Migs

From the Observer site - "The NWA has announced that Jordan Clearwater, Crimson, and Slice Boogie will be part of their return on March 21 on the Back to Attack pay-per-view on FITE TV." I wasn't going to give them money, but now that I know Jordan Clearwater AND Slice Boogie will be there?

I'll never pass judgment on another person's growth. If he's dealing with his issues, great. (I also won't pass judgment on whether he actually committed crimes.) But I still never want to see that dude tell someone to touch his dick on my TV ever again.

I would like to be sent VHS tapes of matches in a package with my 'zines.

Michaels-Mankind from IYH I think was underrated for a long time because of the messy finish, although now I think it's rightly recognized as a classic.

They've been toying with his alignment for a while. I could see him winning this and wrestling Darby again as the catalyst for the turn, but we'll see.

He only drinks Canadian Club.

JR on the Ethan Page entrance, paraphrased: "Tell us more about this man I definitely have never seen before, Excalibur, ya nerd."

It got me thinking about him at the LA Park stage of his career 15 years from now, I bet he'll be great.

Ethan Page and Andrew Cuomo are both well known people, one more than the other.

I was excited for this match and then I quickly realized that I did not need a major Matt Hardy singles match. Other than that, don't get the hate. Tag title match was great, battle royal had a terrific finish, women's match was really good, and the Miro tag was creatively structured and not long.

I'm guessing Dalton resigned then. On the one hand, I feel bad for him, as it felt like he had so much steam a couple of years ago that was lost; but hopefully they gave him some solid money for the very reasonable ROH schedule. I really have no interest in seeing Lethal on top again, but you're right that Rush just doesn't work as their champ for me. Just feels like a roster of mid carders at this point.

This is apparently happening and I am quite excited.

Easily the best Cup show so far, three really good matches with Okada-Shingo being predictably excellent.

Right. Powerrr is kind of a cult thing, and what better way to monetize a cult favorite than to sell access to it? No clue if there's enough people to make this viable for Corgan, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

I really fucking hope you're right. That would rule very hard.

All the NJ guys who'd be a big deal are tied up with the NJ Cup. Would Mick Foley work?

The paywall thing seems ridiculous at first glance, but I also don't think its the worst idea to try and monetize the people who are super fans. It wasn't like Powerrr was convincing that many people to buy tickets or see a PPV. Maybe better to squeeze cash out of the people for whom the NWA is what they want from wrestling.

In a year of truly terrible things, Cody's neck tattoo may have been the worst.

As I said, I've watched BTE for years. I get what they're going for. But I also talk to enough people who don't watch BTE who feel its not translating well at all to Dynamite. I don't think it's going to kill the promotion, but I do think the presentation of the Bucks over the last 6-9 months has been really messy.

I think it runs the other way. The Bucks have shown a tendency in the last year to really overthink their angles and presentation and play shades of grey that are a little too hard to read. They were acting heelish in the fall because of their frustrations with not being champ, but were ultimately the faces in the match with FTR. They are sticking with their friend Omega and the Good Brothers, sorta, even though they're clearly breaking away from them. Like, I get the story they're trying to tell - these are their friends, Omega their best friend, and they don't want to believe that they'd screw them over. I watch BTE every week and I still think they're playing some of these shifts in too subtle ways to work on a national TV show.

Is Cornette gonna give this a good review because Castor dropped a Ronnie Garvin fireball reference?

Yes, it would be TLC.

I loved that feud a lot, as I was just getting back into WWE (mainly Smackdown). I still think the matches hold up, and while I can see the argument that the finisher were a bit ridiculous, I actually thought they were a smart way to stretch things out when the matches were still effective. And it let them culminate the feud twice, once in Edge's signature match and once in Taker's. It all would have sucked if the matches weren't good, but I'm on the side of those two having ridiculously great chemistry that justified them having 5 PPV matches in a year, as crazy as that sounds.

So, NXT is running a 2016 ROH main event and Wrestlemania will be main evented by a 2016 TNA main event? It really all comes around sometimes. (Not that either of these things is bad. I mean, LOL at the hypocrisy of WWE claiming that everyone else was small-time and then just reusing their old stuff, but in some ways good for them for softening on this stuff.)

Fair, it's definitely an issue. But I do think if this works it would probably be aimed at a Netflix viewer that's less likely to be plugged in on wrestling message boards, and would have their own take on whether to engage with spoilers (there were plenty of things like that for Game of Thrones, for example). So you could take in front of a crowd like LU and not be too concerned on spoilers. The spoiler concern is really where the sports/TV issue rubber hits the road - if it's sports, spoilers are a killer. People rarely watch a basketball game they know the result of, and they don't really avoid spoilers too aggressively. If you see it as a TV show, then spoilers are still a big deal but the spoiler culture is very different. Being sports is really good in some ways for WWE, especially when networks are paying out the nose for sports content to fill time and draw consistent ratings. But it also creates this real barrier to re-entry as a fan if you have to watch the equivalent of three sports games per week to stay up to date.