Cox

This is only tangentially related to the thread, but after watching Edge on The Flash last night, I find it comical that Dave ever talked up his acting ability as being even average, let alone Hall of Fame worthy. He was so cartoonishly over-the-top and hammy that it managed to stand out on a superhero TV show on The CW.

This has legitimately happened with one of my friends. He sent Dave an email about something or another, not intending for it to be published on the site, and it was up on the site later that day. He was confused.

Here's what I'm wondering about the Hall of Fame at this point: have we reached a point where there are no slam dunk Hall of Famers left for a long time? It feels like everybody left is borderline, some are better than candidates that are already in, some are not, but nobody is a definite, no doubt about it, this guy belongs in the Hall of Fame candidate. That doesn't mean it should go away or anything, and I think the debate does help bring to light even fringe candidates like Rose or Patera who might not stayed on the ballot, but whose case was seen and helped find new fans. But at this stage of the game, it really just feels like we're debating along the margins, and without a slam dunk candidate anywhere near the horizon, I don't see that changing anytime soon. I even wonder if we'll have a year coming up where nobody new gets elected.

The parallels between Roman Reigns in 2015 and Lex Luger in 1993-1994 are really strong right now. I'm not sure he's ever going to recover from the Royal Rumble, no matter how hard they try.

That was a good show. Really pissed that my comps wound up falling through as I'd have loved to have gone to this, but I guess I'll have to wait until another time. Opening match was great for the spectacle of seeing Jushin Liger in a WWE ring, but Tyler Breeze did a great job too. Fun opener. Tag title match was some good tag team wrestling. Gotch feeding off of the hot tag was really great, almost Robert Gibsonesque. The Vaudevillains gimmick is really good, and Alexa's heel second work at ringside was really good too. I liked the Apollo Crews debut. They were never going to have him run through Dillinger, but he got to show off what makes him great and I didn't feel like this overextended its welcome. I think Crews is going to be a star in WWE, as his look, size, and athleticism will help him go far here. When did Samoa Joe get so shitty? He looked like he was wrestling underwater in that match. He's never been the most in shape guy or anything, but he was sucking wind early and everything he did just looked slow and loose. It was really sad for me since I used to really dig the guy back when he was the best guy in the world, but he looked a ways away from that guy tonight. The match wasn't bad or anything, but Joe did not look good at all, I thought. The women's title match was excellent. Great match and a great finish. Not more else that needs to be said here. If Sasha can get a few good PPV and Raw matches, she might have a real case for Most Outstanding Wrestler in this year's WON Awards. She's that good. As it is, I suspect she's going to have two matches finishing high in the balloting for Match of the Year. Main event was a good WWE style ladder match. I've enjoyed both of these guys more in NXT than I did before they started here, which is something of a testament to WWE style, I think. Not sure where else Balor goes in NXT since all of their top guys are babyfaces at the moment. Feels like somebody needs to turn, or maybe they need to put some more momentum behind Tyler Breeze. Overall, a fun show. I suspect this will wind up being a better show than SummerSlam.

That is the first time I've ever seen Johnny Sorrow shit on a wrestling related thing, so you know it must be pretty bad.

Meltzer reported in the WON this week that he was fired over the Hernandez situation.

MVP getting fired for TNA not doing their due diligence in making sure Hernandez wasn't under contract to Lucha Underground is pretty funny. Also pretty funny: the British TNA guys flying back to the UK during the middle of the tapings to go work indy shots there because they make more money wrestling for British indies than they do for cheap ass TNA. I know it's still technically exposure even though they're on Destination America and nobody watches them, but why would anybody want to go to TNA at this point?

If Hogan wins the Gawker suit and the $100 million that comes with it, but somehow becomes such a social pariah that nobody will have anything to do with him for the rest of his life...that strikes me as the very definition of a pyrrhic victory.

So with Hernandez and MVP gone, that means within the span of six months, every member of the Beatdown Clan (Samoa Joe, Low Ki, Hernandez, and MVP) has left TNA except for poor Kenny King. Wonder if that's karma for King leaving ROH right after he won the tag team titles and pretty much ended poor Rhett Titus' career.

Dave had reported last year that WWE tried to block a bunch of the ROH/DUSA/EVOLVE and WrestleCon folks from getting buildings near Santa Clara, where they ran Mania, as they felt those companies were trying to ride their coattails. Being that they were unsuccessful in blocking them from finding buildings, perhaps they think their next step is to use NXT to corner the smart fan market and keep those fans at WWE-branded shows rather than ROH shows.

I do love WWE's reaction to the bad ratings from last week. "OK, so last week we have our worst ratings since the mid 90's built around a show with a 20 minute Cena/Cesaro match. What do we need to rebuild our ratings? A *30* minute Cena/Cesaro match!" Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the match happened and all...but that strikes me as perhaps a strange reaction to last week's poor rating.

That was a fun squash.

Eh, that finish was more for the live crowd than for the WWE Network crowd, and there are probably more people watching in Japan than on the Network right now. It wasn't a bad finish for a nostalgia match in a foreign country and Neville wasn't hurt at all by having a good match here.

Wait, Jericho is still calling himself Y2J?

I woke up at 4 am to smoke a brisket this morning, put it on, and was about to go back to sleep when I realized that this was on this morning so I'll be watching. Unless I fall back asleep, which is very, very possible.

Serious question: how can people listen to the audio shows on the WON site? I've only listened to a handful, and it was enough to turn me off of the audio forever. Bryan comes off as the worst, most obnoxious AM radio host ever, and Dave often seems woefully underprepared for these shows. What really stands out to me is the podcast they did after the CM Punk interview with Colt Cabana. You have Bryan, in his awful, fake radio voice basically reading a transcript of the Punk/Cabana interview to Dave, because Dave hadn't bothered to listen to what was obviously the biggest piece of wrestling news anywhere in the world at that moment. As Bix has pointed out, it did lead to a funny moment of Dave's shock at finding out that Punk had been wrestling with MRSA, but overall, it's awful radio. It's not like these guys are new at this, as Dave has been doing this show since the late 90's, and Bryan has basically become a full-time podcaster at this point, so I'm shocked at how bad these shows are, and it stuns me that people can actually sit through this. At one point, I was listening to a call-in show with Bryan, and he was actually saying things like, "Who is this, and why are you calling?" You're spending all of this money on production, hire a goddamned phone screener!

Is Samoa Joe the first true independent contractor WWE has hired in a long time?

If one single person actually owns the Memphis tape library, I would imagine that is more valuable than TNA's tape library. Even with WWE's issues with getting people to watch older footage on the Network, their ability to do a really good Jerry Lawler DVD probably blows away their ability to put together a TNA DVD that would make "The Self Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior" look downright even-handed.

History has shown that once a company starts falling behind on pay, the end is usually in sight. For all of TNA's faults, their checks usually cleared and were sent on time. Now with that no longer happening, I have to think this might finally really be the end.

And then today, Zach Lowe drops a Jerry Lawler "pulling down the strap" reference in his 35 things to like and dislike about the NBA season column: http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-supersize-nba-season-ending-things-i-like-and-dont-like/ Have to say, of all of the places I expect to read a Jerry Lawler reference out there, Zach Lowe's column would have ranked at or near the bottom of that list.

Also, who would have thought a year ago, that on a WrestleMania show that included Bryan, Ambrose, Rollins, Cesaro, and others with great reputations, that the top three workers on the show would wind up being Rusev, Reigns, and Lesnar? That's pretty wild.

I did enjoy HHH making sure he got WrestleMania payoffs for all of his buddies in his match, even though it made no sense for the nWo to be backing up Sting (seriously, they couldn't have gotten Flair, Arn Anderson, and the Steiners?). Say what you will about Hunter, he does look out for his friends at least.

I am sympathetic to Loss' argument about last night. If somebody were to say that they had a problem with the way the main event ended, I wouldn't have an answer to that. If you paid your hard-earned $9.99 (or $64.99) for the show to see Reigns/Lesnar end in a decisive finish, you didn't get what you wanted last night. That is on WWE for not delivering. That said, I don't know that it really matters anymore because the WWE business model no longer seems to be built around selling big matches the way it once was. WrestleMania is sold on the brand name WrestleMania. Look at the number of people on this board who were complaining endlessly about the build for the show, but bought it anyway. Why? It wasn't because any one match on this show caught our imagination, but because the WrestleMania brand automatically means we are probably going to buy. I don't think it's different for casual fans either. Since last night was built around "WrestleMania moments" ahead of any one WrestleMania match, the finish to last night's show was beneficial to the WrestleMania brand name. Most of the reaction I've seen from casual fans and "smart" fans alike has been what a great ending it was to the show. From a WrestleMania brand standpoint, last night's finish worked quite well. It seemed momentous. Would it have worked even 15 years ago, when they had to protect matches? No, but that's no longer the business model. It's no longer about getting fans to shell out $55-65 to their cable provider, it's about getting people to buy $9.99 subscriptions to their network. Matches no longer mean anything. It's not necessarily something I'm happy about, but it is the new reality. And ultimately, it's better for WWE to be about selling WrestleMania as a brand above selling it based around any one, or any 5 matches. If a show is built around one match, and that match doesn't deliver or delivers something the fans don't want, maybe those fans don't buy the next big match. If a show is built around a brand name, people will keep buying it no matter what. It's no longer about getting fans to spend $55-65 a month on PPVs. It's about retaining those fans as network subscribers month after month. That means they can get away with pulling off a finish like last night's PPV, which was not the proper culmination of the Lesnar/Reigns title program. It was an exciting, and not necessarily expected way to end the biggest PPV of the year, that successfully sets up six more months of PPVs on the Network. So yeah, it's kind of a shitty way to end last night's show for the fans who were interested in seeing a decisive win, one way or another, to the Lesnar/Reigns program which has been brewing for two months, but ultimately, that's not the business WWE is in anymore. They don't deliver matches anymore, they deliver events. And the way this event ended, it left most fans thinking they witnessed something great.