Embrodak

He only reviews three matches from the RoH PPV, and he only really liked FTR-Briscoes. The segment from the last episode where he talked about taking a bat to cases of merchandise in his garage because of how pissed he was at Spectrum and almost lost his dog in all the commotion was more entertaining than the review.

I’m not opposed in theory to Starks turning babyface and Hobbs turning on him, but it would be more impactful if they had actually gotten some kind of a concerted push as a unit, rather than mostly being in the background for the last year. Starks going on about how he made the FTW title so meaningful by his efforts when we barely saw it and it was a fake title in the first place (in a company that is following the WWE down the path of having way too many fucking titles, to boot) is not the solidest ground on which to launch a babyface turn. Starks rocks, he made the most of it, but it feels like Tony jumped the gun here.

I do hope that the new regime has a less obsessive drive to rewrite history to make WWE both inevitable and transcendent. Let some real wrestling historians get at that footage and tell some stories, a Tim Hornbaker or Brian Solomon.

Well it’s not for nothing that Corny said he sounds like Frasier Crane. I’m a big word user myself, I’m totally sympathetic to how hard it is to tone down language when you have a decent vocabulary, but I’m also not a professional wrestler.

Dax has certainly been making the beginnings of a case for himself this year, eh? If he ever has a singles run, look out.

WWE used Limp Bizkit because they were huge, not vice versa. It’s impossible to overstate how perfectly fitting to the type of angsty teen that existed in the late 90s and early 2000s LB was.

He lacks conviction and has kind of a lilting, sing-songy cadence that undermines the aural effect of his otherwise deep voice. He often *over*enunciates words in an unnatural way in the middle of a sentence such that it sounds like he’s reading dialogue, not talking. He doesn’t really have an ear for memorable wrestling lines, like when he riffed on how he uses the word “plethora” online in that promo they posted to YouTube a few months ago. Idk, always sounds to me like he’s performing and reciting, not talking, not dissimilar to how Danielson sounded on the mic back in like 2009 but with different qualities of artifice. Whether it’s really the way he talks or not, the effect is jarring, at least to me.

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.