NintendoLogic

According to Fightful, Ivelisse decided to go into business for herself in the Thunder Rosa match by no-selling. I see no reason for AEW to keep her around when they have Diamante, who is basically the same wrestler but far less of a pain in the ass to deal with.

Taue and Akiyama both should have been in years ago. Looking at his drawing power at his peak, Caristico should be a no-brainer or close to it. But the WWE run killed him. Looks like we'll have to wait for that run to fade from voters' memories for him to be given a fair shake. I've been skeptical of Owen's candidacy, but if Crockett Sr. is in, he should be too. Roman Reigns is an interesting case. Unless WWE business collapses or he ends up in the doghouse (both very real possibilities), he'll likely end his career having headlined more events that drew in excess of 50,000 fans in history by a wide margin. You can say that he's a beneficiary of the WWE machine and plenty of guys could be plugged into his spot and do just as well, but the same could be said for Bob Backlund and his MSG sellouts as WWF champion. At the end of the day, they're the ones who did it and that can't be taken away from them.

This year's ballot got posted on the F4W board. New additions for 2020 are in bold.

Brock's only banger post-WM31 was the AJ match in 2017. The Rey match was so awful that I turned off Survivor Series in disgust immediately afterward. That was the point where I decided I had no desire to ever see Brock again because the Suplex City crap had damaged him beyond repair.

Gonna be honest, the idea of Meltzer as a puppet of WWE management strikes me as so preposterous on its face that I'd need to see it fleshed out in far greater detail before I could take it seriously.

When Stacy Keibler went on Dancing with the Stars, everyone she met was shocked by things like wrestlers driving themselves from town to town and having to pay for their own meals and hotels. After about six weeks of that, she decided she was done with WWE. Even D-list celebrities find the conditions there appalling.

If she doesn't already have one foot out the door, she will once she discovers how much better entertainers in non-carny industries are treated.

For what it's worth, it looks to me like Asuka usually hits her opponent in the neck rather than the face with her backfist.

Sabian getting beaten up by female wrestlers is the only intergender wrestling I would approve of. It'd be a modern version of Cornette getting knocked out by Baby Doll.

Looks like the Performance Center has worked its magic yet again. Dwayne should've sent his daughter to a wrestling school where they actually teach you how to wrestle and not do endless forward rolls.

Hey, the Funking Conservatory produced Kurt Angle. Actually, just about everybody who debuted in the WWF in the late 90s trained at his wrestling camp.

In other news, Mandy Rose has been traded to Raw for a jobber to be named later. Apparently, Miz leveraged his connections in the entertainment industry to orchestrate the trade. It's all part of his master plan to divest Otis of his Money in the Bank contract. I'm opposed to heels outsmarting babyfaces as a general rule, but someone with that kind of power in the industry should be able to get a step ahead of a guy who stores his contract in a lunchbox.

Thankfully, he no longer has to do embarrassing lowbrow wedding angles in WWE. Now that he's in AEW, he can do serious sports-based wedding angles.

Actually, a promotion that consists entirely of the Elite being murdered by brawlers and hosses sounds like the perfect 2020 pro wrestling promotion to me. Also, I've never seen so much as a millisecond of BTE, so what happens there has no impact on my enjoyment. They can do all the dorky shit they want on a non-canon Internet show. Moving on, I continue to maintain that Vickie Guerrero brings absolutely nothing to the table. Jake Roberts and Tully Blanchard have been cutting awesome promos, but it's questionable whether those promos have been getting their clients over. Vickie doesn't even do that. She just screeches a catchphrase that jumped the shark a decade ago.

Precisely my point. It's a 1998 Sean Waltman promo in 2020. That "I've got some things to get off my chest about that other promotion" shit is beyond played out. It's as lame as doing crotch chops. Moxley and Brodie Lee hinted at that approach, but they also came across as dangerous men with chips on their shoulders. Miro didn't do anything to make you think he's going to be a serious asskicker. AEW has earned the benefit of the doubt, so I'm willing to let things play out. But right before joining the company, he tried to pick a fight with Meltzer over his reporting on Lana and produced a video calling Randy Orton the greatest heel of all time, so I'm fearing the worst.

In fairness, 36 years is an eternity in this company. However, the Briscos were supposed to have jobs for life as a condition of the GCW sale. Just goes to show that a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.

I've been a Conti fan ever since the last Mae Young Classic. I even thought she acquitted herself well in that atrocious tag team tournament. She's still rough around the edges, but she's awesome when she's ragdolling people with judo throws and takedowns. Having her debut against Nyla Rose was like having Rey Mysterio debut against Dean Malenko.

So did Rusev really cut a TNA-style worked shoot promo?

Very poor choice of words, my man.

The thing about WWE is that the cream does eventually rise to the top as long as you're capable of branching out and reinventing yourself. Benoit, Guerrero, Danielson, and even Asuka have shown that. The super workers who get lost in the shuffle have historically been guys like Vader and William Regal who could only really work their own style and forced everyone to conform to them.

The bigger issue is that Thatcher (and everyone else in NXT, for that matter) isn't in the same galaxy as Benoit as a performer. Benoit could be plugged into pretty much any style and excel. Thatcher can only work his own esoteric style.

I have to say that the Sydal/Shockmaster comparisons are seriously overblown. The problem with the Shockmaster went well beyond his entrance. It was an attempt to repackage Tugboat as a main eventer by putting a glittery Stormtrooper helmet on him and having Ole Anderson cut promos in a Dr. Claw voice. It would have sucked ass even if the entrance had gone off without a hitch. In fact, he probably did WCW a favor by mercy killing the gimmick right out the gate. I'm sure anybody who would purchase an AEW PPV knows who Matt Sydal is and likely has seen him successfully hit a shooting star press hundreds of times. Brock Lesnar was able to live down nearly breaking his neck attempting a SSP in the main event of Wrestlemania. Sydal will be fine.

That's because he spent part of his childhood in Cleveland.

I'm sure part of the reason for hesitancy in calling off the match was the stipulation that Matt would have had to leave AEW had he lost. The lesson here (well, one of them) is to never book matches with stipulations you have no intention of delivering on because sometimes shit happens and the match has to be stopped.

I get the impression that they're keeping the details as vague as possible to see how far the talent will allow them to go. You would think that trying to assert control over all outside endeavors, even under their real names, would obviously result in serious pushback. But after what went down in Saudi Arabia, all bets are off.