Matt D

There's a lot of Shawn Michaels in him. He knew how to get over, no matter the cost.

Better than Brody.

Big Show has a very outside chance at 100.

+1 for fighting Godzilla.

WWE values Total Divas more than it does Sasha/Becky/Etc.

Styles and Joe are guys I might make a last run at watching more of.

Cena, Dustin, Henry, Cesaro, probably Sheamus

Steph sure sells lots of stock, it seems.

One thing Steven reemphasized for me is that it's not that you learn something with every case. It's just more data to look at. Some new lens you can use to reexamine previous work. If you use that lens, reexamine it, and find nothing to go with, that's fine. It's just another tool at your disposal when you're working to understand a wrestler as a whole and to figure out #6 vs #5 or whatever. Another experiment to run. In the end, we disagree. I'm always happy to agree with you, Parv. I'm always happy to disagree too.

Concussions are an issue as is drug use. I don't think they're enough of one to invalidate the point as a whole. I think you can learn a lot from an author's last work, even if he's a little slower, or a little more derivative or no longer ahead of the curve. Playback is not a strong Raymond Chandler book relative to his previous works. It came out five years after Long Goodbye, and after he had lost his wife, in the year before he died. I think you can still learn a lot about him as an artist from it, and what you see there can help you in evaluating his previous, far superior works. It doesn't meant that you'll end up necessarily thinking they're better or worse specifically, but it could help you see the color in them differently, the themes more clearly, and in that, you might come to the conclusion that he was a better or worse writer. That, to me,is a much better example than sports or spuds.

I do that all the time. And then I keep doing it. I figure it's fair game right up until the point someone quotes you in a reply. I lost a nice bit about "Everyone values different things." for one of my last ones.

We've had a ten minute conversation about potatoes after that. You can't just put out the first bit of potato talk. The mental illness argument was one I was having a lot more problem with, to be honest.

I'm higher than most people on the Foley match, which is totally beside the point.

Yeah, that gets factored in. You're looking for patterns, not for one magic bullet. How they learn matters. If they don't learn, that matters too. If they never needed to learn, that matters. Frankly, isn't what you just said true with BIGLAV too though? What if Wrestler A is best at Psychology in 2000, best at offense in 1984 and best at selling in 1994? Etc. Big Show was throwing missile dropkicks in 1997 when he was young and most athletic but didn't get the ring presence down or figured how much to give and when to give it until years later. That sort of thing.

Flair is the poster child for what you can learn. We've had this argument before. Multiple times. You can dig through the archives to find my feelings on this specific thing with Flair if you care so much. There are pages and pages of back and forth on this. I don't suggest that you do it. You should focus on WoS and other things to round out your ballot as we get close to the end. Everyone will get a lot more out of that. I don't think you've written a ton about WoS past Breaks, and I'm sure people would be more interested to see your thoughts on those matches than to go around this circle again. I've made a general clarification point about the reasoning because I thought that might have still somehow been unclear. If you want to argue with me more about this, you can argue with the me of two years ago, McFly.

We've been over this again and again and again. Of the people I know factoring in post-prime, it's not to: 1) Average the star rating of every match (or performance) for the entire career or 2) calculate every stat in Parv's BIGLAV. It's because they value highly what Parv would have as the psychology stat, or what Loss came up with as "Vision." And that downplays a lot of other more athletic or technical stats. And the way to really understand that metric is to watch a lot of matches and look for patterns and use elements of matches as a lens, to watch different matches as experiments to see how a wrestler will deal with a particular situation, etc. And in that regard, every single match a wrestler has might shed some light on every other single match that he has. You're constantly building a bigger picture of who that wrestler was, how he wrestled, what was his vision. In that regard, there may or may not be things that you can learn from his post prime, once some of the physical gifts have diminished or if he's in a very different situation. It's not ever, ever, ever about penalizing. It's always about understanding. It's about gathering more data to understand the wrestler as a whole, to understand his development, to understand his vision, to gain a new lens to try looking at his prime or pre-prime matches with, to run that experiment and see what you discover about his performances. It doesn't necessarily apply for a Great Match or BIGLAV driven approach.

If they do this, I wouldn't want them to change the NXT formula at all. elevate some guys out of NXT, have some enhancement matches on every show, debut the new NXT guys, and have separate brands of the current roster plus some of the elevated NXT wrestlers. They could loop in a crusierweight title out of the tournament this year, could run with a six man tag title on the Raw show (if it's going to be Raw and Smackdown) to fill time. Have the US challenge each week too. Smackdown could have the Cruiserweights. Use the Total Divas cast on one show, maybe with a Divas Tag Title so that they can focus on multiple of them at once, and the others on another, etc. It's not rocket science the ways they could do this.

All I need is enough data points from enough different scenarios to feel confident about my triangulation.

Naylor leaving felt very weird at the time, that it was something that had to be done on a corporate level, that it had to be a clean sweep of sorts, just necessary business. I could be way off, mind you, but that's how it felt at the time.

Maybe they can just put Mr. Niebla in all the remaining matches to reassure us that it's mostly business as usual.

OJ, They're off youtube, but this is one of the Monterrey ones, right? http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1c12z8_el-hijo-del-santo-vs-blue-panther-5-28-00_sport

Good question. I watched a bunch early into my lucha watching, so my opinions are spurious at best. I liked this when I saw it a month or two ago: This might be the best single match to watch? A lot of the other 2006 stuff went down, unfortunately. There are a lot of fun trios with the Ultimo Guerrero, Atlantis, Rey Bucanero, Olimpico, Toscano/Tarzan Boy stable up against Mistico, Dr. Wagner, Jr., and Friends, like this, which will at least give you a sense of the spirit of things:

Have you seen much rudo Atlantis yet?

I'd guess it'd be more of a case of Vince booking a match and Taker just wanting to destroy someone. Shane has tons of hubris and a punchable face. It's more that Vince gave Shane a mythical task. The dragon doesn't care about the king who sends the knight to slay it. It just wants lunch.

I might regret saying this later, but anything to shake things up would be preferable to what we have now.