and (ii) how many different ways the PPV revenue is split up and Comcast's size that WWE Content is more valuable to their bottom line that WWE PPV. Even more so if they were willing to increase the rates by 50% or more in the new deal. If WWE Content is of value to them, they'll be more than happy to pay for it at a price that can make them money. This is all just business. Also, as Dave pointed out: If there's anything resembling a bidding war, it probably won't matter. True, but the last time their rights came up no one made an offer. That's why they got stuck with the deal they got from USA, it was either take it or have no TV. There's a pretty established history of networks not valuing wrestling content despite the ratings they provide.

Dave brought up a great point in their Q&A show: Comcast, as a cable company, is likely as upset about potentially losing PPV revenue as DirecTV is (just not likely to write a pissy PR release about it). They also own NBCUniversal, who WWE is trying to get 2-3x the TV revenue from. That could make for some interesting talks when Vince comes in asking to get paid more when the network is taking cash out of Universal's pockets.