Matt D

I watched the two ring battle royal and the promo after went a bit long but it still got me ready to watch the Reed vs Kamala matches.

Wasn't part of that the fact he worked six-mans after the injury happened.

Berzerker is one of the best guys on the 92 WWF roster.

How much of it is the old TNA crowd?

That's new to us, right?

I skipped some stuff and made it most of the way through, and you know, I just can't bring myself to be nearly as angry or annoyed as you guys are. I could when Bryan was being horribly mismanaged. This, though? Eh. We're all paying next to nothing for these shows now. It all just seems really low salience to get yourself so worked up over. I like the Bruiser/Crusher thing. That's kind of what some of these guys are now. I think we're just sort of in a cruising cycle until there's a changing of the guard. Everything interesting in WWE right now is centered around Dunn vs HHH, and then a couple of wrestlers (Cesaro, maybe Owens, maybe not, Rusev, maybe the New Day). I just don't see how you guys can raise the vitriol after years and years of the same. Nothing about Taker coming back and the match being a no contest was a huge surprise. Whenever WWE's entered into a situation with no good booking option over the last few years, they just find a way to book no finish at all, it seems. It'd be one thing if they were coming up with new and surprising ways to do stupid things, but this is just more and more of the same. If anything, Will's doing it to himself by not reading the news/following the shows, because it lets him come in with too open a mind when he should have already set his expectations more realistically from keeping an ear open. Why the fuck would you ever give WWE the benefit of the doubt? What has Vince and co. done to deserve that?

Needs more Bock

I applaud your optimism. It is too pure for this world.

All that said, I don't think they book to create stars over the last many years, and I think it's very much a Vince(and maybe Dunn) quirk. I think it's a side effect of winning the Monday Night War and having no competition but also because Vince felt personally burned when it came to some guys (and Divas as well) who became bigger than the WWE.

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)