NintendoLogic

It depends on the team. If I'm not mistaken, the Freebirds were inducted largely as a way of getting Terry Gordy in through the back door.

In the case of KENTA, there's also the fact that his real name (Kenta Kobayashi) bears a strong resemblance to that of Kenta Kobashi.

The issue isn't really Cena's selling during the match. It's in the days afterward. When he suffers a big loss, he usually shows up on Raw the next night and laughs it off. I guess the idea is to keep him from coming across as a sore loser, but it's hard enough to get people to care about wins and losses without one of the few guys who's protected in that regard treating losing like it's no big deal. That's outside the scope of his working ability, but I think it's an example of how the insufferability of his character often overshadows his merits as a worker.

Yeah, post-neck injury Austin's matches were filled with punches and kicks with little or no mat wrestling and lots of blood and international objects. How is that not brawling? I think he's unquestionably more of a brawler than Finlay. Also, put me down as a big fan of the SS98 Austin/Taker match. Austin spent the bulk of the match working from underneath, and I really liked his Misawa-esque drawn-out comeback.

Ideally, you want to draw in casuals and present a show that turns them into the base. Basing the biggest shows around part-time guys just sends the message that the everyday talent isn't worth watching.

Don't forget the 6/3/94 of pole matches.

A big part of that was how he was booked. UFC isn't popular in most of the countries where WWE runs PPV, so Brock the UFC guy means nothing to them. His only value there was as an unstoppable monster, which went out the window when he lost his first match back. I think that's the best explanation for the Summerslam 2012 buyrate. If you remember, buys were way up from the previous year in the US but way down internationally.

I can see how someone can view things like this. What I can't see is how someone can view things like this while simultaneously ranking Kurt Angle top 20 all time. Pretty much anything you can ding Shawn for, Angle is far worse.

Wrestling would really be improved these days if more matches had powder in them.

Haven't Atlanta crowds been dead for years?

Savio Vega? Takao Omori? Yoshinari Ogawa?

Yeah, let's copy the promotional strategy that nearly put New Japan out of business.

All I know about this guy is that I voted against him in DVDVR's March Madness tournament a few years ago without watching a single one of his matches. I have lucharesu filed in the "DO NOT WATCH UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" compartment of my brain.

I decided to list everybody off the top of my head who who was more likely than not to finish in the top half of my ballot and came up with 34 names. Aja Kong Akira Taue Barry Windham Billy Robinson Bret Hart Bryan Danielson Chris Benoit Devil Masami Eddy Guerrero El Dandy El Hijo del Santo Genichiro Tenryu Jerry Lawler Jumbo Tsuruta Jun Akiyama Jushin Liger Kenta Kobashi Mitsuharu Misawa Negro Casas Nick Bockwinkel Rey Mysterio Ric Flair Ricky Steamboat Riki Choshu Satanico Shawn Michaels Shinya Hashimoto Stan Hansen Steve Austin Tatsumi Fujinami Terry Funk Toshiaki Kawada Vader Volk Han

They actually had a guy doing a Gestapo gimmick? How the hell did they get away with that in Florida of all places? Setting that aside, you really need to watch that Jumbo match like right now. It's awesome.

I always figured Martel got that from Buddy Rose.

They're not, at least at house shows. Take Brie Bella. She gets no reaction on TV unless she's doing the Yes chant, but she's over huge at house shows. It seems that Raw, especially in places like Chicago and Brooklyn, provides a skewed perception of the WWE fanbase.

A knock in what respect? Matysik ranked Bruno as the fifth-greatest wrestler of all time in his book, so he couldn't have been too hard on him.

The thing about Cena is that to a large extent, he's a system quarterback. He works within the confines of the WWE formula, which is virtually idiot-proof. I complain all the time about how it handcuffs guys, but it also makes it so that pretty much any decently talented wrestler can consistently have good matches and even oxygen thieves like Miz are usually watchable. I'm not saying that he's entirely the product of a formula or road agents laying things out for him, but I do think he benefits to a degree from resume inflation.

I find Sekimoto overall to be a dull meathead, but I did really enjoy the match where he tagged with Okabayashi against Akebono and Hama on 1/3/12.

I consider Miz's match with Daniel Bryan at Night of Champions to be his best. I thought the Lawler/Miz matches were worked well, but they weren't worked smart. Having the world champion be so thoroughly outclassed by a part-timer twice his age did even more damage to the title than putting it on Miz in the first place. If they were going to go that far in making Miz look like a weak and undeserving champion, they should've given Lawler a cup of coffee run with the belt for a feel-good moment.

I can't wait for him to come out with a tune denouncing Obama for giving away the Panama Canal.

Someone seriously nominated him?

I'm sure Japanese fans also found Fukuzawa's gratuitous English grating. "ON THE FLOOR~!"

Shamrock and Lashley having no prayer of getting in would seem to undercut the argument that HOF voters are a bunch of legitimacy marks.