Migs

I recently rewatched Summerslam 2016, because it happened to be on FS1 and I was at the show and was curious to revisit it. Here's the main card. 4 Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens defeated Enzo Amore and Big Cass Tag team match[49] 12:08 5 Charlotte defeated Sasha Banks (c) Singles match for the WWE Women's Championship[50] 13:51 6 The Miz (c) (with Maryse) defeated Apollo Crews Singles match for the WWE Intercontinental Championship[51] 5:45 7 AJ Styles defeated John Cena Singles match[52] 23:10 8 Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson defeated The New Day (Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods) (c) (with Jon Stewart) by disqualification Tag team match for the WWE Tag Team Championship[53] 9:09 9 Dean Ambrose (c) defeated Dolph Ziggler Singles match for the WWE World Championship[54] 15:18 10 Nikki Bella, Natalya, and Alexa Bliss[Note 1] defeated Becky Lynch, Naomi, and Carmella Six-woman tag team match[55] 11:04 11 "The Demon King" Finn Bálor defeated Seth Rollins Pinfall and submission-only match for the inaugural WWE Universal Championship[56] 19:24 12 Brock Lesnar (with Paul Heyman) defeated Randy Orton by technical knockout Everyone on the show is still in WWE, and in basically the same spot, except: - Enzo and Cass (basically got themselves fired, otherwise would still be there) - Nikki Bella and John Cena (not regulars anymore but still appear) - Gallows and Anderson (and they were there until pretty recently!) - Ambrose and Jericho (who would likely still be there if AEW wasn't a thing) Oh, and they cut two matches for time, because it's a 4 hour slot with a million commercials. It was the ones involving Jericho and Ambrose. Wonder how they made those selections...

It definitely feels like they need to get the belt back on Naito at the baseball stadium - call this a quick way to escalate EVIL and set up a nice moment for the stadium show and go back to Naito for a bit, because I don't know how many more EVIL main events they can do. The tournaments are clearly a way to fill some time when they have a limited roster to pair off. Meltzer implied they may get more of the roster back for the G1, which would be nice. Pretty sure all they have is this tour to finish before the G1, so it's not like they're spinning their wheels for months. Also really like where they're going with this Ibushi/Tana story.

I think the staleness at the top of the product on the main roster has also hurt them. You look at the pushes Steen, Balor, Nakamura, even Joe got on the main roster - they were all pretty solid, even if there were mistakes made. Obviously, the Horsewomen got giant pushes too. But now all those people are still there, as are the people from before they got pushed (Miz, Ziggler, etc.) and there's a log jam that makes it almost impossible to feel like there's upward mobility (see the treatment of Ricochet, Black, Andrade). That flip has really happened in the last two years (starting with Andrade, I'd say) and just sucked the energy out of NXT. Plus, the guys that rose to the top at that time were guys who were so obviously not Vince prototypes because of sizw (Gargano, Ciampa, Cole) and you get the feeling that the NXT characters have barely moved at all since 2018. If Gargano and Ciampa had moved to the main roster after the blowoff, I'm not sure we'd be saying that was the end of NXT.

My understanding is very few people had a deal with the NWA of any length. Aldis did, Kingston likely didn't.

Fredericks' character so far seems like a heel. But I also don't see why the LA Dojo young boys can't be their own heel foreigner faction (especially if they include Gabe Kidd).

All of these sites are using fine generic blank shirts. The hard thing with Redbubble is they don't list exactly what they're using, but the shirt itself should be fine and if you tend to be the same size across multiple brands, I wouldn't be too worried.

I do think the roster seems a little thinner because they're using Tana and Ibushi together as a tag team to try and boost the profile of those titles. (I contend the ace they have in the hole is having Ibushi turn on Tana to set up a heel run on top for him. I think "crazy Ibushi" is a character with a ton of juice.)

Not yet, no. I think people are getting a little too down on New Japan, especially when they're short a number of main eventers (Ospreay, Mox, White, KENTA to an extent). I do think they've past their artistic peak for this era, though (that's going to be Kenny-Okada). If Okada is Flair, early 90s WCW should be instructive here - it's hard to build new stars when the other top guys is not only still around, but the new guys are forced to work the old guy's style and can't do it (although Sting and Luger certainly > EVIL as workers in their prime). This KOPW belt seems like just a thing to do to spice things up without burning any big matchups they have on the table. Definitely feels like they are trying to keep things in neutral when they can't do big crowds, but with COVID coming back a bit in Japan, it may be a while before they can do full shows again and there's going to have to be a point where they can't just spin their wheels.

Yeah, Kingston needs that feeling of looseness, that anything could happen. That's why he was so great on Powerrr. But he really popped on AEW because it's a tight show that allowed him to cut loose. People normally don't curse on the show with regularity, so Kingston's language was able to really pop and jump started the energy of the show.

That's at least plausible, since Mox said it made him very pleased - wasn't Shark Boy an HWA / Les Thatcher guy forever, and wasn't that where Mox trained?

This is apparently the Cody opponent.

I'm sure at this point she works relatively cheap. I'd wager AEW sees this much the same way a sports team does when they take on a head case with talent on a cheap contract - if it works out, awesome, you've got more talent on the team for a below-market price, and if she alienates everyone on day 1, it's a small loss.

Those original MLW episodes are going up on their YouTube right now, for those interested. Definitely trying hard to be ECW, and getting only part of the way there, but it's fun (and I'm finding it nice to have new to me wrestling from that period I'm very nostalgic for to check out).

In that case, then, this was unfortunately foreseeable. If you're getting paid far above your actual value, you're going to be a target of cuts. I guess you could say they felt at the time that WWE was years from ending their roster hoarding, but it goes back to the idea we've been discussing of not wanting to pin your trust on Vince McMahon.

Although you really have to question the lawyers on the contract if they got stupid money in a contract that allowed them to be cut with 90 days notice.

What's the time commitment on the Fire Pro career mode? That sounds super fun for a wrestling fan party when gathering in people's houses again is a thing to do.

I'm pretty much always going with Eaton on the question of the all-time GOAT. I also think you may be overrating Cesaro based on the variety of partners. He's very good, but even in this century, there have been consistent teams where the members are a little hard to rate individually but almost have to be above Cesaro. The Young Bucks, Usos, ReDragon, FTR, New Day, the Briscoes - all of those teams have more high end matches than Cesaro has been involved in. The Dudley Boyz and the Hardyz as well. If you're requiring that this be across multiple partners, he's probably higher up the list. Hard to find guys who've been as good as him with many partners in this century. Rocky Romero? Edge? Kofi? Kenny Omega?

He's behind at least E&C, the Dudleyz, Billy Gunn, Kane and Mick Foley. The busted lineage of the various tag titles makes it really hard to find a simple list, but those guys all have more than him under the old lineage.

I was on a show with her once. I was introduced, without gimmick name, before the show. She was a surprise appearance, and when she came out, I was like "wow, I didn't realize she was here!" and my friend was like dude, you met her a half hour ago.

I can't find any confirmation on that, but that might be because Phantasmo calling him the Autistic Assassin dominates the search results. But certainly that could play into what I think could be called Ospreay struggling with certain social situations.

I've for a while thought there was likely a middle ground on the Ospreay story where both sides were right. Ospreay presumably believed his friend (which, who knows whether that was reasonable to do or not) and then spoke poorly of Pollyanna, not realizing that if he was like "she sucks, I don't want to be around her" he was basically blackballing her, even if he didn't intend to. He's always struck me as someone incredibly dumb to anything outside of actually wrestling in a ring, someone who sees the world very one dimensionally (remember his weird comments about UK women who couldn't make it in a Japanese dojo?). (On Dave's comments, yes, it's a bad comparison. I would say, though, that, going along with the above, Ospreay seems like someone who would be really freaked out by intense negativity directed at him, even if people weren't saying "kill yourself." If he felt that his career was over, I could definitely imagine him losing it, because, again, he seems to understand little other than wrestling.)

I think this is the payoff to Impact continuing to do shows now - with AEW hitting about the max roster size they want and ROH and MLW not running shows, Impact is going to be able to pick up a good chunk of the WWE releases and bolster their mid -> upper card. I can't say I've found Impact's empty arena shows particularly engaging, but I think in part that's because the roster was feeling really depleted after the last couple of years of talent leaving. This should put them in a good position, particularly when crowd return.

I believe it was the Sunshine Network in Florida, since that's where they mostly ran in the time period when they had TV (2003-04).

Lagana was probably an even bigger blow, as he seemed to really be driving the booking and production end. Not that there's no one that could step in, but to need to do that much work for a damaged brand that maybe wasn't going as well as they wanted before... not surprised that he might decide it's not worth the effort.

He did (does?) famously live with his mom! I do think it'd be tricky with Joey because there's a segment of the fan base for whom he'd always be a babyface (Spring Break / the way he connected with people on the indies). But maybe that chunk of the fan base is small enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference.