Matt D

The TV was stronger when they had 1-2 Six Man Tag groups running around to run matches against. That seemed like the magic bullet a couple of years ago.

They're not trying to sell people to go to the weekly show. TV is their highest form of revenue, with the network being second. Live events would be third? Or Merchandising? I don't know. Bix or someone can break this down better. I'm not saying you're wrong, but they feel that having jobber matches on Monday (and to a lesser extent Thursday) night would hurt the ratings too much. This is a good Dangerous Alliance Podcast challenge, actually: Try to rebook 1984 Mid South or 1984 Crockett if they were primarily worried about going up against Breaking Bad and selling a digital network.

There are three issues, I'd say, that are more important than what you're looking at. You're seeing a symptom, not the illness. 1.) There's no more fluidity of the roster. Guys don't come in and out nearly as much. A guy like Kofi Kingston or Dolph Ziggler has been on the active roster for eight years or so. We're not talking Smackdown/Raw split, let alone territories. 2.) The sheer amount of TV/PPVs in a world where every match is a match between two stars. The sort of hierarchy you like on your roster doesn't really exist. I'm not sure it can exist. It's much looser and more nebulous. They're on TV for 5 hours (main shows) a week with something like 15+ special PPV type events now. 3.) This is theory and rumor, but they don't want anyone to get over too much. They don't want anyone to be more important than the company. WWE is the draw not any specific wrestler. Brock's an exception. Cena's an exception. I always thought this had a lot to do with how Rock left and with how Brock left especially but the usual way WWE will debut a guy is with a big push and then a drop down the roster so that he knows his place and they can see how he handles it. Then, they'll build him back up but so much of that initial momentum can never be recovered. Basically, no, they don't want to protect guys. That's the idea.

Parv, do you understand the prevailing thought behind the start-stop pushes of the last ten years or so?

Mark Henry, 2009.

Five years from now some kid who is the spiritual successor of Kris Z will be combing the site for results for his spreadsheet and will end up very confused.

Re: Sasha. To me the biggest thing is this: unlike Emma and Paige and even Summer Rae, who were distilled or watered down or in the case of Paige, inverted completely, Sasha really felt like Sasha out there. On a show that Parv was bitching about the character work being a mugging for the camera after a move was hit (whether valid or not) she showed so much personality, whether through body language, jawing, or her distinct actions (mocking Charlotte repeatedly, playing up the alliance with Brie at the beginning, the desperate way she ducked out of the way of the spear). Maybe that's because Del Ray is an agent now or because Vince was more familiar with her character or maybe it's because she's a couple of years older than Paige was when she was called up but it stood out and boded well.

1998 Flair > 2002 Flair 2002 hogan > 1998 Hogan? I think we've got issues here.

Billy Robinson managing Kamala in Pro Wrestling USA is pretty out there.

2015 Undertaker is more like 1998 Flair than 1998 Hogan.

If the lights went off during Diamond Dallas Page vs Goldberg from Halloween Havoc 98 and Flair came out with an entourage and ran over Goldberg in a limo, I kind of wonder how that'd be received. Would Goldberg vs Hogan at the Georgia Dome be a better example?

It's funny but the ending of the JBL/Cole show has distanced me from their product as much as anything. That was pretty much my only WWE routine since Smackdown moved to Thursday. I'd check their youtube site a lot more a month or two ago than I do now.

I'm glad that they seemingly figured out the best way to use these guys are in tag matches where they can be protected and someone else can get the rub, at least if they are going to run Wyatt/Harper vs Reigns/Sting. You rarely saw Fritz or Bill Watts or Verne come back for a singles match. It was usually a tag (though not always, yeah).

why give away their biggest money drawing Wrestlemania match? (I'm only half kidding)

Performance of the night was Parv heeling on the females like he was Bobby Heenan.

Apparently Crossfit makes one immune to the damage from a half dozen German suplexes.

I caught this. I don't think it was quite as bad as Will put it. It had a lot of problems that a triple threat inherently has. I think Sasha was going overboard to try to keep some elements of story and I do think she came off as a star, and I'm curious to see what Parv thinks about her character work relative to the rest of the roster. I think the pacing was off, especially during the finishing stretch. They really should have gone home right before the dive train. They had the crowd for bits and lost it for others bits and it was obvious that they were torn. Some of them were diehard geeks who wanted this to succeed, some of them just liked the Flair name, and some were the general female Bella fans that you get post Total Divas. It wasn't a disaster and I think it can be spun positively. At times Brie looked way out of place relative to the over the top complex spots (for good or ill) that the other two were doing. At other times, she almost seemed to ground things in a good way. I don't know. It was a weird match but I don't think it spelled the success or failure of this experiment one way or the other.

What's the shopping list look like? Big bag of cool ranch doritos make in on there? In process now. Only chicken is on sale. This pleases no one. I did catch Bray's awesome red pajama pants though. I miss old WCW PPVs that were on Saturdays.

Haven't seen much but I did catch Steph warning JoJo and JoJo having real fear in her eyes considering what's happened to people in the past.

I'm behind on everything so I'm using the 20-30 minute window that for sure I can watch wrestling without distraction tonight to watch a Volador vs UG singles match for Segunda Caida. Putting the kid to sleep and a long supermarket run both have to happen tonight too.

Is it better that Owens wins tonight or that Cena keeps doing the open challenges?

Matches feel more special if we didn't have them before, even if some of the ones that we did are still new to me.

I love that after trying to get Shoe to do this and goc trying to point at me to do it, goc ended up doing it in the end.

Someone (like Stacey) give me a list of the TV matches since the last PPV I need to try to catch in the next few days.