Coffey

Yeah, this is bothering me, too. It's one thing to have a fun, goofy gimmick get over because it's goofy & the studio audience are having a fun time with it. It's another thing entirely to push it as credible. To me, it's no different than how unbelievable it is to still see the Rock 'n Roll Express wrestling, let alone winning matches. I had no desire to see the RnR work in 2019. Them winning the titles was a joke. Them defending the titles was a joke. And now Ricky Morton is getting a world title shot? It's not nostalgic, it's lame. That shit makes this company looks really, really bush league. Which, I mean, it is bush league, but they shouldn't be going for that look. It makes them look like a parody - which is one of the big things people have used to shine a negative light on the company. That the wrestlers are all cosplaying & it's just like a big gimmick show trying to look like old studio shows from the 1980s. Like the old school episode that Impact did, only it's not a one night only thing but it's their real actual product. The women's division is bad. The tag division is bad. They're adding another midcard title that they don't really need, since they already had one. Their roster is paper thin. Like the wheels are coming off this train, for sure. El-P was a lot more down on NWA as a whole than I ever was but I don't see any sort of future for NWA. Rovert said that they're not making any money from YouTube or anything. So they have to do this PPV model. They're apparently teaming up with ROH but ROH also seems as doomed as doomed can be. It's just not a good look all around. I love Tim Storm. I really like Nick Aldis. I think Kamille can be a superstar. Ricky Starks has a lot of potential. I enjoy the commentary & really like David Marquez as the interviewer. There's good promos in NWA for sure... but there's a lot of duct tape, glue & bent nails holding this thing together. Allysin Kay is great. Marti Belle & everyone else isn't. You can't have a division & a title with that. For every Tim Storm you have three or four Ken Andersons or The Dawsons taking up space. Like bringing in Scott Steiner in 2020 is not where they should be... but here we are. I like that they're focused more on promos. But they need to focus on getting over young talent credibly & with how they work in NWA, that isn't happening. The matches are all too short & don't give any time to tell a story, really. The outcomes don't seem to matter all too much. Even the title matches kind of feel like they come out of nowhere. It feels very short term. Will NWA even be around in this form one year from now? Will there still be an NWA Power on Youtube next January? What's stopping an AEW or WWE from taking someone like Kamille or Ricky Starks? You can't make a company that's just a bunch of people that the other companies don't want.

I would put more blame on Shawn Michaels & Rob Van Dam than I ever would put on Mick Foley.

Terrible idea in my opinion. Regardless of what money they get from it. One of the big problems with modern wrestling, and wrestling during the tail end of the Monday Night Wars, is oversaturation. People don't want to watch RAW in large part because it's 3-hours long. No one cared to watch WCW Thunder either. WWE alone has 3-hour RAW, 2-hour NXT & 2-hour Smackdown a week, just from the main televised shows. Hopefully AEW doesn't think that they need that too. So now AEW already had Dynamite - which isn't firing on all cylinders & they're adding more programming? They already do the Being the Elite stuff & AEW Dark. How thin do they think they can spread that roster? No one tuned into WCW Thunder to watch nWo b-team members battle the jobbers of Raven's Flock. Who out here is thinking AEW needs more hours a week to fill with The Librarians, Sonny Kiss, QT Marshall & Britt Baker shit? AEW has more bad than good right now, roster wise, and they want to spread themselves even thinner? I don't like it.

I can relate to this post a lot. I used to buy into the characters, the stories & the words that they said. That's what I feel is missing. The whole buying in aspect. Now it's like the good stuff is so few & far between, it feels like you only get a few a year - like the Cody promo. Great matches are a dime a dozen anymore, so they start to blend together. Like it's only been a couple of days but is anyone talking about Tyler Bate Vs. Jordan Devlin anymore? Or even the WALTER Vs. Bate match that happened not too long ago? Or hell, even Wrestle Kingdom? Feels more like people are talking about Tessa Blanchard being racist & Triple H making a bad joke about Paige. Social media bullshit instead of the actual shows. I became a pro-wrestling fan in 1987 because of WWF & Hulk Hogan. It was all about the characters, not the actual wrestling. As I was young, of course, I wanted to see the good guys win & the bad guys lose, but other than the finish & maybe the finishing move, I didn't really care about the actual matches as a kid. I just wanted to see the good guy beat the bad guy. Hogan, Warrior, Duggan... whatever. Over the years, as I got older, of course that changed. I still like good character work, and grew to appreciate heels, but I also enjoy the journey of the actual match. And I get that from other promotions, like New Japan (at least for the top half of the card). But there's a lot of promotions out there that really lack the character part of the show & their idea of the wrestling part of the show doesn't really coincide with what I'm wanting as a fan either. AEW & ROH come to mind. I think WWE can definitely fall into that category as well. I enjoy NWA but at this point, I'm not sure if it's just because of ironic nostalgia or what because the wrestling for the most part is trash but I do enjoy most of the promos & I like Nick Aldis & Tim Storm. I watched Wrestle Kingdom at the start of this year & thoroughly enjoyed myself so I know that I haven't "outgrown" - or at least fallen out of favor with professional wrestling. I still have WWE Network. I can put on a WCW Saturday Night from 1993 right now & smile like a kid & love the show beginning to end. So it's not that I don't still enjoy wrestling, it's that modern WWE is so far removed from what I want to see that it bums me out as a fan. I'll still watch Royal Rumble & I'll still watch Wrestlemania but outside of those two specific shows, nothing that WWE does during the calendar year grabs my attention. Like, I'm not going to tune into a 3-hour live RAW to see a wedding between Lana & Bobby Lashley. I don't care to see Seth Rollins & Kevin Owens as main eventers. Just like I'm never going to care about the Young Bucks. I know what I like & what I don't and that Indieriffic style wrestling is not what I enjoy. Which is part of the reason why it's so surprising to me that it has become the popular norm in wrestling of today. The whole spam finishers, kick out of everything & sell nothing style. Like every match is trying to be Shawn Michaels Vs. The Undertaker at Wrestlemania, even when it's the opening match in an Indie with 200 people there. I agree that I want quality over quantity & think that less is more & wrestlers should work smarter not harder. That's all common sense to me, so I don't know why it seems like it's lost on the modern era workers. I get that the mentality is that you probably feel like you need to throw everything at someone, including the kitchen sink, so as to get noticed... but EVERYONE is doing that right now. If you want to stand out & be different & get noticed, you should be doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Not doing another insanely dangerous apron bump. Look at the freakin' Question Mark in NWA. Who would have ever guessed that ridiculousness would get over? It's just over-the-top silly. Just like on RAW people are saying that the crazy R-Truth promo about eliminating Paul Heyman from the Rumble was the best part. Not another 20 minute match with twenty kickouts. NXT is also squarely in the working harder instead of smarter & quantity over quality camp. Every match feels like it's trying to appease Dave Meltzer & win some Wrestler of the Year award or some shit. It's just too much. They need more promos & character work & angles. That's why my favorite thing in recent memory that they have done was the Dakota Kai heel turn at War Games. People knew it was coming but they didn't see how it was coming & it played out really well. I still watch & enjoy MLW. I'm still a big Jacob Fatu fan but even MLW is bringing in acts that I don't like now. Injustice is pretty much the exact opposite of what I want. 150lb jobbers doing flips & everything looking fake & sloppy. Fatu Vs. L.A. Park in November of last year was fantastic & stuff like that is what I enjoy. It wasn't too long, didn't have too many false finishes. It also felt different from everything else on the show & was believable. Despite one dude being dressed like a skeleton & the other being managed by a dude that thinks he's a Sheik & throws fireballs. Right now, I feel like if you took bits & pieces from multiple promotions you could build-a-promotion to get to what I want from a full show. But I don't feel like any promotion provides me with everything that I want. I like the New Japan Big Match Feel of a main event. It feels like a sporting event. But I don't want that from every match, I just want that from the main event. I still love the production values of WWE, especially their video packages. But I hate their commentary & camera cuts & the crowds never feel alive anymore. I also want that newness feeling, with fans that feel engaged & into the actual show, like you get from AEW or even NXT UK. And the feeling like you're a part of something that not everyone else is, like I get with MLW & even NWA to an extent. I felt that during the Monday Night Wars when everyone else was talking about RAW Vs. Nitro & I was watching ECW. Wrestling feels more niche now than ever but it's also easier to follow than ever & there's so many options. I still watch big event WWE shows & NXT PPVs. I still watch NWA & MLW & NJPW. What I'm missing is can't-miss weekly episodic television. NXT doesn't give it to me, nor does AEW Dynamite, RAW or Smackdown. Like @SomethingSavage said, it all feels like filler, just trying to kill scheduled, mandated time to get to the next show. I just want professional wrestling to feel fun again & right now, it feels more like a chore to keep up with.

Damn, I knew absolutely nothing about this. That's terrible.

I'm actually in the other camp. I didn't even know that the show was happening & now I plan on watching it tonight.

They do on Twitter & Reddit, apparently. Because I've been reading it all damn day.

Yes, Tessa is just facing a barrage of jealously from all the other women speaking out not in her position. That's the ticket. It's really an ulterior motive because they're jealous of her... Impact wrestling intergender match against Sami fucking Callahan. Yeah... OK, Moose. Sure thing, buddy.

The things that have surprised me so far are the people that defend Tessa with one of the two following statements: 1. When did this happen? Why didn't anyone speak up then! 2. Tessa is dating/engaged to a person of color. She can't be racist! For the first one, it's been mentioned that the person targeted asked for it not to be shared/discussed for fear of being blackballed. It's coming out now in direct response to a tweet that Tessa just made. For the second, that has never been true. Especially in America. Seriously?

The Tessa Blanchard stuff should have its own thread, not be lost in the Impact thread. A lot of the people coming out against her aren't affiliated with Impact wrestling, such as Allysin Kay. I feel like it's going to be a big story.

I agree with the sentiment that The Dark Order gimmick is wrestlecrap material but I love their tag team finish. That might be my favorite tag finish since The Dudley Death Drop.

C.M. Punk's wrestling excursion into the world of MMA really exposed how little athletic ability the man has. That wasn't all age & an injured body. He genuinely came off like a guy that wouldn't be able to hit a baseball, catch a fly ball, etc. He looked like a deer in headlights. If anything, I think it proved that a lot of his success in the world of professional wrestling came from being a long-time fan growing up & being a fantastic promo. Even in the ring in wrestling he never came off as fluid. It never really looked natural. He was able to overcome that due to the bells & whistles of the entertainment parts of the industry. Compare Punk to Lesnar in MMA. Lesnar came off as a super athlete that lacked experience. Punk came off like Corey Haim in the movie Lucas trying to play football. Which, of course, Brock was a monster in NCAA wrestling & almost made the Minnesota Vikings as a walk-on, so that makes sense. Wasn't C.M. Punk's wrestling idol Roddy Piper? And I'm pretty sure Piper had a legit background in boxing. I feel like there's a reason that a lot of people in charge of discovering talent, such as Jim Ross in the past, are looking for people with more athletic backgrounds. There's a lot of wrestlers that have found success after football, in example. Hell, even Mark Henry, despite his size, could dunk a basketball. You can't teach that. I think Punk opened some eyes in that you can do wrestling without certain tools but you can't do MMA without those tools. I think that Punk's success in wrestling was the exception to the unwritten rule of athleticism. His failure at mixed martial arts, regardless of what people say about him being courageous for trying it, took all of the impact out of his tough guy words. Wrestling fans, I feel, would welcome him back with open arms, but I think that's more about the state of American wrestling more than the talents of C.M. Punk. There's not a lot of genuine surprises in wrestling anymore & for a long time, the surprises were the best part. Punk returning to WWE or showing up in AEW or whatever would have been a genuinely big moment. Instead he shows up on a show that no one watches & falls into obscurity as his attempts at being a pipe bomb dropper, or whatever, fall on deaf ears now. Punk is a success story despite his MMA adventure. Made his money, married a beautiful woman & now gets to do things that he enjoys without having to worry too much about the daily stress of monthly bills. I can't hate on him for that. He's definitely a man that succeeded despite all the odds being against him. But when he's trying to come off as the snarky, asshole prick on social media or whatever, people can just look at him getting his ass whipped & ignore him. If we're talking Marquess of Queensberry, I'm pretty sure I'd take Miz over Punk.

WTF, does Necro Butcher have AIDS? What happened to him? Meth?

To be 100% honest, I don't think there is really anything. Watch the newest episode of Powerrr & they'll recap whatever you need to see, usually multiple times, including during the pre-show countdown. I would check out the PPV if you missed it though. But really, they're doing the whole Nick Aldis stable thing, Marty Scurll is waiting-in-the-weeds somewhere, they're doing the TV Title tournament in nothing 6-minute or less matches, while using a lot of The Question Mark because he's ironically over with the studio audience. That's all that's happened in the last month+ Oh and the women stuff with Melina but I don't know if anyone cares about that. Stuff I would recommend to check out though, would be any of the Tim Storm promos.

Helluva main event. I still don't like making it a two-day thing, but the main event of both shows definitely delivered.