I'm sure there is heavier context to it then that.

Yeah, I think so too. Perhaps for Drew, it was because he had just signed back with WWE so that didn't pan out as they wanted. I don't know about Eli Drake about that time but Nick Aldis turned out to be a pretty good choice.

He was Impact Champion probably around the time they were having these discussions. All three guys would have been guys they leaned heavily on when they were running Impact.

I'm not surprised by that news. I have seen interviews where both Drew Galloway and Matt Hardy talked about how much they loved working with Billy Corgan when he was with TNA, and how if he hadn't left TNA (and sued to get his money back) they never would have left.  So of course, Dixie Carter had to go and be Dixie Carter and fuck it all up for everybody.

From the National Wrestling Alliance website:

 

On last week's #NWAPowerrr, NWA President William Patrick Corgan (aka Billy Corgan) teased an announcement that would open the envelope for talents to be a part of the National Wrestling Alliance.

Today, the National Wrestling Alliance and Lightning One announce a new series that will join NWA Powerrr and Ten Pounds Of Gold… The new show is called The Circle Squared.

This series will allow new talents an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is to get a chance to earn an NWA Talent contract. This competition show allows talents selected to step up to the circle of the podium to exhibit their talents on the microphone before stepping into the square of the ring to show their physical abilities in a wrestling match. The key to making the NWA roster and eventually NWA Powerrr will be in these talents ability to connect with the the live audience in Atlanta and the audience watching all over the world. The ultimate winner of The Circle Squared will earn an National Wrestling Alliance contract.

 

Sounds like fun!

Sounds like the old TNA stuff they used to do. Pro-wrestling as figure skating indeed. I hope they get Al Snow. Nobody does grumpy old wrestler better than Al Snow.

This sounds like a good idea to me, if for no other reason than it will attract guys who are totally unknown.  The NWA needs brand new fresh faces who are totally unfamiliar to fans, and this is as good a way as any to find some.  They need some fresh new blood to mix in with the veterans they have, rather than relying solely on guys who are WWE or TNA castoffs. El-P mentioned Al Snow and I would love to see the NWA work with Al Snow and OVW as well, Snow has a ton of unknown talents and new students he trained, he could really benefit from the NWA, just as they could benefit from OVW.

On 11/18/2019 at 11:05 PM, The Thread Killer said:

For real? Fuck yeah, that match could and should be outstanding.

Yeah. Except it was a three minutes nothing match. Huge disappointment. You have complained about some AEW matches going too long and being too competitive for your tastes, but you can't tell me you are happy with what they did with this. Especially considering how good Murdoch looks. To me this program is a clear case of less is less. 

Interesting thing about the ?Mark/Stevens dynamic is that it's basically a reverse Miz/Mizdow deal, with Stevens in the role of the Miz and ?Mark being cheered like crazy like Mizdow was. Also, the main event being 100% silly shit with a WWE comedy reject and a totally meta/ironic gimmick (AND Colt Cabana) makes Corny looks like the biggest idiot and hypocrite ever, really. I hope some people make gifs of this match and tag Corny with it on Twitter with the mention Outlaw Mud Show or something. James Storm calling this a bunch of bullshit was kinda neat though.

Eli Drake vs Ken Anderson is intriguing in a "who can do the best Stone Cold/Rock mix" way.

They are clearly overdoing the whole Kamille/Latimer/James Storm/whoever mystery now. Too much plotting without actual storytelling elements being revealed.

This was the worst episode yet to me, if only because Aldis vs Murdoch could have been a really good long main event and they delivered jack shit instead.

In other news, Melina still looks great...

Any idea what this is about? I haven't watched the episode yet and probably won't for a few more days.

P.S. I was tempted to post this in the Cornette thread instead, since he's the usual suspect, but I don't want to make baseless assumptions.

https://twitter.com/ceehawk/status/1196936758363119618?s=21

Well, there you go. I don't pay attention that much to the commentary on this show so I did not hear it but yeah... What we talked about before...

EDIT: Sorry, just posted the link not realising that it was already up

I can barely understand Cornette's Southern accent and the sound mixing continues to be terrible with the wrestlers' stomps drowning out the commentary. Can anyone transcribe? 

1 minute ago, C.S. said:

I can barely understand Cornette's Southern warble and the sound mixing continues to be terrible with the wrestlers' stomps drowning out the commentary. Can anyone transcribe? 

"Trevor Murdoch, he's mad, bad and dangerous, you know he's the only man I've ever known that can strap a bucket of fried chicken on his back and ride a motor-scooter across Ethiopia, Trevor Murdoch can take care of himself..."

I really hope this doesn't kill Powerrr's momentum but man, how the hell did this get through the editing process?

Come on ! I'm French and I got it !  Mostly. Talking about Trevor is so tough he's the only guy who can strap a ? (EDIT : bucket! Damn !) of fried chicken on his back and ride a motorscooter across Ethiopia.

And before anyone wants to defend it as having nothing to do with color of skin/race : FRIED CHICKEN !!!

I'm sure Cornette was thinking mainly in the sense of Ethiopia being a famine-stricken region (which is a dated reference in itself given that We Are the World was recorded over 30 years ago). But anyone with an ounce of common sense should know that fried chicken is such a heavily racialized trope that it's better to just avoid referencing it. At the very least, someone should have caught it in post-production.

Was thinking about this forum and how everyone pretty much knew that something from Corny would slip through the cracks eventually on Powerrr and there it is. Terrible.

Court Bauer must be relieved this stuff did not happen on Being Sports...

Wow, they really should have caught that. That could kill the promotion dead. Corny has really been playing with fire lately with some things he's been saying and I think this one is going to bite his ass or the NWA's.

Well...

Not really any defending that one. Probably the end of Cornette not just in NWA but in a modern wrestling landscape as a whole. Hope he's content with his podcasts & merch sales because... yeah, this ain't good. 

Well, it did strike me before how *white* the roster was.

the whole "pay us to show your talents" concept is an amazing carny idea.. it's almost as good as the time that Limp Bizkit got a bunch of people to try out for a band spot, and then just stole their riffs.

That being said.. tough fucking day for the guy whose job involves editing shows that were taped 7 weeks ago.

 

2 hours ago, El-P said:

Yeah. Except it was a three minutes nothing match. Huge disappointment. You have complained about some AEW matches going too long and being too competitive for your tastes, but you can't tell me you are happy with what they did with this. Especially considering how good Murdoch looks. To me this program is a clear case of less is less.

I was disappointed with how long the match went, absolutely.  I thought what they gave us was very good, which made the fact that it was too short all the more disappointing.  I think that match should have been the Main Event and should have gone 5-10 minutes at least.  I'm going to chalk this up to the fact that they taped all of these episodes in two days.  Not only did they have to make sure to not overwork these guys, I'm going to assume that they didn't know what they had yet in Murdoch...maybe they didn't know what kind of shape he'd be in, how rusty he'd be (he was essentially retired prior to these tapings, I think) and how popular he'd be with the NWA fans in the studio.  That is the one advantage to booking a show week to week and not taping two months at a time, you can adjust on the fly and react when something gets popular. (Unless you're WWE in which case you ignore the fans and continue to ram bullshit down their throats.) I am just guessing here, but I think they went into these tapings with a predetermined plan for Murdoch mapped out for all the tapings and didn't know what they had with him.  I am hoping he has a much more prominent role at the next set of tapings. If he doesn't, then they're idiots because this guy was made for the NWA and he has been gold so far.  WAY better than guys like Anderson, Cabana and Storm who have all been featured more prominently than he.

In fairness, my complaint about matches being too long and too competitive does not just apply to AEW, either.  It applies to NXT as well, and I've loved that show since it debuted on the USA Network...but I still think these guys are going way too long, doing way too much and are doing too many dives, high impact manoeuvres and false finishes.  Same goes for Raw and Smackdown, but I don't watch that crap so stuff them.  But I'd like to think there is a happy medium between a lot of what we're seeing on Dynamite and NXT every week, and these short matches on Power.  That's one thing that sucks about having an hour long show, they are trying to cram everything in.  The show flies by for sure, but matches like this one get shortchanged. As I said, that disappoints me.