sek69

The ongoing complaints about match placement are interesting. It's clear WWE has an established pattern for PPVs by now: a match they expect to be good on first to get the crowd going, title match A, womens/tag filler, title match B, filler match with whichever one of women or tag wasn't used before, main event with John Cena/HHH/Taker. It's clear if Cena is on the card, his match is going on last no matter what. Him not being in the title picture for a while is just driving the point home they haven't been thinking "title match goes on last" for a long time, it's just the guy they do put on last has been the champ for a lot of the last decade or so.

Kane's been in matches with guys who were in the top ten of their time and not looked out of place. I think he has the same problem Taker had in the 90s when he was constantly matched up with guys who no one could possibly get good matches out of. Not to mention I can't blame the guy for not going balls out every night with some of the bullshit he's been thrown into over the years. I was thinking about this the other day, was his debut angle ripping the door off the Hell in a Cell and killing Taker the last time he was involved in a feud that didn't end up Wrestlecrap material?

I think what aggravates people is that Kane has shown that he can ramp it up and and hang with guys considered top shelf workers, but has more often than not relied on his monster gimmick to coast in matches where he could get by on being big and scary.

Dave and Bryan seem to be defensive when people joke about the "plans change" meme, but this seems like a case where it did actually happen. The Bellas mocked Kharma when she left after announcing her pregnancy, and the whole deal with one of them winning the title when their deal was ending that week was to set up her return to get her revenge and squash them. It got reported, WWE had one of their "word got out, we have to change this" spasms, and we got Layla coming out to zero reaction instead. They never seemed to be able to find a way to write her back in, so I guess indirectly it's because of Meltzer. Wouldn't say it's his fault though.

I can't speak for the man's music tastes, but I've never heard anyone speak of Lita's band as anything worth listening to.

I think they will at least call her up, I just wonder if/when they do she'll get the Molly Holly treatment and have the announcers talk about her granny panties. I suspect if WWE wants to keep having women wrestling, they will have to start going back to women who can actually work a match. Like what was stated earlier, the model types are starting to get to the point where it's not worth the hassle anymore. Not only did Maxine and the Bellas leave, Kelly Kelly is on that Stacy Keibler-esque long term leave that doesn't appear she'll ever come back from anytime soon. They're going to have to start hiring women who actually want to be in wrestling, and they're going to have to come to terms with those who want to be there not always looking like Vince's ideal wank fantasy.

TNA should just fuck with them at this point and have Kenny come out with one of Eric Young's old TV belts and say he's the Real World Tag Team Champion.

The reason Mark Madden bashed ROH for using the arena football guys as promotion was that the team pretty much burned any goodwill it had with anyone in town by taking the team out to Olive Garden when they were in Orlando and firing everyone (then leaving them stuck with the check). So ROH teaming up with them to promote a show here was pretty tone deaf on their part.

I honestly don't see why so many people have such hatred for ROH. I don't think the TV is horrible, the announcing was terrible at first but Kevin and Nigel seem to have got their acts together in terms of being an old school straight announcer/ex wrestler color man team. Neither guy is the second coming of Gordon of course, but better than what WWE and TNA offer most weeks. I'll grant you the formatting is a little odd, having the big "Inside ROH" promo block in the middle of the show like that. I get that they are trying to get guys a chance to show personality to the viewers, but putting it in one block like that just makes it fast forward material. Davey to me seems like the John Cena of ROH. He doesn't bother me nearly as much as he seems to bother practically everyone else, I just figured that his gimmick was a weeaboo type who favored Japanese pro wrestling rather than like , anime or whatever. He seems like a guy who just watched puro tapes 24/7 without understanding any cultural differences why guys act all stoic and shit. Also I agree Steen celebrating his title win by stuffing his face with cake was by far the best thing they've done so far. But yeah, I have ROH TV on my weekly DVR rotation and I don't really see why it gets hated on so much. Best I can gather is that it seems like some people are still holding on to the days where Joe, Punk, and Danielson were regulars and of course nothing today is going to compare to that. Even Dave was comparing Spike's investment with TNA to Sinclair/ROH as proof that perhaps they aren't into ROH for the long run. Of course ROH's production values are going to be less, Spike is part of the Viacom empire which is worth billions. They have the capital to prop up a money losing wrestling venture. Sinclair's earnings are less than $100 million. Not chump change, but they have less room to work with in terms of how much they can burn. Could ROH TV use an upgrade? Sure, but it doesn't seem fair to compare to TNA when they are bankrolled by someone who probably has the net worth of Sinclair lost in their couch cushions.

Saturday nights on WPGH were the best here. You had WCCW come on at 10pm, GLOW at 11pm, and NWA Worldwide on at 12 midnight. I always liked Worldwide more as a kid, they had matches from arenas instead of the TV studio (which made them seem a million times more important to me even if they were still mostly jobber squashes). Plus the ring they used had different ropes that would make a snapping sound when someone would hit them, which for some reason was the coolest thing in the world to me at the time.

I was amused by Dave's theory he posed on one of the radio shows the other day that the most popular women in US wrestling tend to be the one's who are just hot enough that you find them attractive but not so hot that you'd think you wouldn't have a chance to bang them. I got what he was trying to get at, the stereotypical wrestling fan is going to tend to be somewhat resentful of the unbelievably hot chick since it will probably remind him of a chick who doesn't give him a chance IRL. On the other hand, Trish Stratus.

Probably not the same since it's not internet based, but I always thought the fans who cheer the Rudos were kind of the Mexican equivalent to "smart fans" since they are cheering guys they want to instead of "yay face, boo heel".

The alleged JR quotes from that story sound like how he talks on those raw satellite feeds of WWE TV that show up on YouTube. It's funny to see him switch from his smarmy, sarcastic "shoot voice" to the working "Good Ol JR" voice in a snap.

Pretty sure it was Bryan who did the recap, since Dave has indicated in the past he's not a iPPV kind of guy (ie: he doesn't know/care to learn how to do it).

So it looks like ROH managed to have an iPPV without any major technical disasters tonight, which itself seems like a minor miracle based on the last several attempts.

The counter of course, is that no one in the 80s knew who Virgil Runnels was unless they had a WON sub. Also there wasn't a photo of Dusty in a suit and executive ponytail accompanying the credit either.

I feel like HHH is, at this point, is a justified exception (if he's an exception, I agree that smarky gratuitous real name use is annoying) . HHH is the character on WWE TV, Paul Levesque is the real WWE executive. This seems fair since WWE uses his real name on the corporate site, they appear to be making this separation as well. At least it's more defined than WWE Chairman Vince McMahon and TV character Mr. McMahon which very often seem like one in the same. Also I agree with Loss, it's definitely one of those names that even when you know someone is pronouncing it correctly it still sounds like they aren't. I just wonder how long they can go with the "real executives get involved with storylines/wrestling" before they end up causing an issue. It's one thing for Vince to be doing it since to people out of the wrestling bubble Vince = WWE and that's just how it's always been. It might be different when HHH is the boss and going on TV solving lawsuits by calling people cowards and challenging them to PPV fights. At some point if they want to be taken seriously as a company to invest in, you can't have your CEO going out and rolling around in his undies anymore.

Pretty sure that was the first time Wendi was in a WWF/E ring since the whole Spider Lady double cross (or whatever it was) happened. I had a feeling Vince wasn't going to let that go without getting his digs in by proxy, but I figured they would just have Cole make fat jokes about her or something. I'm not a big "RESPECK DA BIZ" guy, but belittling a segment built around someone who legit helped build the company (she was pretty much the reason they got on MTV and were able to build Wrestlemania I) came off as a pretty disrespectful even by usual petty WWE standards.

If memory serves me right, the "asses in seats" line came from Bischoff who did get heat over feeding Tony that line. I think most people who know the deal in terms of announcers being fed their lines know it's not their fault most of the time. What's Cole going to do? If he doesn't say what he's told to say, he loses his job and Vince puts someone else out there to be his parrot. That's not to say Cole doesn't get serious go away heat or that making your lead announcer an annoying heel isn't damaging your business, but it's not like he's shooting out there. By all accounts one of the hardest jobs in WWE is trying to be an announcer with Vince screaming in your ear for hours on end.

Anyone know who owns the library for Southwest Championship Wrestling? I know the promotion got sold to the Texas All Star group, who ended up getting bought by WCCW, did Fritz end up with the library too?

Dunn must know a lot of shit, since it seems like he has a knack for rubbing practically everyone the wrong way. Then again, based on what we know about Vince maybe that's the appeal.

Apparently someone at WWE finally found out about the @CrankyVince twitter account and got it suspended. The fake WWE Creative account also got suspended but came back when they changed their name to better reflect they were a parody account. However the person* behind the CrankyVince account also has @PremiumVince, which he's started using as the main account. (*pretty sure it's Seth Mates, since he accidentally sent a CrankyVince tweet from his own account once)

Johnny's whole career has been based upon him being able to kiss the ass of whoever is in charge, it would be interesting to see if he ends up the first head to roll since it's been mentioned several times Hunter and Steph want to replace all of Vince's flunkies when they take over.

Honestly, I just figured they were arranging the deck chairs to give Hunter an EVP title now so when the time comes shareholders won't freak over someone with no executive experience taking over. In a related note, it was funny to hear Dave answering a reader question by stating WWE hasn't used Mick Foley since bringing him back because Hunter still gets irritated that the consensus is the matches with Mick made him a star.

Wasn't the talent department reorganized when HHH took over developmental? I know it was reported that he would be Johnny's boss in the new organizational chart but it wasn't seen as a demotion.