Jimmy Redman

At this point I feel Bryan vs Punk halfway down the card is the most likely scenario for him. Cena will face Hunter or Orton. Brock vs Taker. Vomit, but there you go.

The quick answer is that most "smarks" think that if you are not a supermodel, that somehow means you must be a good worker. And vice versa. The amount of people I've seen who think Tamina is good solely for the above reason makes my head hurt.

Heh. Still think Bryan wins though cause he doesn't have a lot of competition this year. I don't think Okada or Tanahashi are really up there this year. Punk fell off. John Cena missed some time. If you could vote for The Shield as one unit, maybe! Oops. For the people who feel like they can't vote for Bryan now because they killed his main event run, in the HOF thread the argument was made many times that comparing a potential candidate to "the worst guy in" wasn't really the right way to go about things, and I agree in that context, but at the same time, look at Chris Jericho winning WOTY for 2008 and 2009. Where is the drawing power? He main evented Raw for a couple months in 2008 (less than 3 months of the voting period actually), and may have drawn one number (No Mercy, which also had a Jeff Hardy title shot). And in 2009 he was upper midcard working the Legends angle and then IC and Tag Title feuds on Smackdown all year. I don't think you can make a single argument for him drawing in 2009. In both years, people voted for him because of his work, because he was cutting great promos and having great matches while feeling like a big star on the show. I'm sure there are other examples too. What the hell did Kurt Angle draw whenever he won it? Did Flair not win a WOTY after WCW started to tank business-wise? I realise the suggestion of willfully ignoring drawing power is getting away from the spirit of the award since it's part of the criteria, but what happens when you have no viable candidate who ticks all of the boxes? Lately the trend seems to be going toward throwing out everything else and just judging by drawing power, by floating guys like Rock as candidates (which to me is absurd). I mean, especially in this day and age where it is harder and harder to both find drawcards, and ascertain whether someone is a draw or not, the emphasis on drawing power over performance seems limiting. They're supposed to be equal parts of the criteria. To me, in 2013, Bryan is a completely viable candidate. He's been one of the best workers of matches this year, at bare minimum. He's also done a lot of great work out of the ring, between the comedy and then being anti-Authority Bryan. He got himself so ridiculously over they were basically forced to push someone they didn't want to push (with the obvious result, of course), and for a long time has been the most over guy on the roster. He main evented Summerslam, beat Cena clean, and has been a main event guy since then. He sort of has everything EXCEPT drawing power, which in this case is probably the thing he has the least control over. I'll have him somewhere in my three for sure. I wouldn't be arguing this if we had evidence of top guys being really strong drawcards all over the place and business was better. But we don't. We're left with what we have, Tana, Okada, and then a bunch of people who either draw and don't work, or work and don't draw. In that situation I have zero qualms about going for work over drawing.

I actually took it as an indication of how the awful Hunter feud killed Brock as a draw card.

Summerslam wasn't good, no, but the point is, how can you blame Bryan for that? It was his first proper main event and they spent the build telling people that he didn't belong there. I'm not even complaining about the last part, because it was all part of the story being told where the company didn't believe in him and he was going to prove them wrong (until he didn't, but thats the other issue). But I mean, you can't start a story like that and then bail when the number a guy drew based on the fans being told he wasn't a big star isn't good. No kidding, you're the ones that booked him like that. Sure, if the numbers are still down when the story is finished and Bryan has been established as a legit player, then yes, that is a problem and maybe he isn't a draw. But they never got that far so they'll never know.

I think more than singling out any one person (Vince) or any one thing ("soap opera writers~!" usually), the actual answer is going to be a combination of everything. There's no one factor at fault and no one solution. Vince is a problem. He does come off as an insane old man losing his grip, and his constant changing of minds and weird foibles make it impossible to book logically. Hunter and Steph are problems because they seem to have inherited some of Vince's narrow mindedness and pettyness in terms of how to book and make stars. Hunter is his own problem because of his ego and inability to book himself objectively. The Creative Team is a problem because there are a million of them and are probably all tripping over each other. Some of them don't come from a wrestling background and wouldn't understand certain things. Some of them do come from a wrestling background but are still incompetent. All of them are trying to write stuff to please Vince and not write the best story possible. The WWE Corporate mentality is a problem because it sanitises and homogenises the product so much that nothing is allowed to get over organically, because they seemingly don't want anyone getting over above their station. The structure of the product is a problem, they have what feels like 57 hours of TV to fill every week and this has resulted in everyone wrestling and losing to everyone else a million times already, and things will seemingly only get worse with the Network coming. And so on and so on and so on. The sad thing is that I can't see any way in which things get fixed, in an overall sense. Even if you eliminate one problem (Vince dies, for one morbid example, since that is the only way he'll go) you still have the other 75 problems that remain. It seems impossible that things would be able to change in WWE so completely as to constitute a total overhaul of their business and strategy, which is what would need to happen. So at this point, for me, and I am someone who still watches religiously every week and enjoys a LOT of WWE, for me when you're looking at the overall state of the company, you just have to accept that it is what it is, and enjoy the good bits while you can, because they won't be able to last in that environment. But at the same time, when you look at positives like the first six months of the Shield, the initial Bryan angle, Rhodes Bros, Hall of Pain Henry, whatever, I mean...when they do get it right, they can get it really right. To me that is worth it enough.

I feel like the tipping point was around Battleground. Maybe the high water mark was the Rhodes Bros winning the tag titles. There's no uniform cut off of course, but I feel generally before that point, everything had a sense of direction and a purpose, and everything that on paper looked bad (long Hunter and Steph segments, them burying everything in promos, Big Show crying, screwing Bryan, etc.) was actually good and came off well in execution. I mean, I was THE most sick of Hunter and McMahons I could possibly have been before Summerslam, and if you had told me that we'd have months of Hunter and Steph being insufferable heels cutting neverending burying promos, and I would love the shit out of it, I'd have prbably had you committed. But it happened, and I loved the shit out of it. I thought Hunter and Steph were both great in their roles for those couple months, and the angle felt interesting and like it had a point on a weekly basis. Then on the other side, things started to slip off. Bryan lost a fourth straight screwjob and they stopped protecting him from that, or maybe it was just too much bullshit in such a short space of time for anyone to overcome. The Shield stopped being hired guns and just...went back to being the Shield. Show was fired and brought back and the lawsuit shit happened. Hunter and Steph's promos lost their direction and are now samey. They are also feuding with Orton for no discernible reason. Orton is bad in his role and being killed by the writing. The auxiliary babyfaces that were helping in the big fight - Usos, Rhodes Bros, Dolph, PTP, etc. - have all stopped caring and gone back to the midcard. Nothing below the Orton/Show feud is connected to the Authority angle anymore. Now it's just every other 'Heel GM backs Heel Champ against Babyface Challenger' feud ever. Except they're not even backing their horse properly. And now they're hotshotting the title unification, which has nothing to do with anything. It really feels like, for all intents, the Authority angle is over. It doesn't really matter anymore. Even if Vince were to make his big return (?), it doesn't really feel expected or needed, because the angle has stalled that much. It would feel weird now, even though I'm sure that is what will happen in the near future. But it's just the usual McMahon family farce now, which is ahame because for a while there, it really wasn't and I was enjoying it immensely on a weekly basis. But alas.

I agree with NL about the extent to which people are avoiding saying "other wrestlers think he's really great". They clearly do, they pretty much all blow the guy. The legit connection is absolutely there, but it's also simply that they like different things in their wrestling compared to most of us and they just really rate the guy. This isn't exactly a secret, or an indictment of anyone, so I don't know why it can't be just stated and accepted. You can even go back to the Meltzer quote (he's said it at least once on the Board so I could dig it up if need be) about how half a dozen of the absolute top guys in the business have told him Angle is the best guy they've ever worked. I think two of them being Jarrett and Austin was implied. Lots of wrestlers think Angle is a great wrestler. That doesn't mean they're right or we have to agree, but they do.

Think about how absurd it would be if Nikki was a guy, and Bryan thought that a guy jacking off a lot on the road meant they were headed for a life in porn. How can he be married knowing this little about women?

As for the points you made in the last paragraph, I don't think any of those things are that strange. Firstly, Smackdown 27/2/09 is the Cena/Show match you're looking for. But even accepting the premise of Khali > Show when it comes to Cena, it's really not that weird since there are always guys who don't have much chemistry with each other or never put it all together. Even though I like their aforementioned best match a lot I would put Cena and Show in that category. Ironically I think it's because Cena sells too much for him. It's normally a good thing, and can be a good thing when done right, but sometimes he's laying dead from the first move which looks silly relative to how others sell for him, and it kills the match dead to never recover. When I saw them at a house show it was like that. On the other hand, Khali was much more of a freakshow so a cartoon style match was more effective. Also, Umaga was the dog's bollocks in that period. One of the very best in the company. He was miles and miles better than Ryback has ever been or Barrett was in 2010. Sheamus is great in the ring now as a babyface, but was decidedly average as a heel when Cena worked with him. Of course Cena and Umaga at their peaks had better matches than with those guys at those times. Miz is also mediocre in the ring. Very few have been able to get anything special out of him, and the huge stage he was put on only made that worse. Cena and Miz have had some good TV matches at other times. The broken ring match with Alberto was awesome and they've had some real good TV matches as well. The recent matches are meh, but Cena is hurt and Alberto is dead in the water. I think it's easy to cherry pick the worst of now vs the best of 2007 and make an unfavourable comparison. You can do it the other way too. I agree Cena was more consistent back then, but I mean of course he was, that was his career peak in the ring. I don't think that has to mean anything negative about what he's done since then. He still has MOTYCs for WWE every year, and I'd find it hard to put him out of a, say, Top 10 for WWE for any year either. For what it's worth, I loved the first Rock match, and I thought Kane at the Rumble, non-finish aside, was one of the best Kane singles matches I can think of.

Having watched some stuff for the anniversary of his death, I could not disagree more. He was other-wordly in 2005, and not far off at any other point.

Did they ever do a big Batista v. Orton match on PPV? They probably did, but I can't recall it. That would have been a natural major feud for them, and that I've followed WWE the entire time both were at their peaks and can't remember tells me they dropped the ball on that They did, at Armageddon 2008. So not "big", but they did do it. Off the back of a Team Orton vs Team Dave match at Survivor Series. That is literally the only thing I remember about their supposed feud. Couldn't even tell you who won the match. Maybe Orton since he got the Rumble push with the punting Vince angle. But I really have no idea. EDIT: Batista may have been injuring during or after this. He missed WM25 didn't he? Yes I think Orton took him out in storyline, some big beatdown. They did it in the Summer of 2009 briefly after Orton's feud with HHH was over. Batista actually beat him for the belt in a cage match that went about 9 minutes. Dave gave the title up the next night because he was hurt. I can't recall if he was hurt going into that match and they *still* did the title change or not. I thought that was the story. Ahh, yes. So the timeline is, Orton vs Dave in late 2008, Dave gets injured in about December. Dave comes back post-Mania to be the third man in the Legacy vs McMahons WWE Title 6-man at Backlash 2009. Orton vs Dave at Judgment Day, then the cage match at Extreme Rules which Dave wins (yes, I think he was already injured, they just didn't want to beat him again for whatever stupid reason). Orton gets the title back the next night, Dave is out injured again. Dave comes back a couple months later on a random Raw, gets some revenge win on Orton, and then immediately leaves for SD. Dave teams with Rey vs Jerishow, then turns heel on Rey, etc. etc.

Did they ever do a big Batista v. Orton match on PPV? They probably did, but I can't recall it. That would have been a natural major feud for them, and that I've followed WWE the entire time both were at their peaks and can't remember tells me they dropped the ball on that They did, at Armageddon 2008. So not "big", but they did do it. Off the back of a Team Orton vs Team Dave match at Survivor Series. That is literally the only thing I remember about their supposed feud. Couldn't even tell you who won the match. Maybe Orton since he got the Rumble push with the punting Vince angle. But I really have no idea. EDIT: Batista may have been injuring during or after this. He missed WM25 didn't he? Yes I think Orton took him out in storyline, some big beatdown.

Yes, that. Orton went from Babyface Viper Randy to Heel Corporate Champion Randy and literally didn't change a single thing about himself. People always complain "oh he went from face/heel to heel/face and changed everything about him!", but I mean to a certain extent you have to, you need to have defined roles. Orton at least figured out how to wrestle matches as a face even with his basically heel character and mannerisms. Now that he's back as a heel, he's a heel who fights with the other heels and pops the crowd with all his crowd-pleasing moves. He isn't really acting much differently so there's not much impetus to boo him, and people wont boo him for busting out the DDT or RKO either.

One thing I noticed more than once during the show was the times when they showed the floor section on the hard cam side, most of them were just sitting there visibly not giving a shit. And this was for things like Nattie going over to celebrate with them and the Orton/Show crowd brawling. Not the most exciting things in the world, I grant you, but still they were both designed to have people going nuts in the background, so the zero fucks being given was pretty hilarious.

The thing is, they are completely delusional if they think Cena/Orton will draw. It was killed as a feud in 2009, and every time they have teased it since it has been met with deafening, embarrassing silence. Even with the title unification attached, which is what I assume you mean, I don't see it drumming up much interest. You could find a more compelling title unification by putting either guy against almost any other star. They just have nothing together.

Ok you talked me into seeing your point. I wish there was a way on this board to like or rep your post, because this may be the first time anyone has ever admitted this in the history of the internet. My hat to you sir. So, Survivor Series. What the shit was that show? I'm surprised at the overwhelming praise for the opener, because for the guys involved and my expectations going in, I found it disappointing on the whole. Good start, and good finish, but it dragged to a halt in the middle when they inexplicably gave the babyfaces a 5 vs 2 advantage that they murdered like fools.

In this particular case though (Orton/Cena/HHH), it wasn't a main event either in placement or importance. Edge/Taker went on last. Money/Show was bigger. Shawn/Flair was more important. Like I said, it may have been lateral to Edge/Taker in importance at absolute best, but they chose put the other match on last. If you're getting into the fourth from the top match as a "main event", you're rendering the term pretty worthless at that point. To get back to the original point, I don't think even Orton would consider his WM24 match as main eventing Wrestlemania. It was a pretty well pushed match with the top Raw stars in it, it was for the Raw title, and hell he probably did get paid well for it, but all that isn't the same thing. And Orton actually HAS main evented Mania anyway, with Hunter at WM25, so I'm not sure why WM24 would even come into it when a legitimate example is right there.

Umm seriously? Yes? The main event is the main event. The last match on the card. This is pretty universal EXCEPT in cases like the old 'before intermission' Hogan main event, or a MITB cash in coming after the main event, or a 'double main event' card, or SNME cards, those kinds of examples where the match that is built and sold and named as the main event doesn't go on last. But a main event isn't suddenly not a main event because there are other matches on the card that have bigger stars or turned out better or stole the show from the actual main event. Jericho vs Hunter was the main event of WM18. Rock vs Hogan was the bigger match with more star power in it, and it also turned out to be the more heated and better match. That still doesn't magically make it the main event, because it wasn't. Cena vs Orton vs Hunter at WM24 wasn't the main event. Edge vs Taker was. Even if you possibly want to argue that a match on that undercard was more important than Edge/Taker was, then that match is Floyd/Show. And then Shawn/Flair. Orton's match on that card was third from the top in terms of importance, at best, and in no way was the main event. This is partly an issue with current-day WWE marketing style, because they often try to call three or four matches on the card "main events". But unless you want to actually buy into that and any match given the "one of the main events!" tag is a main event, I don't see why main event should be such a nebulous term.

Just because a match is bigger than or has more heat than the match that goes on last doesn't make it the main event. The last match is the main event. It being the main event doesn't say anything to its quality.

I don't remember the details off-hand, but it was when Helms had just gone from being The Hurricane to Gregory Helms. He either called out the announcers for being mean to him on commentary, or had an interview with Lawler that went south, and so they ended up feuding and making the match. It had build, it's just that nobody gave the slightest shit about it. Helms was dead in the water as not Hurricane. EDIT: From Wiki:

Yeah I'm not really getting the idea of Tanahashi as some master of structure because he has main events that go opening exchanges-body part middle third-bomb throwing stretch. Like, all main events go like that. That's just getting things right on the most basic level. When he has middle thirds that usually cause me to drift off in boredom, I'm not sure that is a great example of an effective structure. And, as has already been pointed out, let alone actually doing anything with it.

Basically this. I doubt there would be nearly as much "backlash" to him if he weren't pimped all over the joint as being this amazing, best of all time worker having the greatest matches of all time. Saying things like that leads people to react because they have something to latch onto and disagree with. Me being one of them. I've said it numerous times but I don't have that much of a problem with Tanahashi. I think he's fine and is capable of having a great match. And if nobody was talking him up to ridiculous levels, I'd probably be content to say something like that and be done with it. But it's when you see people giving him such outlandish praise that you can't possibly agree with, it makes you examine him in greater detail to a) try and see what the fuss is about, and point out his flaws to explain why he isn't the greatest wrestler of all time. And then you end up as a "hater" because you're focusing on the negatives.

I'm in the same boat as Raging Noodles, after his anniversary I started watching a lot of Eddie matches, since I hadn't really in a while. If someone had made the thread I would have participated the shit out of it. He is probably old news at this point, but a lot of it is still new to me because I haven't seen too much of his 90s work.

The difference in quality between the JBL of 2006-07 and the JBL of today is just staggering. After that first run people were talking about him as one of the best colour guys of all time, and with good reason. He added a tremendous amount to Smackdown in that period, especially the acts they were pushing at the time like MVP, Londrick, Kennedy, Matt Hardy, Finlay, and when he buried the shit stuff he was hilarious and not annoying. Nowadays, he's excruciating. Whether it shows that nobody can sound good the way the announcing is set up now, or whether its JBL who doesn't give a shit anymore, or both, I don't know.