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He just always makes those points so clumsily though.

Someone needs to severely restrict Meltzer's Twitter access. Or just send him to a Race and Racism 101 seminar.

Couldn't win an election to save her life but Linda McMahon is now officially part of the Trump administration. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/07/politics/linda-mcmahon-picked-to-be-small-business-administrator/index.html

I don't know where the fresh opponent is on Smackdown though. Unless they wheel out Taker.

I think just being on TV so much and being in so many matches kinda dilutes the novelty of anyone. Everyone ends up overexposed because there's just too much content. But I also kinda agree that the Reigns feud might have been his high point in terms of crowd pops.

I wonder if there would still be any resistance among the wider internet community to the argument that Reigns is the best worker from the Shield. The ruination of what seemed in 2014 like three can't miss main event prospects from a super hot act should be analysed as a perfect study of dreadful modern WWE booking. It's something Melzer has gone on about recently actually. How exposure on WWE TV works to make people less over rather than the obvious goal of making them more over. And no one has been more overexposed in the last couple of years than Seth Rollins.

Have you ever actually argued a point before other than just calling everyone an idiot?

Just catching the main event of Smackdown. American Alpha really aren't very over. They need some longer showcase matches.

I took the Black Friday deal too and I can confirm that Bryan Alvarez refusing to give any credit whatsoever to someone he's decided not to like is still really really annoying.

When I made the comment that was quoted in the article, I kinda thought out the point in a couple of ways. 1) Last year WWE had a bit of a injury crisis and I think that has to at least be partially attributed to the higher impact working style. If they slowed down and were able to get more out of less, guys like Seth Rollins could add a decade on to their careers. 2) It's harder to get a crowd invested in a match if moves and selling don't really mean anything. Why should I care about a guy's big spot or 10 minutes of leg work if Kevin Owens is going to be running around throwing superkicks as if nothing happened in a couple of seconds anyway? It leads to you only really being able to do one type of match as well. 3) It's part of a wider issue I have with modern WWE where it feels like a bunch of guys playing wrestler. It seems inauthentic, like the badly scripted promos. There was a GIF going round at the time of the Rollins vs Owens Hell in a Cell match where the two of them were no selling superkicks and clotheslines and such so that they could jump up and sprint to the next spot while Michael Cole yelled "What a sequence!" Everything about it screamed THIS IS FAKE. Working matches in this style and playing for the "This Is Awesome" chants solidifies the notion of wrestling as an athletic exhibition, like a gymnastic floor routine but with fake punches. To me, wrestling is at its best when you can buy into the characters, buy into the physicality and buy into hatred in the rivalries. Everyone knows wrestling is fake etc but that doesn't mean that people don't want to suspend their disbelief. I think that style of work is indicative of a wider philosophy in WWE that is preventative of suspension of disbelief and I think it harms wider engagement from a casual audience when it's presented as just an exhibition for the in-crowd.

don't think Owens will be champion come Mania season. I was wondering how they were going to have Roman in the title picture again without him winning the Rumble Surely they ought to pull the trigger on this Jericho thing then. It's the only part of the show that anyone is actually looking forward to and this title could use a hot feud after the dud that was Rollins vs Owens.

Sasha worked so much better as a heel in NXT and she would be much more suited to turning on the main roster. Her babyface promos just aren't good at all. But with Bayley being the only other notable woman face on Raw, there isn't really room for that to happen. She also needs to learn how to work a lot safer than she does. I think buying into the WWE 'making history' narrative is pushing her to take reckless bumps in all of these matches in order to prove herself. I think they need to calm that down and encourage her to work on character development. That's something that helps Charlotte so much more. Because she's comfortable in her role and good at playing heel, she can get heat from the crowd rather than shooting for the 'this is awesome' type of reaction. That helps her overall work a lot.

And there's a lot of people who thought the same way as Meltzer. I thought the Sasha/Charlotte match was great and I'm starting to think the "who goes on last" story was a planted story by someone who gives information to Dave to keep this show in the news cycle. From all of the promotional outside of the weekly TV, Sasha/Charlotte was the obvious main event match advertised. It's similar to the questioning of the Shane/Taker match being on last when the advertiseing match was Triple H/Reigns. That's fine but to me, he shifted very quickly between his opinion that Owens and Rollins had a much better match to speculating that Vince wouldn't put the women on last again because their match was bad, as if this was now an objective fact or at least the overwhelming consensus. I guess that's the problem with the main reporter of wrestling also being the main reviewer. While he obviously has an incredible knowledge of the business and it's history, I wish his star ratings and opinions on style weren't so influential because a lot of the time those ratings are almost taken as facts by some. Besides, I honestly think the Owens/Rollins style is downright bad for business. But that's a side point.

Dave convinced that Vince will resist putting the women on last again after last night simply he preferred the shitty Seth Rollins match really is a case of him letting his own tastes inform his reporting too much. The way he spoke on WOR today was as if it was just accepted fact the women's match was a disaster and the Owens vs Rollins match was great.

Everything in WWE is booked like the midcard. 2/3 of the main Raw feuds are about who gets to make Stephanie McMahon happy.

Buries the world title if you ask me. Shades of Ron Simmons. These guys already feel midcardy, need to put them over in main event. If champ was Cena or Brock or even HHH it wouldn't matter so much. The women's championship is currently more over than the world title and I see no reason in theory that they can't be portrayed in storyline as having equal prestige. Works in other real sports. Besides, this Rollins vs Owens feud has been God-awful. The crowd would be dead if it went on last.

After being given the run around by Russo, Hogan, Eric and basically everyone else for years, it's so odd that Dixie Carter has emerged as the queen of the carnies.

Twitter is not the place for nuance. Seeing that his point, as dumb as it is, is less than 140 characters, it could be a lot more nuanced if he wasn't a blockhead.

https://www.facebook.com/RealMickFoley/photos/a.150133228350157.28288.126269440736536/1440544925975641/?type=3 (includes picture) Instead of a match I think the two women, Mick and Stephanie should just go out to the cafe, present each other with little plaques and give themselves a pat on the back for MAKING HISTORY!!!

Goldberg cut the best promo of the show by far last night and was really made to look like a big deal. Not to take anything away from his own performance, but it should be so obvious that giving stars credibility and allowing them to speak with sincerity will get them over but WWE doesn't learn this lesson for anyone on the regular roster.

Goldberg popping a rating and convincing Vince to move away from the Rollins, Balor, Owens types on top would be quite hilarious. If Goldberg were to debut with the same act this year, would he end up being booed out of the building by all the types that will be cheering for him next Monday?

From time to time I read a Keith review just to see what that sort of section of fans thinks but good lord, he really is horrible. His ratings seem to be entirely based on received smark opinion e.g. everything by Owens or Rollins is graded super highly because we're 'supposed' to think they're great while anything with say, The Miz is graded a bit lower because we're 'supposed' to think he sucks.

Just have him cheat to beat Brock and fucking turn him. If they turn him heel and book him like a badass for 6 months, the crowds will end up cheering him. I have no idea how the smark audience can boo him but deify Seth Rollins.

As usual, the Monday Night Wars continues to be the only thing in wrestling history that actually mattered. I always wonder who is even left for them to drag back for the nostalgia pop. With ratings the way they are, you'd expect them to be shitting themselves and hot-shotting some guys to the top but instead, it's into the chequebook and back to the past. Again. The match will probably be morbidly fascinating and it may be cool to see Goldberg again but this, once again, is an indictment of how badly the current roster has been squandered where no one is even as believable match for Brock. Could you imagine Vince bringing in Bob Backlund to feud with Rock in 2000? That's what this is like in terms of the gap between Goldberg's peak and today.

Anything can be a good idea of it's booked an presented well. Almost anything. However, I understand the concerns when so many of the supposed 'heavyweights' like Rollins are spotfest workers. Cruiserweights should be as they were in WCW, something to add variety to the cards with a different style of wrestling and looks of the wrestlers. The radical and interesting thing to do would be for WWE to reform weight divisions altogether so that each title is as important as the next and wrestlers compete in weight classes. We know that isn't going to happen but at the very least, a serious commitment to a cruiserweight division should be an opportunity to reform and scale back the working style on the rest of the cards. More selling and playing to the crowd, less spots and kickouts. Then the cruisers can flourish and WWE can sort out these main events.