Matt D

This is an interesting question for me. It's not been rising and falling so much as me filling in gaps in my viewing from when we started. Obviously, that makes certain people fall or rise by default, but it's not always due to their own actions. Then there are people who are rising in my estimation but that might not make my list anyway, like Duggan who's looked great in the new Houston footage.

They need a Donna Reed style anti divas revolution heel

I'm with Johnny.

I was there live for the Boston one, so I might lean otherwise. I haven't seen it in ten years though.

I almost crashed the car yesterday I was laughing so hard.

How does that Briscoe match rank with their ROH one from Boston?

The way that Eadie worked in and out of the armholds in the opening stretch made me wish that they put him over Martel instead of Hansen. He would have been a great AWA champ for their ring style.

I think "impact" will hurt him.

EDIT: Let's just respectfully say that I think we have more to gain from respecting a plurality of well-explained opinions than trying to force a single truth through when it comes to all sorts of things. It'll make us all happier and stronger in the end.

He's had kind of a hard week. But then considering how many HOF ballots we've seen this week with Edge on them...

I didn't submit because: 1.) By the time I really felt like I had a handle on lucha, I was on disc 5 and to gauge things, I would have had to go back to the start 2.) I decided to go off and do the SC stuff and just look broadly all over instead 3.) Disc 6 was killer with all the trios matches (though I probably wouldn't feel that way now) 4.) It's a lot easier for me to watch/annotate wrestling streaming than off of a DVD at this point. It was the gateway drug for me to watch hundreds of lucha matches, but I never actually finished it.

I hold the Kamala match against Bryan

I'm excited for that match. Eadie, as Ax, was very good at not taking crap from babyfaces who didn't want to give him what they should. Mil, more than any babyface in the history of wrestling, had a tendency to do that. Very curious to see what it looks like (and how it compares to Mil working with Hansen which is fun for all the reasons you'd think).

I'm going to defend Parv here in that I don't think it works quite like that. It's an ingrained function. He's not sitting there with a notebook. Those factors are just constantly present when he's watching a match. He can't shut them off. It's sort of a model overlaid upon a match where things that happen pull in one direction or another upon the grids. And you can train yourself to think like that, or it can happen naturally over time, or it can just be who you are, but I'm not sure if you'll be happier if you train yourself to think that way. A lot is gained in the process but something is lost.

Are those people that wouldn't have made your list anyway?

I'm bumping this, mainly because I'm a jerk.

Edge made it in five times.

Good Ol' Will from Texas still never gave us the link for that.

Did you miss the part where I said Naylor? It's a deal breaker otherwise.

I'm pretty certain that these two will be my top two luchadores, and very likely both within my top five. I'm just not sure which of the two will rank higher. I just want to throw this out there now with a few comments, and I'll try to go more in depth later. Satanico is everything advertised. He's simply the best rudo of all time, quite possibly the best bad guy in the history of wrestling. He's able to portray the joy of evil through his mannerisms and expressions in a way that I've never seen from anyone else. There's almost nothing in lucha I love more than the way he directs traffic in a trios beatdown. He's a technical master, with matwork full of struggle and weight. An extremely smart worker that could have one of the best matches of all time with little more than basic strikes, but that could also turn it up for quick-paced brawls or some of the most amazing title matches you'd ever see. While he has a few babyface (we'll call it that and not tecnico) runs and certainly played that role with the crowd behind him in some rudo vs rudo matches, I think, with him, it's more of a case of being the deepest pond than a wide one. He's as bad as bad can be, the very best of the very worst. Casas, on the other hand, feels far more versatile to me. He has workrate sprints, heated apuestas matches, big title matches, feuds full of character. He's one of the most emotive, charismatic wrestlers of all times, both in his younger, athletic work and in his later, wizened trickster god persona. I don't think he's quite as strong a rudo as Satanico and at times his charisma could even be a negative because it can take away from the clarity of his matches when up against a straight tecnico. I'm not sure there's anyone nominated who has as many great performances that feel as different from one another (maybe Funk?). For someone who could play so naturally cocky a jerk, he could also garner incredible amounts of sympathy. Just an amazing range that carries on to today, where he can light up a trios match just by stepping in through the ropes. I do think there were periods in the early-mid 00s where he could, as a tecnico, fade into the background too much in trios matches, but that was him playing his role and not overshadowing the main focus on the match, so it's hard to hold it against him too much. It wasn't something I often saw with Satanico though. Someone like Hijo del Santo feels "purer" to me, but I think these two have to be my top 2. I'm not sure it isn't a wide vs deep argument here, the very best at one thing (while being very good at so many other things) against someone who's almost the best at just about everything.

Ok, so here's another thing, last for now. I tried to get at it in my initial post (which I still like, but you need more detail here, apparently). There is no shame in Flair being someone's #3 or #5 or even #15. We're not Brodying Flair. None of us are. We're not Dynamite Kidding him. (There's the we again). Flair's a smart enough worker to rate. I just don't think the value shift, whether I'm overstating it or not, is something that benefits him as much as other top ten contenders. When it comes to the very top, the difference between 10 and 1 of all time, that's when these things can really matter. Frankly, I think that means he probably should do worse this time around (not from any moral reason, just as a prediction), as the people above him in that poll that would be "hurt" by this value shift, would be hurt lockstep with him while a number of others below him could be bolstered. EDIT: Time's an issue right now, but I shamefully admit that I would, in a heartbeat, listen to a Parv/Rob Naylor podcast about Harley Race.

I think that would be distracting from the broader point I was trying to make, Parv, so I'm happy to rephrase every "we" to a broader "people." Or "some people." Hell, I wrote that thing on my phone standing in line for a commuter bus. Let me distill. I'm saying: 1.) Flair still holds up well, even with all the new footage, on the 2005 metrics. I'm not seeing much argument otherwise from anyone. 2.) The 2015 metrics valued BY SOME PEOPLE maybe aren't the same as the metrics valued in 2005 and potentially (maybe even due to his strengths) Flair does not perform as well as other wrestlers in these. 3.) I don't like the idea of people being desensitized to Flair or arguing against him because it's too easy to just call him the GOAT and people want to feel different and edgy or whatever, since I think it's not a matter of that so much as a shift in values in SOME of the voting base over the last decade. with the admission that "metrics" isn't quite the right word. I kind of liked my first post though. This one is sort of conciliatory bullshit. I'm going to stick with that initial post and we'll just put everything I wrote right now into teeny tiny text and make it horrific comic sans.

Show of hands, folks? Revaluing smart vs hard relative to 2005? Post-workrate whatever as part of the general PWO discussion over the last five years? How about minimalism? Is there a we here? I'm on the extremity of it but this is a thing, right?

We know. We know you value action and a visceral, gripping feel in matches and suplexes. We even know you value cardio now. Other people here still do too, but not everyone values those things as much as they used to, as much as we were supposed to in years' past. I think the story of this poll compared to the last is the freedom from old dogmas due to the rise of the post-workrate paradigm and people who have come to value smart over hard. Even then you are arguing AT people who will still have him at 3 or 6 or 15 out of every wrestler ever because they still see him as the best at certain aspects. They just have come to value those aspects less than others (some of which they still rate him highly in, just not highly enough) which along with the discovery and propagation of new footage is one of the only reasons to even do a poll again. So you can do another project on why workrate still matters and why our growth as viewers and people thinking about this stuff over the last 10 years is just relativistic bullshit that has no basis in reality or you can let go and accept that some people's metrics have shifted before you drive all of us insane.

I got a kick out of Bosch talking about Gilbert.