sek69

Plus being the main figure of the first legit competition in 20 years and (so far) carrying the ball expertly would put him ahead of Goldberg in an importance sense without all the other stuff. Some people are stuck on his last WWE run not being all that great, but history has pretty much shown to be mostly on the company and not Jericho himself.

Not that it wasn't largely useless and un-needed already, but going out there and basically announcing Roman vs Goldberg makes the Elimination Chamber a total waste of everyone's time.

Someone get brother KawadaSmile some lotion for that burn.

Goldberg generally hasn't looked too bad (by his standards) in his US matches since coming back, it's probably not a good idea for him to keep doing matches in the SA heat at his age but clearly at this point WWE isn't concerned with the quality of those shows.

The Wyatt Family vs the Shield faceoff was a legit holy-shit inducing moment the crowd was going nuts for. Also I thought the brawl with the New Day at the Wyatt Compound was stupid fun even if if was clearly WWE doing a discount Broken Universe idea. I get the impression a lot of the problems Bray runs into are from Vince and/or the rest of creative not "getting" his ideas and not knowing what to do with them. Like I can't believe it would have been Bray's idea to invest all that time and effort into a new gimmick, get Tom Savini involved in design, and then have all his matches in a stupid fucking red light that doesn't let anyone see a thing.

Conversely, I didn't expect that Ricochet would actually win or anything, but it did him no favors to go out there and get Kofi'd either. He was supposed to be one of the guys Heyman was trying to build Raw around, I wonder if he tried to suggest having a competitive match and Brock decided that didn't work for him brother.

I mean, it's the best match for Roman in terms of star power but not when you consider Bill's best matches had to be kept short in 1998 let alone 2020. I suppose it's better than having Bill do another match in Saudi heat and nearly kill someone due to exhaustion and/or concussing himself, but I don't really want to see Mania turned in to series of 30 second matches because the old men involved will gas out too fast.

It's that, and also the abject failure of the WWE to create new stars so that only names from the past can draw money.

Truly this is his "well the trains ran on time" moment.

Ric's long been a glaring blind spot in Dave's coverage, and that seems to have passed down to Charlotte. It's not so much he favors her, but if Charlotte ends up being some kind of HBK level pain the ass backstage, I wouldn't expect him to be the first to report on it. I will say though that it seems despite her being a clear company favorite, there were some plans involving her that obviously changed due to the rise of Becky. I wouldn't be mad if Charlotte had a realization he has the pull to nix some of the bullshit that has been going on with the booking of her character.

Charlotte Uber Alles, brother. No one can stop the path of Woo (and also Vince's hard on for blondes with big fake'uns).

I don't think he grew up on it considering he was raised in Illinois (and born in 1982), but I'd wager he traded for more than a few tapes of it in his day. It really gets undersold how big a fan he was growing up, he was deep in it back in the early days of the interwebs like a lot of us were back then. His dad's mentioned it more than once how it even impressed him how much Tony followed the business and how when he approached him to start AEW he knew he could make it work.

Man that was such a Mid-South ending, everyone brawling everywhere while JR is losing his mind, it could have been the Irish McNeil Boy's Club in 1984.

Time for PWO combined into one wrestler, SHANNA!

Orange is great. The old farts can complain all they want, if the crowd chants "he will try" then it works.

This Iron Man match has been pretty solid so far. Another great start to a show.

I don't recall that particular reference, but you can pull up any episode of NXT at random and find at least 2 or 3 shoe-horned references per show.

Wait, CS isn't playing a gimmick and honestly doesn't get why people dislike Mauro? I feel like a character at the end of a M. Night Shyamalan movie with a twist this shocking.

I would hope deep down that there's a line even he wouldn't cross, but I fear that the lure of the reference will be too strong for him to resist.

There were a lot of people in OVW who showed tons of charisma and ended up getting cut. It seems inconceivable in hindsight that John Goddamn Cena almost got cut, but it definitely was reported as such at the time.

IIRC the feeling was Cena was on the fast track in OVW as the Prototype, and it probably ruffled some feathers. He absolutely was going to be on the "cut because creative has nothing for you" train until Steph famously heard him rapping and decided they could do a gimmick about it. It's funny how they always frame his debut confrontation with Angle as a birth-of-a-new-star moment when it was a one and done type deal and they very clearly didn't have anything further planned beyond that.

If I were to guess, if it wasn't for something recreational he might have been taking something to speed up the healing when he broke his thumb and got flagged for that.

Well it could be that both things occurred. It is funny that we're getting so many failures after like 4 years of not having any. Also keep in mind WWE often waits to suspend folks who fail if it happens at an inconvenient time, it's possible once he got 2 concussions back to back they just decided to announce the failure now so he can use the 30 days to get his head right.

There's a large segment of the population that wouldn't make that distinction, and I always got the impression that's who Vince was aiming for. Of all the things you can armchair psychoanalyze Vince for, him projecting his shitty childhood in North Carolina into a pathological dislike of all things Southern is right near the top of the list. It shapes so much of his mindset to this day, from his obvious dislike of religion to his banning of terms he feels is to reminiscent of "rasslin".

I like that they flipped the expectation of having Shayna being the one to trash the contract signing to have her be the only one to not get involved in the melee.