Embrodak

Something about WWE using terrible music for most of their video packages makes them better, it’s surreal. Imagine Dragons are absolute dogshit, but that “Monster” Daniel Bryan video for Wrestlemania was stellar.

Yeah but he was starting his build *from* an older age. I’m not saying they couldn’t have gotten something out of him, they absolutely could have if they’d done something to hide his biggest weakness (mic work), but there is an opportunity cost involved in building up someone that just had a major health problem that you were maybe only going to get a few years out of even without that versus getting two or three young college guys on threadbare training contracts. Did not know that about Cody, that’s cool. If one can put the AEW run out of one’s mind, his WWE run so far has been pretty excellent.

Punk is like a 100/99 if he makes the list. He has great ring psychology, and he got over a very simple, old-school move set in workrate-heavy AEW. I love Punk as a personality, he brings a realness most other wrestlers can’t dream of. But let’s be real, he’s sloppy as shit, has a very unconvincing physique, and he destroyed some of his mystique losing to tomato cans in MMA.

Yeah I was thinking Cody might be the big loser out of all this if by chance HHH is not as convinced as Vince seemed to be that Cody is a top guy in the making. Re: relative levels of overness, Moxley is as over in AEW as he is because he was a near-top guy in WWE for years and left in the prime of his career amidst perceptions that he was being held down. FTR are better off in AEW than they were in WWE, but that’s more a demerit to WWE’s tendency to book tag teams like jokes than a credit to the blasé booking they were given in AEW prior to this year. Claudio was intermittently pretty over in WWE and had a permanent upper midcard position like Sheamus if he wanted it, it remains to be seen if he is *more over* long-term in AEW. Of the remainder, Swerve honestly seems like the only one that smacks of “missed opportunity” to me. Keith Lee maybe, if they’d gotten him a good mouthpiece, but it seems like he’s lost something since he was on top in NXT, plus he’s fairly old and has a lot of miles on him.

Yeah, I read a recap and it seemed like just another Raw, other than starting in media res with a Paul/Miz fight.

I think there is every reason to be optimistic that there will be changes for the better with HHH at the head of creative. At the same time, I can’t imagine that anybody can make 5 hours of TV content a week “good”, overall, nor do I think the army of hack TV writers are going anywhere. And Triple H and HBK were big enthusiasts of the performance center, of having a big “state of the art” building to show “real” athletes, so probably the injunctions against hiring indie guys are going to remain mostly in place. So I think we should probably temper our expectations of how much is going to change.

Cornette is pretty smart, but he’s pretty uneducated and ignorant about a lot of things.

Isn’t Stephanie at least partly responsible for much of the structural problems with the product? I seem to recall that the shift toward writers was a Stephanie thing.

As long as Dunn and Prichard are in charge of creative, I can’t imagine that Vince is *done* done, unless there’s a plan in place to phase in a new creative team over the course of a year or so. You can’t micromanage at home, but you can send texts and emails.

Cesaro/Sami in NXT seemed really great at the time, idk if it still holds up. The weird thing with Claudio is it’s hard for me to imagine what a “Claudio match” would even look like. Maybe it’s just that his personality is not that strong, so it’s difficult to say that any match he might have is one that is both technically great and encapsulating of his persona, which I think is a big part of saying something is someone’s “best match” in the sense meant by this thread.

I strongly dislike Excalibur, do not see the appeal at all. He does not sound like a professional broadcaster to my ears, and he doesn’t relay the action in the ring in a manner I find at all compelling. He’s better than Schiavone and JR, the latter of whom openly has contempt for the product he’s calling, but I think they need to redo the booth from the ground up.

I’ll bet Trips is seething that they fired Regal, otherwise he could call up HBK.

Prichard and Dunn running creative is fucking hilarious, it’ll be like if Ringo kept The Beatles going by himself. They’ve gotta be placeholders while they put some kind of committee in place, unless they’re just there so Vince can text them what he wants done without actually physically being in the building to harass the talent.

Bron looks, sounds, and wrestles exactly like a Steiner, idk what the top of this page is thinking. Are we anti-Bron now? He’s like the most impressive rookie ever.

I want Ian Riccaboni and Taz, then maybe pull an early-80s MSW and have a rotating third man from the roster. Dump Excalibur, Tony, and JR yesterday.

Corny reading out Vince, Johnny Ace, and Prichards’ phone numbers for Wardlow was pretty funny. But yes, the Weasel Dooley segment was great, great stuff.

Well I have to imagine the advice from his doctors was something along the lines of “I wouldn’t keep wrestling, but if you’re going to do it anyway, here’s the timing you should employ”. Granted, probably most wrestlers get told by non-sports medicine physicians not to do their profession.

He should very much prioritize continuing to take blood thinners over continuing to wrestle. Pulmonary embolisms are no joke, they were a major part of what made my mother’s cancer fatal.

Last’s Mid-South watch along podcast is fun. Hearing him rave about things he likes is better than him disinterestedly agreeing with Corny about modern wrestling. Although I do like Last as a foil for Corny in general, I don’t know that anybody could have done a better job of lubricating that Bobby Eaton tribute episode. And hearing him get annoyed and call Kenny Omega “Ty” on the latest ep was pretty funny, so I can’t hate too much. As for why it’s a marathon show - because Corny can’t truncate himself even if he wanted to, and because they can sell a bunch of ads without the show feeling like it’s nothing but ads. Corny has the best ads in the game, though.

-If Jericho is on blood thinners, continuing to wrestle is stupider than anything Sammy or Darby have ever done, or even Mick Foley. I cannot believe that that’s true, no doctor on the planet would clear you for a barbed wire match if you’re on fucking Eliquis or Coumadin. -Wardlow shouldn’t be wrestling Orange Cassidy, but if he has to, he definitely should not join the Best Friends.

Fatalism is not useful, there is more urgency here. This isn’t a consensual relationship with a subordinate that you’d want to keep quiet because infidelity is embarrassing, or one credible but unsubstantiated allegation from decades ago like Chatterton’s (although that should have been taken seriously, to be clear). This is an *ongoing* pattern of sexual harassment and abuse of employees, now substantiated by hard transfer of currency to keep it quiet. He is still going to be in regular contact with female employees and is still basically in charge of them, and they are not safe as long as he is around. Everybody in any position to do something - NBC, advertisers, the talent - need to take a stand, here. McMahon has gotta go. Ideally, Stephanie and Triple H should go, too, because who could ever trust that they didn’t know about this stuff, but I’d take VKM finally retiring.

That locker room needs to do a wildcat strike, refuse to perform until McMahon steps down from both the board and creative. He’s a wizard when it comes to navigating corporate cut-throat politics, let’s not put much hope in that sphere.

Maybe Sasha has some dirt on Johnny Ace

He’s very heavy-looking, even by the standards of his physique. I’m not sure if he gained weight or lost muscle mass, but he has a noticeably less athletic look, at least to me.

Keith Lee really looks terrible. Covid is scary as fuck, breh. Like a roulette wheel’s chance that your health will be (possibly permanently) upended in a major way.