Matt D

Bryan is 39. I looked it up before posting.

Rey's knees are only 4 years old.

Christian is immediately the best 40-something guy on the roster.

Holy shit. I was going to joke that Christian should come out when Edge was getting triple teamed at the start.

Good on Hurricane for not being on the gas.

Nice of Ali to let Dominik borrow his gear after he got eliminated.

The titantron hands going up and down for Bryan feel like a Monty Python thing.

Last time you demanded that, you got Bad Bunny. This time? The Miz.

You could tell that Edge was pretty happy to feed for Ricochet.

Who the hell gave Ziggler a belt?

Sami hyping up Orton should be a weekly act.

Sami's working a Cuban Assassin gimmick.

You just keep going on with that TNA gimmick tonight.

They have a ton of time between now and Mania right?

My mind: Hey, handcuffs. I wonder what Bossman would be doing if he was still alive. He'd be a good guy to bring back for legends things. The old guys were really pared down with all the deaths. He, I wonder why they don't use Barbarian. Hey, they should put Meng and Barbarian in the HOF.

The biggest thing on the line in this match is EverRise's shirt sales.

Just caught up. Lots to go through. It was interesting just how many people were in there through most of it. @El-P complained about lack of stories but Billie Kay carried the first half of this. Her trying to team up before getting in and being torn about the Iiconics pose and trying to be friends with three people/entities, etc. Jax and Moon looked pretty bad. Mostly everyone else looked really good. I liked the Alexa stuff, to be honest. She's playing her character in the ring and changing up the way she's moving and reacting. The character may be problematic but Alexa's doing well with working to it in a setting like this. Blame Prichard, not her. Lots of great little moments, like Victoria hitting the widow's peak after Peyton did it or the Naomi/Bianca stuff or the Nia/Tamina stuff and Lana's big moment. I like how they cycle through the "legends" and you get people you haven't seen last time. I saw the WWE Rewind (or whatever) thing with Bianca featured earlier today and I'm pretty happy for her because she put in such a showing last time, even better than this one, I think. I don't know. I enjoyed this.

I love that their response to this was Bad Bunny

Goldberg likes MMA stuff. Use some holds. There's a story you could tell that wasn't that. Something with narrative and build and a payoff. Of course the other option is just to not fucking book it? It's a style and a pattern, not just one match.

The WWE "Good parts only" finisher spam sprint title match style is the most bankrupt title match structure in history. Just hollow and pointless.

There’s a “2x speed” joke here somewhere.

The only reason they might do the opposite is if they decide they can coast any go lighter on creating new content and just decide to dump already processed and converted things, so the people happy to get readily available things like Challenge might do well but people wanting more Omni shows still wouldn’t.

If anyone really wants to delve, the other Phil (Being Rippa) posted a bunch of road reports and I imagine Phil shows up in a number of them. http://deathvalleydriver.com/1001_otr/

I'm far behind as things have been crazy lately, but thanks for the Herd interview. It's interesting. Our understanding of WCW is like a blind man touching an element. At first, we just have the text, what we see. Then we have Meltzer/Keller/Beverly and the sheets. Then we have the early RF shoots from wrestlers. Eventually, we get books from people like Ross and Flair as well. We got the later era shoots like the long Flair one. Then we finally get things like Bischoff's podcast. Each time, it paints in the picture a little more, contextualizes things, gives us different perspectives, different things we can choose to believe. The elephant starts to take more and more shape as it goes. That's exactly what we got here. It gave us reasoning for things we took for granted before, gave us a counterpoint and some emotional underpinning to someone who wasn't a person so much as a caricature previously. We believe what we believe and toss aside what we don't, but it brings us closer to a meaningful truth.

Kayfabe 350 lbs and over? You don’t want guys like Hogan (303) or even Hansen (321) in this in my mind, but you don’t want to lose Bigelow at 390. and second the vote for Herd.