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Lol. It's because he's a NXT reject who doesn't fit in a workrate promotion (or whatever ROH tries to be these days) and clearly got booked just because he was an ex WWE guy they could roll out . That your first thought would be "is it because he's fat?" is hilarious. A company that books the Young Bucks, Kenny Omega, and brings in Okada/Tanahashi fairly regularly. Weird that that audience doesn't give a shit about Bull Dempsey.

Well Raw did get 2 for ever 1 pick SD got, plus they have the entire cruiserweight division.

You mean like how they paid him to show up after Raw unannounced to do a beat down and leave last week?

Curious to see who gets exposed more in KO vs Goldberg.

Money left on the table and embarrassing yourself because you were terrible with your money or don't know what else to do aren't the same things.

I rewatched Joe vs Kobashi for the first time probably since it happened a few days ago. I'm trying to imagine the ROH of 2005 running shows with Strike Force and Smash.

I thought Nak/Roode was legit shitty. They had ZERO chemistry, and Nak's selling of the knee was so overdone. In literally any other match, he'd go from that directly into throwing 6 knees in a row like nothing happened. And all the sudden he's doing the same type of selling he normally would but with medical staff out there and I'm supposed to buy into it as being more serious than his normal screaming sell that he stops selling 3 minutes later in all of his big matches? The build up between them was legit Nak makes wacky faces at Roode for a few shows, and all of the sudden they were running HARD with "the biggest money match in NXT history" shit, which was utterly ridiculous. On top of that, Roode has basically been a comedy mid carder since coming into NXT, so his sudden ascension into the title scene made little sense to begin with.

What percentage of the time do you think WWE storylines payoff in satisfying fashion? I am afraid to provide my answer to that for fear it will be seen as a troll, but I am genuinely curious. I will provide it at some point after other people provide theirs. It's definitely pretty low. 1998-2001 WCW lack of payoffs in general. I feel like WWE doesn't even have actual payoffs to anything anymore. Angles just kind of die out after a bunch of rematches and then everyone moves on.

Ali, absolutely. Jordan, no, because even on the Wizards he was still averaging 20ppg off the bench as a part time player just to help out the franchise. But athletes in actual sports hanging on too long and hurting their legacy is also a negative that is talked about frequently, particularly in combat sports.

I would say most big names that don't retire due to injuries tend to go 3 years or more longer than they should have. And I mean big names with big legacies, not lower card guys who have no money or other employable skills. Dusty Rhodes Ric Flair Terry Funk Dory Funk Jr. Andre The Giant Hulk Hogan Randy Savage Undertaker Harley Race Kurt Angle Sting Jerry Lawler Giant Baba Misawa Kawada Stan Hansen Taue Mutoh Chono All guys who were big names who didn't know when to hang it up and ended up negatively impacting their legacy.

They're probably the same people who thought Sting should have "one last match", too.

I'd like to think we can all agree that regardless of opponent, this should definitely be Taker's last WM.

There comes a point where people are just being nice because a guy is a legend and don't want to point out how broken down and shitty they are now. Taker hit that point at least 3-4 years ago. At the Rumble he looked Andre 1988-1989 level of "why is this guy still in the ring?".

TNA will hype ANYONE from WWE as company/industry changing. They were hyping Damien fucking Sandow as the next coming and 6 months later they had him as a 2017 Gorgeous George and he's probably not even with the company anymore. Same with Cody Rhodes. TNA's hype has been justified all of 2 times in 15 years: Sting and Kurt Angle.

Comparing Vince/Dana isn't the same thing as comparing wrestlers and fighters. Now that I look at it, I think I misread what you meant by stopping the comparisons at Vince/Dana. Dana is the ultimate scumbag promoter, though. Vince wishes he was as much as a real life heel as Dana.

Dana is more of a real life Mr. McMahon than Vince himself is, so I don't understand what this means. Literally a few hours ago he chastised a fighter for not calling him/UFC first before being taken to the hospital near death from cutting weight, because if he had called, Dana could have saved the fight.

I don't even know why MMA guys are included on the list. Draws, sure, but a MMA promo and pro wrestling promo, while at their very essence do the same thing, are entirely different and take entirely different skills. It's easy to be a good promo guy when you have zero restraint, don't have to build up your opponent at all, and only have to cut promos on 2-3 guys per year at the most. Put Connor is a position where he has to cut promos weekly or even monthly and he falls apart instantly. Even if he has to do 2 pressers reasonably close together, he's pretty shot for the 2nd one and just repeats himself.

Why do you say that "everyone else hearing him say this" see The Undertaker as just some broken down old guy when that's pretty much just what the smarkiest of smarks would think? He's the fucking Undertaker & he's been the most coveted WrestleMania opponent for years. I don't even think it goes that deep. There really isn't a smarks and everyone else anymore, little kids can get spoiled on booking plans on Facebook and WWE Network has tons of 100% out of character programming talking about the most inside of inside shit. It could have been 15 other people Cena mentioned instead of Taker and the same point would come through: This is below me and I'd rather not be working with you if I had my choice. You don't need to be a smark or a mark or whatever in between to understand what he was saying. Which is a bizarre way to build up a WM match.

Approximately 70% of all the awards went to Connor McGreggor. Is Dave ever going to change most over/underrated to most over/under pushed, since that's what readers clearly mean by their votes?

That would be ideal. You know, like a normal wrestling company. Ideally, there would be like...one 4th wall pushing storyline every couple of years. Imagine if you tried the NWO angle today in an era where they have a weekly show on their network devoted to being as shooty as you can without going all the way, and then periodical podcasts that are 100% out of character. Well that shouldn't really be surprising that setting something on fire and doing your wrestling pose in front of it would get cheered. It was a cool visual. The real issue with the angle is that for all the stuff people have written about how Bray's character is so cool, it's fucking vague as shit and has never been fleshed out. Who is Sister Abigail? Why is she important to Bray? Why is it so devastating to him that Randy burned down the shack she was buried in? This is all shit that Bray is going to have to ACTUALLY explain, in clear terms and not couched in vague supernatural mumbo jumbo to take this from a cool moment into a viable feud. So next Tuesday Bray is going to have actually live up to all the (misplaced imo) hype about him being this great pro wrestling promo because he has a lot of shit to explain to make people understand why he's actually the hero in this story. I'm almost 100% positive that after he explains it, you and everyone else will wish he had stuck to vague rambling bullshit.

I'm so fucking tired of the "Cena's opponent says he sucks, can't wrestle, and plays politics to get everything he gets" and Cena responding by summarily destroying his opponent's gimmick and character, making their career seem like a joke, and then going out of his way to make his own match seem like something he doesn't want to be involved with. That's been almost every Cena feud since Edge, which was a decade ago. Inspired delivery means nothing to me at this point. There's nothing any guy can say to Cena that hasn't been said 25 times at this point, and there are only so many times you can hear Cena outright shit on a dude in a way that usually comes egregiously close to breaking the 4th wall. It's such a tired concept in general. It was tired when AJ did it as well, and AJ/Cena is obviously going to produce a better match than Miz/Maryse vs Cena/Nikki. Cena feels as out of place today as Hogan in 1993 or Rock for any of his appearances between 2004 and 2011ish. Kind of seems like he's moved on, and so has WWE.

He gained Bray's confidence while also destroying the Wyatt Family by having Bray turn against Luke Harper, used their help to win the Rumble, turned down the title match to fully ingratiate himself with Bray which led to Bray giving him the "keys to the kingdom" and then used those keys to destroy the base of Bray's stupid dumb ass "powers" that will hopefully end that goofy shit forever. He's still going to get the Mania title match because he won the Rumble which has more import than a promo saying you're giving up the match. The promo did a fine job of explaining it, he joined them because he couldn't beat them and waited for the right time to fully destroy them. Luke Harper was gone & Bray was completely fooled by Randy and gave him the "keys to the kingdom" aka the keys to and location of that shack. Said it way back when they first started teasing a Rusev and Lana split during the Cena program, but yeah. There's some serious bank to be made in a Liz/Randy style relationship with Rusev and Lana. As fun as it was to watch Rusev grow a bit through the breakup, I always thought there was major money in switching them both babyface. It's so easy. It could be done overnight. Rusev packs a certain spark and charm. Just have a more menacing heel physically threaten Lana, let Rusev come to her rescue, and boom. Off to the races. The problem with this idea is that Lana showed the last time they tried to turn her that she is an awful babyface. I assume this will lead to Orton vs AJ for the final number one contender spot, which will play into AJ/Shane by Shane throwing yet another curveball at him and being the final straw for AJ to snap.

Watched a bit of a WCW from January 1988 last night. Dusty comes out to cut a promo where he comes just short of outright calling Cornette a fag, shoots on the WWF. This is followed by a 8 minute Larry Zbyszko match with 7 minutes of stalling and a fan very aggressively calling Babydoll a stupid whore. Also a Ron Simmons squash that I swear had to go on close to 15 minutes.

I don't even know what to think of that Orton thing. For starters, it went on FOREVER. Should have been half as long. Randy's monologue was so overwritten and overwrought, but also hilarious for how stupid it was and for how seriously it was taken. I don't think there is room on the same show for a 6 cam via satellite shoot with live on the fly editing and music with a monologue The Undertaker would balk at doing and promos where guys explicitly destroy the gimmick of their opponent and shit on their booking. You can't have it both ways. Because of how the rest of the show is structured, you can't over look that Randy had at last 5 camera men and a production truck with him in the middle of the woods to burn down a house "live" while Bray was in the arena presumably at least 1200 miles away while he thought up this long monologue to say and where to stand/when to cut/etc. You can't lean on or break the 4th wall constantly and then run an angle like this that plays it 100% straight.

The only way to do that is to have him not cut promos at all.