rzombie1988

Impact winning Best Show was sort of a fluke, as more than ever that particular year the half dozen or so WWE shows split the WWE vote. To a lesser extent, it's hard to remember but Impact was actually pretty decent for like two months that year during the Austin Aries chase to the title storyline, so it gave the hardcore anti WWE contingent a limb hang on to vote something different. Impact was actually pretty decent in the beginning of the year and had some good matches but it seemed to go down hill after they came back from the UK trip. I still think ROH TV was probably worse. It had no direction, no iPPV's to build to, promo's for shows that had already happened and looked like a giant mess, which is apparently was backstage.

MMA's coverage did away with most of the international coverage in the Observer. I don't think Dave watches Lucha, I know he doesn't watch Joshi and aside from NJPW, I don't think Dave is watching much Japanese wrestling either. We also all know Dave has never watched much Indies aside from I guess the occasional ROH big show. Meanwhile, UFC, Bellator and others are covered well. Subtract those things and there would be more time for other stuff. I don't blame him because we know what draws and believe me, Japanese wrestling or indies, it isn't. I always thought Bryan should cover the stuff Dave doesn't, or they should introduce a third person into the mix, like me(lol) to get some of the other stuff. I've also stated before that basically Dave has a ton of influence on what gets watched by people and what doesn't and people on here said that was BS, but its totally true. There's no way NJPW wins a damn thing without Dave watching it this year. The same thing with Joshi and AAA in the 90's and PRIDE in the 2000's. I think there's a really good mookieghana study in there if he could figure out how to do it.

I'm still very confused about how that Tana/Okada match won MOTY. That match wasn't very good. Okada blew half of his offense and Tana did tons of armwork and never followed up on it. It was easily my least favorite match of their series.

Claudio was always awesome -- Power, look, athletic, smarts -- though I haven't seen the very beginnings of his career so I can't comment on that. Everything I've seen from the Indies though was terrific. He had main event in the WWE written on him for a long time. Yeah, Claudio was one of the top can't miss prospects in the indies and now that he gets to work the smarter WWE style, he can produce even better stuff. He also won the ProWresBlog 2013 Wrestler of the Year award and was clearly the best worker on the planet in 2013. No one else managed to get good stuff out of Kane, Khali and pretty much everyone on the WWE roster and he even made Jack Swagger relevant. I'm still waiting for a true Cesaro vs Daniel Bryan match as their partial match earlier this year was great. I don't even think Cesaro has done his best stuff yet which is scary. He's gonna be super over when they finally turn him face and let him do the "HEY" chants.

Outside of the US I don't know but inside of the US, MLB is much more popular and always will be.

Jun was good but not on the level of the Big 4, Jumbo or Baba. He never had the ring presence or charisma to get to the next level and his moveset always kind of held him back a bit. I'm always kind of underwhelmed by his stuff. He can consistently put out good matches but rarely any great matches. The Ogawa title run was hugely panned. People still aren't over it. He got it due to being best buddies with Misawa and probably due to some surprise factor.

I kind of expect it to have the opposite effect, as people will find a way to rip the higher quality stuff off the Network and then it'll filter out to the torrent sites. That's just an observation though because I plan to give them my money for the Network as soon as they'll let me. I don't know if they will stop the pirating, because pirating is just easier sometimes, but I think they will be able to convert free streamers into $10 PPV customers. Granted, the people might download the show after anyway, but it will help a bit in that department. I don't think that pirating is that bad sometimes anyway as I'd rather have people watching my stuff for free than have them not watching it period. The first thing a lot of people are going to be doing is finding ways to rip stuff, if for no reason than their own personal collections. Perfect quality full seasons of Raw and SD would be highly sought after stuff. However, I still don't believe WWE will give everything away like they claim they will. I can totally see them choosing select episodes of Raw and SD, maybe 10 a year or so and rolling with that. Or they will find some way to package the Raw/SD eps in a "best of" manner. They've never released any full seasons to prove to me otherwise. They also can get away with no releasing full seasons of anything. On the overseas releases of footage: I don't have any facts to prove this but it does seem the biggest collectors of genre's of pirated stuff often comes from other countries. American's have pirated puro that the Japanese couldn't even dream of having. The biggest uploaders of wrestling footage do seem to come from the UK too.

The questions and the fact that live stuff gets more viewers. I've listened to some shows I wouldn't have otherwise due to them being live. Twitter is a great screener. If it's awful, you skip it.

Don't even get me started on Anderson... Oddly enough though I thought his best match was against Elgin.

I don't want to see Taker ever lose the streak. It's something that will never be repeated and to even have a shot at getting away with breaking it, you'd have to be a big name, which means you don't really need it anyway to be elevated. The streak break would just become the new Jericho line of "I beat The Rock and Austin in the same night".

Devitt to me hasn't shown anything truly special. His heavy dropkick and interference based offense is annoying and I think he is switchable. Could Shelly, KUSHIDA or Ibushi be inserted into his matches and produce similar or better results? Definitely. Ibushi would be much better, Shelly can work much better than he usually gets the time or vehicle to and KUSHIDA has the fire Devitt doesn't while having equally annoying offense. NJPW could lose him and lose absolutely nothing. I don't think he is awful but he's not half of what he is pimped to be. He's just another flippy who made the right connections and is in fantastic shape. He's not a great seller, he's not great at working smart and he has a bad habit of repeating moves. I don't really use twitter and don't think it means squat considering the audience he is trying to hit doesn't speak much English. It would be like if Cesaro was cutting great promo's in German in the WWE. Might be good but doesn't bring in any cash in the US. Punk, Dragon and Regal may love him but I don't. Workers hated Kumiko Maekawa and I liked her.

Change sucking dick to kissing butt, still homophobic/macho?

Most of the European fans suck Devitt's dick so hard just because he is Irish and likes to mess around on twitter. He's terribly overrated and really no different than your indy geeks of the world and such.

Definitely was a lot of good stuff but aside from The Shield or Daniel Bryan, it usually wasn't on Raw. The Authority angle booked me off of WWE TV for a while. TNA was just TNA. Agred that the TOS came way too late and got way too bad. Gonna be hard to toss out that rep and I don't think they will.

Believe me, it's hard to be positive about wrestling in 2013, especially when you have to watch all of it like I used to. Especially since Dave and Bryan don't watch the B-shows which are usually the best shows of the week. I don't blame them for not watching Main Event, Superstars or Dave for not watching NXT, but those shows give you very different feels for WWE. If I only watched Raw, I'd think WWE were a lot worse than it is. Watching all of those shows week in and week out were really stressful and a chore for me so I can imagine what they feel. The Board can't really be helped unless you stay in the ProWres Paradise section or the sports section which isn't too bad. It is much easier to discuss wrestling you enjoy for hours as opposed to wrestling you hate. Trying to review bad shows is just about as bad as watching them. I might be the only one but bad shows usually put me in a bad mood.

Punches are illegal in NJPW.

I enjoy: - The newsletters: Don't care if the news hits other sites, I like seeing it in full. They deserve the money anyway. - The podcasts: Fills up tons of time on boring days and I am usually entertained by them. I also like the live podcasts as I tend to listen to them more often than I would if they were taped. - I like getting to ask questions to them and to stars when need be. I honestly don't see why more people don't subscribe.

Hey Hunger Games is a ripoff of the much better Battle Royale...

The Seibu Dome is kind of an odd location. It's going to be impossible for people from Yokohoma or Chiba to make it and it won't be a very fun trip either for anyone in Tokyo. For people in Yokohoma, it's a 90 minute trip, Chiba is 2 hours and from north eastern Tokyo it's still around 36 minutes. I really hope they have the fans in the sticks that they think they do.

Not defending Benoit but murder is still murder. Doesn't change it. Everything should be done to avoid it and I don't think there is a good solution.I know someone who did it out of self defense and he doesn't feel any better about it. I understand that WWE is trying to save their own butts but when an uninformed media person gets bored, this could go on and on. We've already cited multiple examples of it. It's one carny working another.

Very believable. Japanese follow a handful of wrestlers or one promotion only. It's too expensive and time consuming to do so otherwise.

Verne killed an old man. New Jack killed someone. Are we only judging murders by age now? Adults are okay, but kids are off limit? Gagne is a sick elderly man with Alzheimer's who attacked a fellow patient at a nursing home. Benoit was deemed to have the brain of an 85 year old Alzheimer's patient with advanced dementia... I don't think killing an adult is any better or worse than killing a kid. Murder is murder. Once you start saying killing someone due to ____ is better than killing someone due to _____ you lead down a slippery slope as shown in this thread. The best way to move on is to move on. WWE will never erase Benoit and making special notices in front of every show he is on doesn't help or change anything.

How? The best way to handle it is to do nothing at all. WWE created their own problem here. I could seriously come up with warnings for everyone. There are lots of bad people in wrestling, but Benoit is the only one who murdered his son. Do you really not see the problem? Are there really going to be critics if the WWE just put up the matches and ran them as if it's business as usual? El-P made a good point. They have other unsavory characters they will most likely show footage of. Should they bring attention to each and every one of their misdeed, grave or minor? Yes, there are going to be critics if they go about business as usual. "I guess they don't care anymore", "Look at them profiting from a murderer", etc. Benoit's offenses are far worse than anyone else's in wrestling. Comparing murdering your son to the other scummy things people in wrestling have done is downplaying the severity of what he did. WWE should not be airing New Jack, Scott Hall, Jimmy Snuka or Verne Gagne matches without warnings then either. Think of the kids!

The best way to handle it is to do nothing at all. WWE created their own problem here. I could seriously come up with warnings for everyone.

It's just really stupid and I think people need to separate wrestling from reality. If WWE treated every wrestler's matches the way they've treated Benoit's, there would be no one left to show.