Reel

I'm probably not going to go back and watch any of it, but having watched it contemporaneously, I can honestly say outside of the stuff with Seth against Drew/Dolph and The Bar, and the triple threat with Brock and Roman, literally none of the stuff you mentioned stands out to me in the least. Obviously, it's all subjective and your mileage may vary, but I think him leaving WWE has made a lot of people look back on his time there more fondly than they would otherwise.

I don't think it matters if he was lazy, battling addiction, or sad because his dog ran away, he has a litany of boring to bad matches and comparatively few bright spots.

I've been slowly working my way through the Cornette Garbage Tapes, and '78-80 high-flying babyface Paul Orndorff rules, I don't think there's enough to make my top 100, but if we had more of that stuff, combined with his peak 80s stuff and his late WCW run, I think he'd have a solid case.

I'll cop to minimalizing it, but only because everyone else seems to be maximalizing it. I'm sure a ton of people have 'seen' Sasha Banks, and I'm sure a ton of people will 'see' all sorts of people in very popular things, and this doesn't have anything to do with the popularity or lack thereof, of the WWE, it has to do with simply appearing on a popular show does not make you a successful working actor.

Wait!!!! There are actors who aren't huge movie stars?????? NO. I'm sure she could parlay her success into some sort of acting gig, but you've watched Sasha Banks, you've heard her cut a promo? You watched the build to the Belair match at Mania last year, do you think that she's a good actress? Do you think that she really could make a ton of money acting? She might, I don't know, all I'm saying is let's pump the brakes on this idea that she can make a great living in Hollywood tomorrow, it's not exactly the easiest business. Ok, this is just silly. There are no background extras more famous or relevant than people who are on national network TV every week. Name one.

She had like 2 lines on the Mandalorian, this idea that she has a burgeoning Hollywood career is a bit of an exaggeration.

Wait, Naomi was booked to win and walked out? That's gotta be a first.

In your somewhat regular reminder that NXT:UK is still a thing that exists, they had their 200th episode this week. Smith & Carter/Gallus and Devlin/Dragunov were both worth checking out.

There are people better equipped to answer this, but not a ton as far as I know. There are about a half-dozen clips, ranging somewhere between 2 to 5 minutes floating around from American TV and then some stuff with Giant Baba, including a match from 67 that I like quite a bit. I will say that young Bruno is pretty similar to any other Bruno, more athletic, and not quite the finished product, but he's always Bruno.

There was some discussion in the Orange Cassidy thread, back when that was a thing, about buy-in, and Bruno seems like the same sort of deal. Suppose you helicopter in and watch some random match with a 7-minute bearhug. In that case, you get a specific impression of a boring wrestler who was only a star because there were a lot of Italians in New York but, if you watch the Larry feud, or the stuff with Waldo, or really just enough Bruno over time where you can buy into Bruno, you start to see the bearhug and punch/kick is all part of this package and the package rules.

I've never been a big ReDRagon guy. I think they're fine, but not anything that I'd go out of my way to watch. His singles stuff has been fine, but like the above post, when New Japan had him going 50/50 with Sakuraba, a guy who I'm down on anyway, I don't think he really held up his end of the bargain there. That being said, the KOR/Ballor series from 2020/2021 was pretty good stuff, and I think KOR could have a good single run, but he seems intent on playing second banana to Adam Cole for some reason.

I think, in the same vein as Sasha, she has knocked all of her big opportunities out of the park. Two huge 'mania matches, two MOTYCs. Plus, she's been really solid on TV, her stuff with Doudrop especially was very good. That being said, I can't say I was all that impressed with her NXT run, it wasn't bad, but I didn't love any of it either. I don't think she'll make my 2026 ballot, because even then she won't have a ton on her resume, but I'm not ruling her out either.

The Screw it...Comics with Jeff Smith is also a great tribute Adams.

Patently untrue, on both counts. Funaki was a good fighter, I can see your point there to an extent, but guys who are head and shoulders above their competition don't lose to Jason DeLucia. Suzuki, not sold he was ever a great fighter, let alone good enough to go in there and fuck around in a real fight to further the booking. Go watch Ken Shamrock hit a Minoru Special against Matt Hume, it's just not a promotion that was on the up and up in any way shape, or form, pretty much until the 2000s, and even then it's spotty. As for work/fixed fight, I've thought about Pancrase stuff for GWE, and came to the conclusion that I'm just gonna handwave it because while there are plenty of works there, I don't think it's worth the time to go through everything to suss out what's what. On top of that, is there anyone for whom a top 100 case could be made based predominately on Pancrase stuff? I don't think so.

Depends on how you want to define work, but there were a lot more than 3 fights in Pancrase where at least one guy went into the ring with no intention of winning.

My only experience with Iroha was when I watched the whole 5* Grand Prix last year. I liked a total of 2 matches in that entire tournament, and I'm willing to pin that on me not liking the style because people seemed to love it, but at no point did Iroha stand out to me at all. I brought Chihiro up in some other thread, and the only reason I didn't nominate her is I was waiting for someone else who is a bigger Joshi fan to do it, but she for sure needs a thread.

I feel like if I had to make a list tomorrow, I could and it would be fine, but I wouldn't feel great about it. I'll probably feel the same way in 2026, but at least I'd have watched 4 more years of wrestling to inform my list.

I'd be interested to see how many of the good to great New Day matches have Kofi in them because if you asked me to rank the New Day members off the top of my head, without doing any research, I'd easily slot Kofi at 3. Obviously, he's in some of them, but it seems to me like when people say 'Kofi is in the New Day, one of the best tag teams of the decade' it is in some ways a bit unearned. Not that this is an exact 1-to-1 comparison, but it is kinda like giving Crush credit for Demolition matches. Kofi is a bigger part of the group than Crush was and the dynamics of how Crush got into the group are different, but I think giving equal credit to all 3 isn't an accurate assessment either.

I think the angle is bad, but I'm excited for that match. Gacy was a low-key MVP of 205 Live before it got rebranded, he had a match with Desmond Troy that ruled.

Pretty Deadly showed up on NXT. Good for those guys, they did everything they were going to do in NXT: UK.

Pretty Deadly are coming off a pretty good run as NXT: UK Tag champs, and I'm guessing they may be the ones who attacked the Creeds in the NXT parking lot. If you want to check them out, they had a good match with Smith & Carter in 2020, and good stuff with Mustache Mountain and Subculture in 2021.

I think everyone who would see it in that light, as WWE poaching an EVP from AEW, already knows he's signed and showing up at some point. So theycan play it coy as to when exactly he's going to show up, instead of playing up overtly.

At the end of GWE16, Dylan said on his podcast that he came away from the project disillusioned because the top 10 were all American-style wrestlers, and wanted to sort of distance himself from the project. So, what does a successful GWE 26 look like in your eyes? Is there something you'd like to see in the top 100 wrestlers that wasn't there last time?

I think a lot of 'Jericho is an all-time great' is, and props to him for this, is that he has spent a lot of time talking about how great his career was on his podcast, and he's been saying it long enough that people started to believe it. I'm not sure there's ever been a year where he was one of the top 5, maybe 10 wrestlers in the promotion he was in. I'm not entirely ruling him out, but I just don't really see him sniffing even my top 200 wrestlers.

Roderick Strong showed up on NXT:UK this week if that's your kinda thing. Had a good match with Wolfgang and challenged Ilja. The Bate match in the open of the show was good too.