WWE goes ALL-IN with NXT The Great American Bash and WWE Saturday Night's Main Event on Saturday and the all-women's WWE Evolution on Sunday

[strobogo]

Evolution was def the best WWE PPV of the year by far. They might have to do these quarterly just to bring up the PPV quality for the rest of the year. Or they might go another 7 years for showing up the men so much, who knows. HHH did start the post show with again repeating he didn't think there was a need to do another show because the women regularly headline shows. Which is a fucking crazy thing to say after how hot and good the show was.

 

"Do we really need to do another thing like this that people asked for for 7 years and had a crazy hot crowd and best show of the year? Idk, guys. I mean the first one was also probably the best show of the year and had a crazy hot crowd. Idk tho." 

 

[El-P]

So there you go. Three specials shows to try and hurt All In. And in the end, Counter-programming Mania was a miserable failure. Two really good shows out of three apparently, but it wasn't the goal.

Goldy's retirement speech getting cut is hilarious. Bye bye big man. We hardly knew ye. The guy milked a 15 months run of relevance into 30 years of cashing huge checks for doing almost nothing. He's also responsible of two of the worst things in pro-wrestling in the last, well, 30 years. The Goldberg push. Which has worked ONCE and never again. Still promoters try it over and over again. Stop doing it. Also, he made the spear into a thing. And most people make it look like shit doing it. I mean, Big Justice has a better spear than Adam Copeland, so it's not lost on everybody (I knew, credit Rocky Romero for it). Anywoo. I was tired of Goldy by November of 1998. The guy never did anything better than the Raven and DDP matches that year. I never got the nostalgia for that guy.

Imagine being at Center Stage, not sold out, and chanting "Tony fumbled" while AEW was running *that* PPV. The level of dumbfuckery and clowning is insane. Plus I'm sure people like Ethan Page, Ricky S. and Blake "I lost my passion while being involved in one of the greatest feud of the last year because I feared I would never go to WWE" Monroe love the chants about the former boss during their match.

I have no doubt Evolution was a terrific PPV considering the feedback (and really Iyo Skye and such). But it shall not be lost on anyone that the first Evolution only existed to whitewash the first Saudi show (or was it the second, seems like ages ago already ?) and this one was bumped and rushed only to try and hurt their "non-competition". Lovely to weaponize your women roster like this. I heard Stephy (ya know, the one in the picture with the brain-worm anti-vaxx destroyer of population, not the one who got lowballed to live her dream) was on the show. I would have vomited into my own throat. Stephanie "Thank you Vince" McMahon talking about women and shit. (edit : and now I learn that Vickie Guerrero was shown. Vickie Guerrero, who has accused her own daughter of being a liar when she talked about being sexually assaulted by her mother's companion. You can't make this shit up, I swear). Also, Naomi being the one standing at the end is hilarious when you think about the joke tweet she made about nepotism a while back. Bloodline gotta Bloodline or something. I guess next time they need to distract the attention from some shit, Evolution III is gonna be right there.

[C.S.]

Bitchcakes Bill bitched up a storm to toady Ariel Helwani about how WWE handled his retirement. He also buried GUNTHER'S chops.

Just total entitled asshole behavior.

The only thing I agree with Goldberg on is what a joke it was that his speech was cut for a million ads. Either don't air it or make it a Peacock/Netflix/YouTube special after the show like the dumb "press" conferences are.

[Alucard]

Prior to this, Goldberg's last match also ended with him being choked out, by Roman in Saudi, so I figured this one would end similarly. I thought his prior matches with Lashley were both pretty good.

Glad he had a good one with Gunther to go out on. Not a bad last handful of matches, at least beating the terrible stretch he had in 2020-2021 where he put over Strowman and McIntyre both in 2 minute matches.

With Goldberg being unhappy about how things went though, it does make me wonder how his retirement would've been if he had gone to AEW instead in the past couple years.

[C.S.]

Billy Bitchcakes has only himself to blame for burning the AEW bridge by calling it "too cheesy."

[sek69]

So its looking like the Bash show was a flop so their big idea to counter program All In fell on its face. Yet they will still keep fucking that chicken and continue doing it. 

[The Thread Killer]

11 hours ago, sek69 said:

So it’s looking like the Bash show was a flop so their big idea to counter program All In fell on its face. Yet they will still keep fucking that chicken and continue doing it. 

On top of everything else, it probably doesn’t help them that the Bash card was not one little bit compelling. When you are advertising a TNA contract signing on your PLE, can you really be surprised when people opted to watch the competition instead?

I’ve heard good things about the Page vs. Saints Falls-Count-Anywhere match and I have been meaning to check it out. At the time, I opted to watch All In live as it happened, a decision I have mixed feelings about. The NXT show might not have been as good but it also wasn’t 6 hours, plus pre-show.

The whole stupid concept of “running against” the competition really needs to go away now. It’s not 1988 anymore. Thanks to streaming, you can easily watch one show live, and then go back and watch the competing show whenever you want. You’re really not missing anything.

The whole thing just comes across as being extremely petty and dumb on the part of WWE. And then Tony Khan apparently admitted that one of the reasons they ran so long with the AEW PPV was to cut into Saturday Night’s Main Event.

TKO needs to accept that AEW is a thing, and isn’t going away. And although I don’t generally prefer their style of professional wrestling, there’s no way anybody with a brain can say that the industry isn’t better off because of AEW’s existence.

[DMJ]

Just finished Evolution...

- Not a fan of Stephanie McMahon being on-screen at all. Her and her husband are trash people whose presence on these big PLEs makes me feel dirty for watching. 

- If you didn't watch this show, you missed one very good match (the tag team 4-way), one great match (the opener), and one instant WWE Match of the Year contender in the main event (tarnished only by the cash-in finish but, at this point, MITB cash-ins are a welcome respite after seeing so many recent WWE matches end with a mystery Samoan/pseudo-Samoan showing up, a cash-in tease, or Travis Scott showing up). Overall, I thought this was a really good event and it makes me a little sad that not every show can be like this because it was so clear how motivated the wrestlers were, how much fun the crowd was having, and even how loose Cole and Barrett were on commentary. There was considerably less shoehorning of Prime Energy shilling, for example.

- I don't think the response to Flair was that crazy or unexpected or had that much to do with the Player's Tribune column. This crowd seemed very engaged and very supportive of the product, including NXT, and my understanding is that the Flair/Alexa Bliss babyface team has been featured quite a bit since Mania. She's a babyface now and she's partnering with Alexa, who has been super popular for awhile now. Also, based on the reaction to Vickie Guerrero, I don't think this was a "smart" crowd looking to boo anybody for off-screen reasons. I think this was a crowd that came to cheer for the stars/babyfaces (Becky Lynch also got cheered during her entrance and Jade Cargill got a much better reaction here than she got at Night of Champions) and the Flair name still means something, especially in Atlanta. Has there been some noticeable change in how people are talking about Charlotte online since Mania? Absolutely. And, yes, the online discourse does impact the live crowd reactions because there is no longer as huge a chasm between the "IWC", "smart" fans and the "smarks" and the "casuals" and whatever else type of fan like there was decades ago. But I really think this change is more a confluence of factors - the right tag partner in the right storyline competing in the right match in the right city - than it is some perfectly-plotted strategy to get Flair over as a babyface. The Tribune column helped, but I don't think it had the reach some folk are attributing to it.

- I don't think I'm going to even bother with SNME. If anything, All In and Evolution reminded me that there is SO, SO much great wrestling to enjoy without feeling like I need to be a "completist" with the major shows. I've long given up on watching the weekly TV of any company, but I do tend to try to watch the major events (and I'd count SNMEs). I'm a pretty big Gunther fan, but I just don't really need to see another Goldberg match. I have zero interest in Seth Rollins and everyone in his vicinity (wake me up when Bron Breakker is actually doing something relevant?). LA Knight doesn't move the needle for me. Hearing that the big SummerSlam match is going to feature fucking Jelly Roll is just...so gross and lame and unappetizing and now I have no interest in Drew's story for the next 4 weeks. So, yeah, I'll probably just start cherry-picking matches and events based on the involvement of the actual wrestlers I like because, when WWE gets out of their own way and lets the wrestlers just do their thing, they still have some of the best talent in the world...but some of the booking and storylines and celebrity involvement is awful.

[sek69]

Thinking on it, I'm realizing the reason the fans are warming up to Charlotte is they are flipping the script on the tired old WWE "tag team partners who don't get along" trope. Instead of a team you know is going to implode, you're waiting for them to admit they like each other.