Sean Liska

It's tough to get a read on WWE right now. House show attendance is historically the best gague of where a company stands, but WWE's attendance is heading the opposite way of most other business indicators. Clearly they've killed PPV by runnning 14 high-priced PPVs a year while giving away 4 hours of free TV with frequent competitive matches between headline guys. Only an absolute diehard would spend $45 for a B-show nowadays.

Wow, I'm an idiot. Can I get a mulligan for speeding through this stuff while at work? Sounds like the domestic will be a bit below the 560,000 that WM19 did, then. Not as disastrous but they certainly didn't take advantage of Bret's return and HBK's retiremment.

This quote is from a Torch article on the main site from Caldwell. I just did the math. "WrestleMania 26 made $19 million in PPV revenue. Dividing that number by the 885,000 buys, WWE only made $21.47 in revenue per PPV buy. Considering the domestic price was $54.99 and cable/satellite companies receive about half of their cut, WWE only received 39.1 percent of the domestic price per buy."

The Torch's math has North American buys for Mania in the 350,000-400,000 range. That would be catastrophic.

Mania was down to around 885,000 buys this year. Pretty surprising since they had such a good lineup, but the general interest in WWE right now just feels down compared to previous years.

Hogan hates being associated with failure. I wonder how much longer he'll be involved with this. I guess the wildcard is that it sounds like he actually does need the money.

Who's also married and has one daughter, if memory serves. I doubt that makes him uncommon.

From today's WO update posted by Bryan: -- I will be flying to Atlanta tomorrow to conduct the first-ever Wrestling Observer Shoot, which will be available on DVD both online and in major retailers around the country. Our first guest will be Abdullah the Butcher, and he's promised to talk openly about everything in his career and even things that happened before he got into wrestling. I'll also be touring his famous HOUSE OF RIBS and sampling some of the fare. The DVD will include other extras including never-before-seen matches from Abby's private collection. If you have any questions for Abdullah on any subject email them to me ASAP at [email protected] and we'll ask as many as we can. We'll have much more on this project in the next few months, and we've got several other guests lined up for future DVDs. I'm very excited about this project and want to thank The Cancer on our board for making it all possible. I'm a little nervous about Dave letting Bryan use the WO name for this.

This sucks. Batista has been great as a heel. Too bad we only got a few months of him in this role.

They still give away a lot. Two weeks after Wrestlemania, Edge and Jericho had a twenty minute TV match. Smackdown's Wrestlemania main event was given away on free TV, and no one even remembers it. Then we had a twenty minute Edge-Jericho-Swagger three way last week. On one hand, I love all the good wrestling WWE gives us, but why would I drop $50 to see Edge and Jericho at Extreme Rules? Orton and Swagger have already wrestled on TV, and now we're supposed to pay to see it again after Orton won the first meeting clean. CM Punk is one of the freshest heels they've had in ages, and his first match with Cena should have been a big deal. Instead they've already had two forgettable matches given away for free. Rey and Punk had an awesome TV match and then had a five-minute WM match. There's not much incentive to buy PPVs anymore outside of the Rumble, Chamber, and Mania season when you feel like you're paying for something important.

It's esepcially cute when you consider he's been a major on-air character for TNA over the last several years.

Is that legit?

I think you're understating Vince's importance. The guy is an insane control freak that mico-manages every aspect of the company's operations. He's one of the greatest minds in wrestling history. He understands the psychology of drawing money in wrestling, which is such a lost art nowadays. It sounds to me like Stephanie has more of an administrative role in creative in terms of hiring and keeping things organized.

Vince dying or them not being able to get any American TV clearance. Barring that, they'll be fine for a good while longer.

Wow, that's a terrible comparison.

It was at the hotel bar.

That's oddly worded. I would assume Dave is a progressive enough guy to not describe two guys kissing as, "very lewd". Sounds like there's more to it.

Meltzer addressed the issue with Orlando Jordan's boyfriend in this week's Observer. Sounds like Flair was justified, although I'm sure some here will be skeptical. "(Boyfriend) was not used on the television show the past two weeks. This was based on an incident at the hotel bar after the tapings three weeks ago where he was doing something described as very lewd in front of the wife of a major executive who was offended. Ric Flair ended up getting him to stop and cut a promo on him over it, but it may not have saved his job."

Maybe he's still angry that JR left his job as VP and moved back to Oklahoma. Vince is supposed to be weird about loyalty.

There was a lot that didn't make sense about Cade's interview.

It's the only really solid Hogan match since, what, Hogan-Vince in 2003? Hogan in that match looked like a guy that could still headline a PPV. The crowd went nuts for it. Hogan looked like a superhero. If he was sticking it to Hogan, he failed pretty miserably. He could have easily wrestled a boring match like the one Hogan had with Orton a year later that no one remembers.

Here's Shawn doing the turnbuckle spot. Go to about 3:47 in. Nothing he did in that match would have been out of place in a mid-90's HBK match. It was probably jarring to people in 2005 because it had been so long since he worked as a heel. But go back and watch any match he had with Nash, another instance where he felt he had to go all-out to get a good match. You could make the same video. He always bumped like a nutjob.

I think there's something to this and partly explains why Vince takes so long to pull the trigger on people now. The Jeff Hardy thing has to hurt so much. They give him the world title, he's extremely hot, has a great 8-month run as the top face on Smackdown, and then he quits and eventually shows up in TNA. You can see why Vince would become paranoid about who he gives his mega-pushes to.

Wow, you beat me to this by a few minutes. But that is a classic HBK bump. I've even seen Edge try to steal it, poorly.

Here's the YouTube video that I swear started this whole theory. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0BYSLdthvQ Again, I'll grant the bump off the big boot looked stupid. But what else is out of the ordinary? The spot where Michaels gets his head thrown into the turnbuckle and then does a front somersault off the bottom rope is an old HBK favorite. The spot where he lays on the top ropes, gets kicked in the stomach, and goes flying crotch first onto the top rope is an old HBK favorite. The big Flair flip into the corner is an HBK favorite. Where is the scandal here?