sek69

I'm sure they'd love to, but they'll never pay Park what he wants for his mask and they don't want Rush to lose his hair to an outsider.

I agree, but even if they sell out every show some folks will still move the goalposts.

It's like AEW found the Infinity Gauntlet and snapped back all the wrestling fans that disappeared in 2001.

So I just read the new WON, and the plan is to be the guy who tried to kill Roman was in fact..... Daniel Bryan. That's why his announcement kept getting delayed, and Roman-Bryan is scheduled for SummerSlam. After all these years they finally got both those guys getting the reactions they wanted, and now they're doing a program? Seems like WWE is playing with fire. Roman beating Bryan on a big show, even if it makes sense based on the storyline they are doing, seems like it will just remind people why they refused to accept Roman in the first place.

Is it bad that my initial reaction was "wtf could have Dave ever said about Simon fucking Gotch to warrant him being that mad"? Not that it would be acceptable in any case, but if it was someone Dave was bagging on I could kinda understand it escalating to that point. I can't imagine Dave's spent one second thinking about Gotch since the Vaudvillians broke up.

They announced the first show will feature a match to crown the first AEW women's champion.

Man, I saw the NWA account and some others tweet some random thank yous to Harley last night and knowing he was in bad shape it was afraid it was in memoriam type thing. I started watching almost exactly at the time he passed the torch to Ric so my only experience watching him growing up was as the King in the WWF and as Vader's manager in WCW. Even that was enough to let me know how awesome he was. Being able to go back and watch him as traveling NWA champ just sealed the deal to me that he was everything you wanted in a world champion. Dude could wrestle, and if shit went down you'd want him on your side.

I'm getting the impression the license for the old tech must have been expiring soon (maybe the end of July?) and they had to push the new version out before it was done baking.

Yeah I get not liking Marko Stunt, but that was some hater ass stuff from that dude. Someone should tell him doing Dolph's "it shoulda been ME!" routine on Twitter won't get him signed any faster.

In a perfect world I'd like to see both WWE and AEW succeed, since the biggest the wrestling business ever grew was when there were two major companies constantly tweaking each other to get better. A world where AEW was the big dog and WWE was out of business or at Impact levels of insignificance would suck just as much as the WWE dominated landscape we have now (probably in a different way but it would still be bad).

There's also a weird psychological effect of WWE being the only wrestling a lot of people have ever known (for better or worse), so having a company come in to challenge them feels like a threat to those folks and/or an attack on their childhood. I've said it before, but there is a larger amount of folks out there who are wrestling fans that are not WWE fans. No one has ever really tried to tap into that market since WCW died, every attempt to be a major player has gone the route of trying to be Diet WWE, and if people want to see that style they'll watch WWE do it better. That's why the "workrate promotions" end up being the ones that get a lot of buzz on the indies, they offer something different than you see in WWE. It's why NXT got all it's initial buzz, it was offering something different. You can make an argument that AEW is trying too much to be a jack of all trades, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. However the fact that they're even attempting to cater to different tastes seem to be winning over fans in a way that WWE's "we have one style and you'll like it" approach has failed to.

They will probably joke about it on BTE since the gimmick there is that the Young Bucks are terrible executives who sign bad contracts, but I doubt they would ever actually bring them in. Maybe Cass since he's seemed to have done a babyface turn by opening up about his battles with mental health, but Enzo is the wrestling equivalent to the bottom of a Chernobyl reactor. Since they are basically a package deal, I would expect AEW to pass on them.

I'd like to say "little of column A, little of column B", but I'm sure the writers aren't the only one left scrambling with Vince's whims changing on a dime. When given proper time WWE production can be amazingly well done, but I'm not sure if even an Academy Award winning cinematographer/director/camera operator combo can work magic when told "do something in an hour that our crazy ass boss might decide to throw out seconds after we finish".

This seems like the logical answer. Once I heard their Impact deal was up, I was assuming AEW is where they would land. Vince already has his "urban tag team" quota filled with the Street Profits and the Usos.

I can get Alexa having a big, over-designed heel plan to have all three of them attack Becky, the only problem is Becky came off as a heel and a major asshole in the earlier segment attacking Nattie (and Fit) for no reason. It made what should have been a heel beatdown into something more like a babyface getting her revenge.

Marko Stunt signed with AEW, he could be good as their version of Spike Dudley. If all we get out of it is him on Jungle Boy's shoulders while Jungle Boy is on Luchasaurus's shoulders as an entrance it would all be worth it.

I never thought of it like that since Orton is on cruise control so much these days, but damn is it spot on. Makes me wonder how great he would be in an environment where he'd feel the need to give a shit more than once or twice a year.

Brother, that take is cooling off faster than a bag of McDonald's fries. It's amazing to see another guy that checks all the typical Vince boxes get used as cannon fodder.

If you actually call/email support (rather than @ the twitter support account) they say the Hidden Gems content is supposed to be added back on eventually.

Wasn't Ryan Ward the one running the SD team now? Guess Vince has to bury all the NXT callups he gets.

Reports are out that Vince has demanded another day-of-the-show rewrite of Smackdown, two weeks in a row now. Doesn't look like their end of the new creative reorganization is working out too well.

Maryse is pregnant too, maybe she can win it on an episode of Miz and Mrs.

The very first Raw after Vince tried to bury AEW with advertisers by calling it "blood and guts" stuff, they do an angle with one of their top guys bleeding from his guts, lol. There was an obvious effort to build folks up, so that was a welcome change.

So apparently Anthem had a big plan to buy the AXS channel and putting Impact on the Pursuit channel was just a stop gap until the deal went through, since there was no point signing a TV deal with another network for such a short period of time. Well, the AXS deal fell through and now it looks like Impact is stuck relying to Twitch and a channel no one gets for the foreseeable future.

Also last we saw Renee Michelle she was being driven off in a limo with R-Truth, and Drake was imagining what horrors awaited the 24/7 title (and also his wife). Now she's just back in a mixed tag.