Jimmy Redman

He also beat Cena clean at TLC to unify the titles. And won the Bryan feud. Orton is being portrayed as a weak champion right now - most of the time - but thats because he's supposed to be a weak paper champion, he's a heel. Bryan is a supposed top babyface who can't get a major win over anybody. And Orton doesn't need to be "pushed well" because he's already been established as a top guy for years. Bryan is on the cusp, it's their job to push him to get him over it.

He won at Survivor Series. Sept: He won via "fast count." Oct: No contest/screwjob Nov: Won the tag match against the Wyatts Dec: Lost a three on one handicap match Jan: Lost to Wyatt. Again, ignoring the fact he's won stuff multiple gauntlet matches and those PPV loses are pretty much the only pinfall losses he's had since Summerslam. I forgot about Survivor Series. But still you're not really disproving my point. I'm not saying Bryan has been losing matches, but rather that he's not winning them. Bryan hasn't won on PPV since Summerslam, apart from the NoC bullshit and the tag match with Punk. Even on TV, what major matches has he won? Orton got DQ'd in their match. The Usos won the cage match. The finish of the Wyatts gauntlet was a DQ. You have to go back to the 11 vs 3 Shield match to find a significant Bryan pinfall victory. That is September. And not everyone gets treated the same way. Look at Sheamus in 2012. When they decided he was going to be The Guy on Smackdown, he won the world title and kept winning matches over and over. I don't think he lost a match between Mania and HIAC. Whenever they push Orton as a face, he wins and wins all the time. Cena. And obviously there are differences between them, and you can't book Bryan as unstoppable when he's a rebellious underdog and I'm not suggesting you do. What I'm saying is that WWE likes it's top babyfaces to win matches. If they really were getting behind Bryan at that level, they'd have him win matches. They wouldn't use him to get the Wyatts over and have him be pinned clean by a heel on PPV in the blow off. They'd use the Wyatts (or anyone else) to keep him busy before Mania season and give Bryan the big win in the end to maintain his momentum going into the supposed big push. But Bray Wyatt was more important to them. If they were going all the way with him getting his back against the Authority, he'd win the Rumble and win the title at Mania, or beat Hunter at Mania or something along those lines. But Batista is more important to them. CM Punk is even more important to them. And Bryan will be 5th down on the Mania card. That isn't WWE getting behind a guy to the best of their ability. That's WWE ultimately deciding that other people are more important.

In calling the last few months a "sustained push" for Bryan are we basing this purely on TV time and main events and ignoring actual...booking? Because yes, Bryan has been featured a lot. He's had a lot of main events and show closing angles. He gets a lot of time for matches. Absolutely. On the other hand, he has also been perennially screwed out of the WWE Title, browbeaten as a guy who is not supposed to be a main event guy, and moved into a Wyatts feud with mini-heel turn that was designed to get Bray over enough to face a real star. Bryan fought the Authority for months and continually failed. He lost to Bray on PPV clean as a sheet. In fact has Bryan won a single match on PPV since Summerslam (aside from the NoC fast count)? Having a guy be constantly beaten down with no redemption is not a sustained push for a top babyface in WWE. And I'm not one of the hysterical "Bryan is buried" people, by any means. But acting like WWE is too clever by half and have somehow orchestrated the entire thing from the beginning is, I think, giving them a bit too much credit. At the same time, if they are finally listening to the fans and planning on giving Bryan a big win in the near future, then good on them for actually having the sense to do that.

I think Dave's coverage of this is an interesting example in the wake of the "Where do Dave's sympathies lie?" conversation we had a couple weeks ago. Try and imagine if this was like 1996 and something like this was happening. I imagine his talking points would be a little different. I mean to be fair, there are other posts of his on the board where he says if he was Vince he'd push Bryan to the moon and they're missing an opportunity. But those lines are drowned out by all of the rhetoric on Bryan not moving the needle and etc.

I think you answered your own statement there: Sami hasn't really had a chance to have his best match yet. He's still in developmental for heaven's sake. Televised development, sure, but still development. I mean you said it yourself, Daniel Bryan, a guy who was the 'best wrestler in the world' for a while beforehand, took until 2012 to start reaching his potential in the ring in WWE, which coincidentally is when he started to work main events. In WWE for the most part you need opportunities and time in order to deliver on a high end level, at least much moreso than the indies where guys have the freedom to routinely go above and beyond on the undercard.

That is a world-record level backflip from "Bryan just doesn't move the needle so forget it guys" Dave less than 24 hours ago.

He can correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean that Dylan's point was to parody and possibly mock the post that NL made in the Rey thread about a single instance of boos affecting his legacy.

And I think everyone is missing Dylan's point.

Yeah, in this particular case the booing had little to do with Rey. Practically anyone on earth in that spot was going to die a death. I'm just making the point that Rey has been booed before. This is current era WWE, seemingly all the faces get booed at some stage. And no, it shouldn't be held against him as an all-time babyface worker.

Well since Goldust is a terrific babyface, and Cody doesn't seem to have much natural charisma to be a singles face going forward, Cody turning on him makes the most sense if they're doing the split.

Rey has been booed quite a few times before. Maybe not that badly, but it has definitely happened. Off the top of my head: - At MITB 2011 in the Raw ladder match he was booed whenever he went anywhere near the briefcase. - vs Dolph at Summerslam 2009 the crowd cheered Dolph over him, way before Dolph became the smark cause du jour. And there are definitely other times in the last few years that I just can't think of right now. Maybe in a previous Rumble or something like that. To be honest I think (like a lot of the booing of people lately) that it is just a case of people being tired of the same old thing. Rey's issue is that he can never turn heel or really freshen up his character in any way. He's always going to be babyface Rey having Rey matches, and I think a lot of people don't really need to see another Rey match at this point. I'm not talking personally, I love the shit out of Rey and will do so until the end of time most probably, but the crowds clearly don't care much about him anymore, and anecdotally the people I know think of him as "old". He is prone to some backlash whenever they put him in a featured position these days. He's just not a guy people want to see all over TV or taking the spot of someone newer. MITB 2011 is a good example of that. It's not that anyone hated Rey, it's just that they REALLY didn't want him to win MITB and have another title run (ironic since he ended up winning the title immediately afterwards).

Blehschmidt's signature GIF reminds me of Punk doing that spot in the Rumble with An Uso, which I enjoyed tremendously and I assume he did as well.

When he reached 6'4".

Who gives a shit about what Mick's son has to say? Are you the same guy who tackled a door at CHIKARA's last show? People bitch and moan and bitch and moan and bitch and moan. Fucking stop watching it if you really care so much. This isn't a case of "don't like it, don't watch it" either. They live and die by ratings and merchandise. Both of those go down, they start panicking and start experimenting and possibly push Bryan. So sick of fans complaining about the direction and continuing to watch it. Stop watching RAW, buy more Bryan t-shirts and fake beards. That's what got Punk over his hump. The reason he's so protected now is because he pushes t-shirts. Of course, wrestling fans are creatures of routine and can't even resist not sitting down Monday night or Tuesday morning for the DVR users for more than a week. Vote with your dollars, people. Or maybe they're right and if every single whiner stopped watching, it wouldn't affect the bottom line. The problem is that if people actually do try to speak with their wallet and boycott the show or whatever, WWE will never give them what they want in a million years because "they're not spending money on the product or watching the shows, why should we book for them??" Then they'll get told "you can't criticise the show if you don't watch it", and we'll have come full circle. There's no real good answer to this particular problem except, as you say, if Bryan's merch suddenly went through the roof overnight. Merch seems to be the only thing that is remotely in the hands of fans wanting to support a particular wrestler these days. Ratings largely follow pre-established patterns. Buyrates are sinking and PPV promotion is terrible. And soon it will all be obsolete once the Network kicks in.

Spanner in the works is slang for a problem. (Spanner is British/Australian for wrench) He is a top guy. He headlined 4 PPVs last year and was in the final segment on many RAWs, including two weeks ago. He's not surpassing Cena - nobody is. So if that's what you're looking for, it's going to be a disappointment, but that's a narrow way of looking at things. I wish people would just relax about Daniel Bryan and enjoy the fact that we're going to get years of great stuff out of him and WWE as long as he stays healthy. He's a made guy now. In a company that struggles to create headliners and is forced to produce a ton of content, he's a guy they know they can rely on. He's going to win the WWE title at some point, he's going to headline more PPVs, he's going to have lots of great matches on PPV and TV. People should be so excited about the next 5 years of Daniel Bryan/WWE collaboration instead of freaking out if he doesn't win the title at a specific PPV. I see him filling a similar role to 2002-2010 HBK. That's a good spot. Speaking for myself, my problem with Bryan being shunted aside isn't that I'm worried for his long term future with the company. I know he'll be there for years and always be able to get himself over and have great matches. That's great, but we're talking about now, about this particular storyline and period of TV. As a fan, watching the shows, Bryan not having a major role now and getting his redemption, after all he went through since Summerslam, makes no sense. It means everything we've been watching has been for nought. That's just bad storytelling. It's all well and good to say don't worry, he'll be their go-to guy for the next decade, but promises for the future are cold comfort when what I'm watching right now is unfulfilling. Think of the guy who said he's never been this depressed about wrestling. It's just not fun when something like this happens, and watching wrestling is supposed to be fun.

You know, Undertaker coming in at #30 may be the only thing that would stave off the "Where the f*ck is Bryan?!" backlash if he's not in the match by then.

I don't think this is any great fault of Meltzer's. There's nothing that says the proper way to watch and rate a match is multiple viewings with an analytical eye. Judging a match by what you thought when you watched it live is a perfectly valid way to do it. Plus Dave as we all know is really big on judging things solely in context and not trying to re-watch or re-rate matches after the fact.

Survivor Series was a worse show than Battleground. Nothing on it was in the same universe as the Rhodes tag, and the main event was God awful.

After her SD GM run, she came back in late 2005 as a heel for a short run. She'd only been on TV sporadically until last summer, but she'd generally be a heel.

I prefer GAB to the Clash.

You would think so, but I swear to God. The match was on Smackdown 27/2/09. When my WO sub goes through in the next 24 hours I can dig out the actual review. But the gist of it was that "Cena looked first-day-of-wrestling-school bad and Big Show couldn't carry him." Now, I'd understand if Cena had looked particularly sloppy or uncoordinated during the match. But he didn't. I could understand if he was blowing off offense or doing something else egregiously bad psychologically. But he wasn't. The entire structure of the match was "Show hits Cena, Cena sells, Show hits him some more, Cena sells some more." That's literally it, it was one of those matches you have to watch in a bubble because Show is treated like the most impervious monster on earth and it works perfectly if you ignore all the other times where he isn't. It was a lot like Show vs Sheamus from HIAC (and for what it's worth Dave didn't like that match either until they started kicking out of finishers). The only thing Cena did in the match was sell. A lot, and often, and well. In the absence of literally anything else I can possibly think of on Cena's end that would give Dave the impression that he was THAT bad, I can only assume that Dave was mad because Cena was laying around so much. For the Big Show. And I get that it was kind of inconsistent with WWE canon, but Jesus.

No, Warrior was the guy they announce early to fuel ticket sales. Yeah, the rest of the class won't be announced until after Elimination Chamber most likely, then they start going one a week during the hard sell.

I feel like she got humiliated a lot between 00 and 02. Did it happen much after that? So she changed around the same time that Hunter suddenly forgot how to show ass and sell as a heel? Interesting.

I've already mentioned Hogan/Andre. Cena/Umaga he only gave ****, which I found ridiculous just when you compare it to all of the WWE main events he has rated higher than that. Actually, it wasn't rated, but I remember Dave beat the crap out of the really awesome Cena/Show Smackdown match from 27/2/09, called it (well Cena) "first day of wrestling school bad" and I was left wondering how a guy who hates selling could become such an opinion former on pro wrestling.

In that case, I'd still assume he'll be in it and they're just hoping not putting him next to the Rumble will make for a better surprise when he comes out. Plus wanting to focus on the Bray blow-off, and him saying "..and then I'm going on to win the Royal Rumble!" distracts from the issue. I've never been convinced that he'd win it, but I can't see him not being in it at all, unless the Authority had outright banned him or something. I think they just wanted to keep him away from it and focused on his grudge match.