Matt D

I never really made the connection of "comedy = laziness" with Murdoch before. I wonder if that's a point of disconnect between Meltzer and people who support Murdoch. I do think that sometimes he goes to comedy (even good comedy) at the wrong time. It never comes off as lazy to me, though. He seems to put a lot of effort into it, maybe even more so than if he went with more conventional work at that point in a match.

Even with the ratings as they are now, you have to imagine some good number will hit at some point (maybe around Mania), and someone could probably make a few bucks by buying relatively low. Hogan didn't mean a whole lot to their bottom line recently. I get a sense that WWE's stock is more based around BS than a lot of things. There's not a lot of understanding on how the business operates and thus it can get affected both ways by things that are pretty meaningless ultimately or are outright fantasy.

Now I want Tully/Gino vs Tito/Mil.

Bracero vs Tully is a really fun five minute match of Tully reacting to Bracero doing crazy things all around him.

The first Kamala vs Reed match is lackluster, mainly because it needed a couple of more definitive hope spots out of Reed. The lumberjack match was better but it needed a few more minutes. I don't know if Reed demanded the lumberjack stip after the finish of the first match but if so, he came off looking really bad. Honestly, I would have liked to see the first end in DQ due to interference. , EDIT: I'm looking at the results now and we're missing a few. The first singles match after the Battle Royal WAS a DDQ, but then he beat him in another singles match AND a tag (w/Parsons vs Kamala and Williams) before the Lumberjack one too. So in five matches, Reed wasn't able to beat Kamala once, and lost to him four times. Geez, and after the lumberjack match, Barbarian (who interfered in it) beat him in a street fight. Weird run for Reed there.

Bonnie Blackstone in WWF is thoroughly weird.

Cornette sort of felt like the first guest he had that really understands how these things work. There were times he was trying to steer Flair away from things in a "don't you realize other people listen to this and we're not just talking for fun?" which was sort of amusing. It's pretty plain to see that Flair had been censored by CBS after the last couple of weeks too.

I sort of thing that the mainstream media might jump on this more if there was one place that really cataloged all of WWE's institutional racism that they could look at in three seconds like a digest. Anything more complex than a simple list is probably too hard for them to look for.

Obviously ROH should bring Hogan and Piper in to declare war on NXT.

They weren't exactly using him meaningfully.

The match especially can put me to sleep if it has Japanese commentary.

I watched the two ring battle royal and the promo after went a bit long but it still got me ready to watch the Reed vs Kamala matches.

Wasn't part of that the fact he worked six-mans after the injury happened.

Berzerker is one of the best guys on the 92 WWF roster.

How much of it is the old TNA crowd?

That's new to us, right?

I skipped some stuff and made it most of the way through, and you know, I just can't bring myself to be nearly as angry or annoyed as you guys are. I could when Bryan was being horribly mismanaged. This, though? Eh. We're all paying next to nothing for these shows now. It all just seems really low salience to get yourself so worked up over. I like the Bruiser/Crusher thing. That's kind of what some of these guys are now. I think we're just sort of in a cruising cycle until there's a changing of the guard. Everything interesting in WWE right now is centered around Dunn vs HHH, and then a couple of wrestlers (Cesaro, maybe Owens, maybe not, Rusev, maybe the New Day). I just don't see how you guys can raise the vitriol after years and years of the same. Nothing about Taker coming back and the match being a no contest was a huge surprise. Whenever WWE's entered into a situation with no good booking option over the last few years, they just find a way to book no finish at all, it seems. It'd be one thing if they were coming up with new and surprising ways to do stupid things, but this is just more and more of the same. If anything, Will's doing it to himself by not reading the news/following the shows, because it lets him come in with too open a mind when he should have already set his expectations more realistically from keeping an ear open. Why the fuck would you ever give WWE the benefit of the doubt? What has Vince and co. done to deserve that?

Needs more Bock

I applaud your optimism. It is too pure for this world.

All that said, I don't think they book to create stars over the last many years, and I think it's very much a Vince(and maybe Dunn) quirk. I think it's a side effect of winning the Monday Night War and having no competition but also because Vince felt personally burned when it came to some guys (and Divas as well) who became bigger than the WWE.

The TV was stronger when they had 1-2 Six Man Tag groups running around to run matches against. That seemed like the magic bullet a couple of years ago.

They're not trying to sell people to go to the weekly show. TV is their highest form of revenue, with the network being second. Live events would be third? Or Merchandising? I don't know. Bix or someone can break this down better. I'm not saying you're wrong, but they feel that having jobber matches on Monday (and to a lesser extent Thursday) night would hurt the ratings too much. This is a good Dangerous Alliance Podcast challenge, actually: Try to rebook 1984 Mid South or 1984 Crockett if they were primarily worried about going up against Breaking Bad and selling a digital network.

There are three issues, I'd say, that are more important than what you're looking at. You're seeing a symptom, not the illness. 1.) There's no more fluidity of the roster. Guys don't come in and out nearly as much. A guy like Kofi Kingston or Dolph Ziggler has been on the active roster for eight years or so. We're not talking Smackdown/Raw split, let alone territories. 2.) The sheer amount of TV/PPVs in a world where every match is a match between two stars. The sort of hierarchy you like on your roster doesn't really exist. I'm not sure it can exist. It's much looser and more nebulous. They're on TV for 5 hours (main shows) a week with something like 15+ special PPV type events now. 3.) This is theory and rumor, but they don't want anyone to get over too much. They don't want anyone to be more important than the company. WWE is the draw not any specific wrestler. Brock's an exception. Cena's an exception. I always thought this had a lot to do with how Rock left and with how Brock left especially but the usual way WWE will debut a guy is with a big push and then a drop down the roster so that he knows his place and they can see how he handles it. Then, they'll build him back up but so much of that initial momentum can never be recovered. Basically, no, they don't want to protect guys. That's the idea.

Parv, do you understand the prevailing thought behind the start-stop pushes of the last ten years or so?