1 minute ago, KawadaSmile said:

Oh no they are going Broadway

I think it will be a schmoz ending setting up Survivor Series

WWE rewrote the Quran and gave women rights! Yay!

Adam Cole being absurdely over will never not surprise me.

6 minutes ago, El Boricua said:

Exactly what I was thinking. If I were Fox I wouldn't be happy about this at all. 

Well if they make three or four of them into fresh hot stars that can appear on Fox then it's no bad thing but then that does pretty much make the draft and roster split an even bigger waste of time than it already seems like it was.

This is a great opportunity for Bryan to add a feather to his resume. I don't mean winning the belt, I mean dragging Cole to a good match. 

Outside of the Stephanie McMahon shit, which last less than three minutes, this show has been dope.

Bryan's been specially nasty tonight

They're definitely going to run some main roster invasions on Wednesday now aren't they?

So the key to a good Adam Cole match is to have Daniel twist him into a pretzel.

Trips bigfooting the entire NXT roster instead of letting the champ speak is the most WWE thing ever.

Hey what the fuck show Lio Rush some respect, Trips.

Adam Cole's finish still looks pretty dumb

1 minute ago, C.S. said:

Trips bigfooting the entire NXT roster instead of letting the champ speak is the most WWE thing ever.

 

You're not wrong but I'm guessing the show was written with the idea the crowd might try to What Chant an NXT person so they have Uncle Paul cut the go home promo.

Would've been nice if one of the guys got to do the promo instead of HHH but he's got to get the maximum vanity from his vanity promotion.

Still, this was probably just about the best that things could've gone given the disaster they could've been heading for with the flight insanity.

That was a helluva show. 

Props to Miz and Bryan. Didn't go to KSA and played a MAJOR part in this episode putting talent over.

2 minutes ago, KawadaSmile said:

Props to Miz and Bryan. Didn't go to KSA and played a MAJOR part in this episode putting talent over.

Speaking of, we know Bryan's deal but how did Miz manage to not have to go? 

20 minutes ago, sek69 said:

So the key to a good Adam Cole match is to have Daniel twist him into a pretzel.

Adam Cole is quickly becoming a barometer to me for how great his opponents are. In the sense that, one can learn a lot about a wrestler by how they approach the problem of having a good match with Adam Cole. 

According to John Pollock the NXT talent didn't arrive until 7:55 pm!

55 minutes ago, SmartMark15 said:

Adam Cole is quickly becoming a barometer to me for how great his opponents are. In the sense that, one can learn a lot about a wrestler by how they approach the problem of having a good match with Adam Cole. 

Isn't this like Wargames. The only way to win is to never play?

Cole is not even bad - he clearly showed he's good time and time again. The issue is that it's easy to overindulge in that overkill NXT main event style, and thus the matches lose all sense of meaning.

On the other hand, a Canadian Destroyer to set up a knee strike is.... less than ideal. 

Also, NXT matches without Mauro on commentary >>>

3 hours ago, KawadaSmile said:

Triple H was absent from Crown Jewel and suddenly the focus is on him?

I suspect there is a COLLUSION

They are IN CAHOOTS!

I suspect that having a live NXT on Wednesday night gave HHH a reason to stick around the USA instead of being in Saudi Arabia on Thursday.

Also, the whole women's match in Saudi Arabia package is effective for the people in the audience who really don't know a lot about Saudi Arabia. There's probably more people in that country who aren't totally aligned with the fundamentalists than one would think and the crowd shots were neat (and also selective sampling)

As for the "Fox should be mad that NXT was put over Smackdown"... 10 Smackdown superstars were involved in matches in some sense and 7 were women (Bayley, Cross, Sasha, the 4 women in the tag match whose names I forgot, and Bryan/Miz/Zayn).. to act like Smackdown got squashed when tonight was the equivalent to a Yankee loss where they only started like 3 of their opening day regulars and had the other 6 spots filled with either backup hitters or pitchers playing positions because most of their roster was unable to make it to the stadium due to travel problems of some sort. Not to diminish the aura of tonight, but it'd be a shocker if Smackdown took a loss in every confrontation next week too.

If the roster wasn't near full-strength due to anything other than shit luck, then Fox could be mad about things. But I suspect anybody handling things for the network could be convinced that the storyline over the next 3 weeks was strengthened due to (as far as we know) a charter company fuckup and maybe it ends with Smackdown going over at Survivor Series. I'd think the network people do realize this is scripted and that there's the occasional adversity.

The next 3 weeks really shouldn't have matches between the brands, but more sneak attacks or out of ring stuff. Whatever the plan was going into the PPV, it may have been improved upon through a happy little accident.

Shit luck in this case meaning they did a show on the other side of the world the day before Smackdown. This isn't like that time they got stranded by a blizzard and they had to do Raw from the WWE studio, that was a shit happens moment. This was scheduling shows as far apart as the planet allows in the span of 24 hours allowing for virtually no margin of error. 

 

It sucks that the Saudi government is using WWE to whitewash their treatment of women with the implication that having that match means they are somehow loosening restrictions. It does seem to be a big deal to young girls there so I suppose that's a silver lining, but it's hard to square it being a world changing moment when they still require women to be accompanied in public.

HHH using this to further his goal of one day running everything by integrating NXT is one step closer. And even better, he put them all over the main roster, guys. The man is something else, you have to give him credit.