NintendoLogic

I'm sold on Jeff Cobb after seeing the Ospreay and Taichi matches. An explosively athletic hoss who ragdolls his opponents and performs superhuman feats of strength is the perfect choice to give New Japan the shot in the arm it so desperately needs.

Per the latest Observer, Vince soured on Luke Harper in large part because he couldn't do a Southern accent. The absolute state of this company.

Wrestling no longer produces great minds because it's no longer an economic necessity. There weren't nearly as many revenue streams in the past, so everyone's livelihood depended on how many asses they could put in seats. In that kind of environment, you learn to sink or swim in a hurry. You can point to the indies, but how many 10,000 seat arenas are they selling out? Everybody's trying to extract as much revenue as possible from within the ever-shrinking wrestling bubble rather than trying to expand it.

All the data in the world won't help if those in charge don't know what to do with it. They've been doing so many things wrong for so long that I don't think they know what right looks like. Most of the things people complain about with WWE are things people have been complaining about for the past decade. The difference is that they no longer have John Cena to prop things up. He was WWE's Goldberg in that his drawing power allowed the the leadership to turn a blind eye to the signs of structural rot. Now that he's gone and the well of stars from the past to drag out for big shows has run dry, the chickens are coming home to roost.

This presumes that they're capable of getting their act together if they really want to. I don't know if we can make that presumption if the build to Mania this year is any indication. They got Goldberg to do the Saudi show? I guess everybody really does have a price. To be honest, I'm more surprised that they would allow him into the country.

NXT ruined him. He most likely would have been a solid midcarder and possibly advanced beyond that after finding his voice, but the genesis of McGillicutty promo destroyed whatever chance he had of being taken seriously.

I've heard some people speculate that the "You are the authority now" promo played a part in ratings dropping even more than usual the past few months. The McMahons openly acknowledged that the show sucked, but they haven't done anything to make it not suck since then. Specifically, they directly blamed Baron Corbin for the show sucking but continued to feature him in a prominent role. I'm sure most fans realize that Corbin doesn't actually have any control over the creative process, but recognizing that he has go-away heat with so many fans but continuing to push him feels like a huge FU to the fanbase.

The biggest letdown to me was no Vader matches in the top 100.

The main sticking point for a lawsuit would be in proving actual harm. I don't know how many courts would buy that Harper was being harmed by being paid to sit at home and do nothing.

I suspect that the rancor the GWE project inspired soured a lot of people on ranking projects in general. Hopefully, seeing how civil this round has been will inspire more people to join in the future.

Lawsuits cost money, and WWE likes to drag things out as long as possible so that even if the other party prevails in court, it's a Pyrrhic victory because they were bled dry financially in the process. There's never going to be any real change unless someone is willing to take one for the team and risk career and financial suicide for the sake of setting a legal precedent.

What accent? There may be a bit of a twang, but it's not pronounced at all. I doubt most people would connect him to Kentucky if he wasn't billed from there. You're making it seem like he's indistinguishable from Hillbilly Jim.

It looks like Starrcast found a suitable replacement.

Saying that someone wouldn't be any worse than Jinder as champion is looking at it backwards. The goal should be to rebuild the title, not degrade it further. Kofi going over at Wrestlemania was the only sensible outcome given the build, but it was plain as day that he wouldn't have legs as the top guy when Bryan had to virtually exhaust his bag of tricks to make him look credible. Simply put, Kofi doesn't have the aura of a world champion. He doesn't come across as a larger-than-life superstar or a super tough guy, and he's not a good enough worker to compensate for his shortcomings in those areas. It might be different if Smackdown were loaded with top-tier heel workers who could accentuate him and make him look good, but the pickings are pretty slim unless Joe and/or Nakamura discover the fountain of youth. But Owens or Shane as champion would be even worse. There's no reason for the historical top title in the promotion to be a midcard comedy belt, especially with the coming move to Fox.

I think it's safe to say that Becky Lynch, the next Stone Cold and the hottest star in the industry, has cooled off quite a bit the past few weeks. Feuding with Lacey Evans is obviously doing her no favors, but I think a bigger issue is that we're in the You Deserve It era. WWE storytelling is so wretched that the fans take it upon themselves to invent their own stories, which invariably leads to them getting behind someone because they're being unfairly held back or they have an inspirational life story or they've been around forever, so why not? But when they actually reach the top, it's not as fun to rally behind them because they're no longer the underdog. So the fans lose interest and move on to the next shiny new toy. I thought last year that Daniel Bryan cooling off to the point where he had to turn heel to remain a top guy was a reflection of WWE's incompetence, but I'm starting to think that such a cycle is inevitable with the current fanbase.

It wasn't WWE who reported the Sheamus concussion, it was Dave. When somebody tears a rotator cuff or something like that, they announce it on wwe.com right away. It's only concussions that lead to long absences with no official explanation. If it was nothing serious with Bryan, you'd think they'd just say so to put an end to the speculation.

All Dave has said is that Bryan is out of action. And recent history has shown that when WWE is all hush-hush about the nature of an injury, it's usually concussion-related. But that's impossible because Bryan is a wrestling genius who came back to work a safer more mat-based style.

I'm surprised they didn't do the opposite and keep them split up to send Andrade a message about punching above his weight.

@El-P, I'm counting on you to attend this and provide us with a house show report.

Well, there you go.

I believe Kevin Nash once said that Vince would rather make a million dollars with his own idea than ten million with someone else's. His longstanding aversion to running with anything he can't claim complete credit for is one of the things that makes WWE booking simultaneously so fascinating and so frustrating. He may have made more money promoting wrestling than anyone in history, but he's also left more money on the table than any promoter ever.

Is there a worse move in wrestling than the Panama Sunrise? I don't think it was possible to make the Canadian Destroyer any stupider, but Adam Cole managed that feat by adding a bunny hop off the middle rope beforehand.

In other news, the NXT Name Generator has finally come up with something for Punishment Martinez. He shall henceforth be known as Damien Priest.

New Japan set a company record for revenue this past year even though their mainstream exposure is only a fraction of what it was in the 80s and 90s. A big part of that was Omega and the Bucks raising their international profile. And I get the impression from what I've read that Okada is roughly as well known in Japan as Roman Reigns is in the US.

Duke and Shafir are both green as hell and being paired with them has cooled Baszler off quite a bit. As for the women's tag titles, the problem with the IIconics as champions, besides the fact that they're terrible, is that all the established teams are heels once you remove Sasha and Bayley from the equation. If they're just transitional champions for the Sky Pirates to vanquish, then fine. But a long reign full of awful matches against thrown-together babyface teams will make the belts completely meaningless.