Matt D

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.

It's less about rewarding him than it is about not punishing him.

All NECW is off the internet? Was Maverick Wild a good sleazy heel or am I misremembering that from 16 years ago.

It's a reaction show. Falling asleep is a perfectly normal reaction to what WWE tries to pass off as wrestling these days. What will be funny is when the camera finds Will sleeping at Wrestlemania.

Astoundingly stacked big card by CMLL standards. Hair vs Hair: Volador, Jr. vs Nego Casas Hair vs Hair: Rush vs Maximo Sexy Mexico vs Japan: Mistico/Valiente/Mascara Dorada/Dragon Lee vs Okumura/Fuijin/Raijin/Kamaitachi When was the last time CMLL even ran an atomicos match? They didn't do one at any point that they had a 4 man Ingobernables line-up or at any point during Thunder vs UG when it might have made sense.

I'd be hesitant on that explanation. I really enjoy the two matches with Hogan in 91. I've written about them here before (though years ago, so always, there's a caveat there). But they weren't supposed to be great matches. That wasn't his role on the card. So it's more of a case that we weren't put in a position to know how good he was because it wasn't his job to have the sort of matches that would have shown us until years later.

Did Puppet H show up yet? That's the only thing from the trailer that I'm looking forward to. I miss Puppet H, but I miss the JBL/Cole show too, far more than I thought I would. Hornswoggle Lannister was great.

I don't think we should discount the possibility of Andy Kaufman at this stage.

"Turning" He's Jimmy Valiant in the York Foundation.

I've thought about this a little, but just haven't had time to post. The main thing I'm trying to do with a review is to answer the question of "What can we learn from this match?" What can we learn about the wrestlers, about the style, about the point in time? "This is a good match" is something that can be learned, but it's by far not the only thing that can be. Eight times out of ten, it's probably not about what can be learned so much as what can be reaffirmed, and I think that's okay too. I can't slip in all of the pop references that someone like Eric does. I can't craft mine to tell broad sweeping tangentially related entertaining stories like DEAN or Raven Mack. I don't utilize star ratings. But I try to distill something from the match that I think people should know about it.

Everytime someone loses, someone gains as well. That's the nature of the game.

I think they can make almost anything seem important with enough build, at least in the short term. We saw that with Reigns' title win.

Flair in 02 has the Arn moment. Arn should get a point for that.

We don't make ridiculous bets enough around here.

I think Dylan would stress more than "projects" but also making sure that HHH is the focal point, either through his human avatar on Earth in Rollins, or just himself, looking to things like his multiple highlighted segments at Mania last year and how he's presented as babyface now in some key ways.