Embrodak

It was a dim time for in-ring competence, but it really can’t be forgotten that in the wake of the Benoit situation, WWE had a lot of incentive to train guys to work the safest, most boring, least legally incriminating style they could get away with.

Train, eat your vitamins, and grab your e-meters, kids.

Extremely sad. I hope that his daughter's surgeries go well and that she is able to walk again.

Well that’s why I said “a year ago”. It was not at all clear to me that if Cody signed with WWE, they were gonna treat him as some massive star. There’s absolutely a world where he returns and is in the Dolph Ziggler “useful hand” position inside of a month.

Did anybody have Cody in the “who will dethrone Roman” pool a year ago? Dude has to feel like the biggest pimp in the world. To go from accidentally putting yourself through a flaming table for no reason in an unimportant match against Andrade to maybe winning the Royal Rumble and beating the most dominant champ in decades is an unbelievable upgrade.

A whole season of him making The Scorpion King would be a funny rib.

What’s weird is I didn’t originally perceive Bray as a *bad* wrestler, he was pretty quick for his size. Is he *genuinely* bad, or is he just so committed to the gimmick that any idea of good wrestling long ago exited his calculation of how to behave?

Julia Hart was inches away from paralysis, she’s incredibly lucky.

I feel bad that LA Knight is saddled with Bray. Dude deserves better.

I can’t compliment everything I saw, but I caught Impact over the holidays with my dad and must say, the women’s division is presented far better in Impact than it is in AEW, despite having worse workers overall.

Bringing back Kross in a context where you were gonna bring back Bray is utterly bizarre. Kross is Malt-O-Meal Wyatt but at least doesn’t have the stink of Bray’s various Wrestlecrap nonsense storylines on him, just have him be the spoopy guy and let Bray make movies.

Conversely, if the Saudis are genuinely motivated buyers, leaking this early might have been to let the brass see how much of a negative fan, employee, and press backlash they would engender.

It seems likely to me that the rumor came from the Wall Street side of things tbh, someone who heard something from someone, that kind of thing.

Disco was fine. People wouldn’t bury him if he didn’t opine like he had expertise to equal the greats as he buried the modern product.

TNA hadn’t happened and proved that “big name WWE guys appearing on your show” could look like desperate clout chasing.

Takeshita is just obviously talented and coming from a promotion with not a lot of hype or viewership in the West. I’d love to see a talented Japanese wrestler not broken in to the (imo) stale NJPW “big match” formula, so I’m willing to give Takeshita a shot.

As I said, the best indication that the Saudis are a real contender is that nobody else is *stupid* enough to buy a company that has been contracting in popularity for two decades and is basically coasting on the fact that live television has become more relatively lucrative to the declining industry of television production. The WWE network proved there weren’t enough interested subscribers to support the company just on streaming revenue, and let’s be real, by the time the savings they’d accrue not paying WWE media rights fees made up for the initial investment, we can probably anticipate that television advertising just isn’t going to be the cash cow that it is now. Advertising in general is frankly a snake oil industry due for a massive market correction at this point, but the proportion of the public that actually watches live television is only going to continue to shrink. NBC and Fox don’t want to be stuck figuring out how to make WWE a profitable live event company again as their relatively older fan base dies off, let’s be real. The Saudis are the only prospective buyers that are potentially removed enough from the Western media ecosystem not to be aware of these dynamics, and they’re also the only ones that can derive secondary and tertiary benefits from owning the WWE that have nothing to do with its profitability.

That’s what I’m talking about, brother. Anyway, Tony Khan has to have the shit-eating grin of the guy from the Extenz commercial constantly right now. Just a never ending rendition of Singin in the Rain in the offices of the Jaguars.

At this point it seems like a lot of hot air, but I sure as shit am not watching or discussing WWE ever again if the fucking Saudi government buys it. What a fucking swerve, though!

You know what’s weird is they removed Edge because he didn’t want to do spoopy stuff and then didn’t do any spoopy stuff when they replaced him with Finn. Judgment Day are essentially a biker gang at this point, which is a much better fit for Rhea and Priest but not something either Finn or Edge feel holistically suited for. Did they change their mind about spoopy, or was that just bullshit?

He came out in Sephiroth cosplay to Sephiroth music.

Vince is hot shotting his own corporate takeover, just unreal.

I think it’s probably geographic, too. Crowds in NYC were going to be different from crowds in the Deep South, in terms of how much media education/exposure they had. Plus there’s a bit of that Fox Mulder “I want to believe” aspect.

I’m not into Finn in Judgment Day, Edge was a much better leader for that faction even with his thespian delivery. Finn is best as a douchebag heel, not an evil heel. Nevertheless, Rhea and Dom and Priest all look good in it, this is the first time Dom has had *any* juice that wasn’t just his dad’s fumes. Getting to maybe fuck Rhea Ripley is the best motivation for a heel turn in history.

I can’t speak for NXT Level Up, but Dark and Elevation are both way botchier than anything else I’ve ever seen presented by a national wrestling company with a television presence, on average.