Just now, Jmare007 said:

New Day having to world champions is fucking dope. Big E winning is dope, even though I wanted him to beat the one to vanquish Roman, I'm just happy he got the belt.

I guess the time was right for Big E to win, but not for Roman to lose.

Also, Lashley still looked like a monster even in defeat. Let's fucking go.

The time has been right for Big E to win for 5 years now.

This is absolutely not how I would have done it, but I am so happy for Big E. No one deserves this as much as he does. He is the WWE champ, and for now, that is all that matters.

Listen, we will get:

The Bloodline vs Balor/Street Profits

The Bloodline vs New Day.

Let's fucking GOOOOOOOOOOP

As cool as it is seeing someone like E finally win the big one,  doing it this way just made it feel like the forced panic based idea it was. They were doing a great slow burn on SD with him taunting Heyman with the briefcase, and this just seemed so shoehorned in to the stories being built on Raw with Lashley.

But Lashley had no stories for the WWE belt, he was more feuding with RKBro for the tag titles than anything. 

I mean, he did beat absolutely everyone in the division!

Goldbergs still comin for Lashley's soul 

At any rate I love that a guy like E who seems to be solidly in the Bobby Eaton-Ricky Steamboat "dudes everyone loves and no one has a bad thing to say about them" category gets his due. The love coming from everyone on Twitter from all across wrestling is legit heartwarming to see.

Every wrestler across promotions is publicly happy. Gotta love it when an incredible talent and human being who is universally adored gets success on the big stage.

Ali just tweeted "Brodie would be so happy" and the room just got a lot more dusty for some reason.

Didn't watch but super happy for Big E.  Going back to FCW he's been in WWE since 2009.

Not how I would have done it, but there wasn't really anything left to do with Lashley as champion.  E is a great ambassador for the company and they need more legit babyfaces.  Now get him out there on the talk show circuit, push the hell out of him as champ, and don't job him to Gable Steveson in 6 months.

First black to black WWE champions too. That's also pretty fucking dope.

Look, I am over the moon with E was champ, but man did I love Lashley's reign. Even after disbanding The Hurt Business (guess they were getting too over) he still had a great damn run.

MVP is truly a Miracle Man.

Not that's it's a big deal now but I wonder what the original plan was for E if they hadn't decided on this over the weekend?

hadnt they been teasing him v .Roman for months?

3 minutes ago, Strummer said:

Not that's it's a big deal now but I wonder what the original plan was for E if they hadn't decided on this over the weekend?

hadnt they been teasing him v .Roman for months?

Andrew Zarian of mat men reports this was always the plan, originally to do on Draft Night. the Draft was originally planned for Aug 30 before being delayed a month, but they stuck with this. 

I've said it here before and I'm saying it again now. Everything WWE does is reactive rather than proactive. They don't really have a long term plan for anybody other than maybe Reigns. They expect to get killed in the ratings by MNF and just lost to AEW, so they hot shot a bunch of things and put the title Big E finally. Big E should have had a title reign a long time ago. Big E vs Lashley should have been a PPV main event with a 6 week build and they should have done it a long time ago. But no, they are getting killed in the ratings so they hot shot it. It reminds me a lot of Goldberg beating Hogan with only 1 weeks build on free TV.  

1 hour ago, joeg said:

I've said it here before and I'm saying it again now. Everything WWE does is reactive rather than proactive. They don't really have a long term plan for anybody other than maybe Reigns. They expect to get killed in the ratings by MNF and just lost to AEW, so they hot shot a bunch of things and put the title Big E finally. Big E should have had a title reign a long time ago. Big E vs Lashley should have been a PPV main event with a 6 week build and they should have done it a long time ago. But no, they are getting killed in the ratings so they hot shot it. It reminds me a lot of Goldberg beating Hogan with only 1 weeks build on free TV.  

This is it exactly. And it makes for a feel good moment, for sure - who the hell doesn't love Big E.? He's great. But it's short sighted because it was just WWE trying to hot shot again.

I have been saying Big E should get the belt for a long time. But this reeks of a panic move where he's going to get blamed when ratings don't shift. 

He's now the champion of a show he hasn't wrestled on in 2 years. What feuds have been built for him, who are his challengers, etc. 

While this is a feel-good moment with Big E I can't get all the way excited when you know this company's history of fucking up the follow-through.  

I can't say I've ever viewed Big E as anything close to a world champion-level talent, but I hope he does well since he's a great guy who seems universally beloved by his peers. One important thing he has over Kofi is a sense of danger where you get the feeling he could snap and destroy someone if pushed too far. The follow-up will be key because the beginning wasn't terribly auspicious. Cashing in on a guy who just wrestled a title match is a heel move any way you slice it. Also, the MNF game ended up being a barnburner, and I'm worried he'll end up as the scapegoat if Raw's ratings take a hit.

By the way, it needs to be said: BIG MEATY MEN SLAPPING MEAT matches are usually pretty boring. Big guys almost always have much better matches with smaller opponents.

1 hour ago, NintendoLogic said:

By the way, it needs to be said: BIG MEATY MEN SLAPPING MEAT matches are usually pretty boring. Big guys almost always have much better matches with smaller opponents.

I'm calling the cops

I also have little hope. Bruce is lazy as fuck as a booker and I fully expect them to settle back into every Raw being 75% the same matches week to week within a few weeks.

12 hours ago, joeg said:

I've said it here before and I'm saying it again now. Everything WWE does is reactive rather than proactive. They don't really have a long term plan for anybody other than maybe Reigns. They expect to get killed in the ratings by MNF and just lost to AEW, so they hot shot a bunch of things and put the title Big E finally. Big E should have had a title reign a long time ago. Big E vs Lashley should have been a PPV main event with a 6 week build and they should have done it a long time ago. But no, they are getting killed in the ratings so they hot shot it. It reminds me a lot of Goldberg beating Hogan with only 1 weeks build on free TV.  

A few problems with this argument - 

1.) As noted above, this has been the plan for a while, because of MNF premiering, not something in response to AEW doing well last week in the ratings or whatever Twitter decided in the last week is the reason why Crazy Senile Vince changed plans. 

2.) The Goldberg-Hogan comparison doesn't work, at least when it comes to the drawing money part, because the money for PPV's and RAW comes from the same place - Comcast. At the moment, every week of RAW gets them a check equivalent to their cut of a 130,000-ish buy PPV from Comcast. Now, there's an argument in a way Comcast pays them even more for the Network, but that's filtered through all the network shows, etc. 

PPV's exist as storytelling devices and big shows to sell lots of tickets too (which is why MiTB will be at a stadium next year), not things to draw money for specific matches. 

Storytelling-wise, it's the Money in the Bank. The whole point is that it comes out of nowhere. Now, you might think that's a dumb storytelling device, but it exists and they're going to use it. 

3.) I think people don't get that card placement doesn't equal how over somebody is anymore, at least in the WWE. People get cycled down and cycled up fairly quickly. Lashley was in a silly feud w/ Lana, and a couple of months later, he was champion, and that didn't seem to hurt him getting over. Owen's right now in the mid card, but he could be turned back up for a title feud w/ Roman tomorrow, and be over again. The downside of WWE booking and people hanging around forever is almost nobody is consistently pushed enough to actually draw ratings. The upside is once you're over, you're always over. Look at the pop Jeff Hardy got last night. Hell, look at the pop Big E got, despite being a "midcarder" recently. Since being a midcarder is not seen as a shoot 'this person is not good enough, so don't care anymore' thing, as long as you were actually over, you can easily be ramped up again. Now, of course, there are problems getting people to that point in the first place, but that's a whole other issue. 

I think it's more than true than ever, that the WWE is booking not like a pro wrestling show, but a soap opera, and that means people who were "background" for a long time can suddenly become main characters in a moment if the storyline requires it, and most of the people still paying attention (and Youtube/Instagram/etc. numbers shows that's hell of a lot more than pushed on the Internet at times) are OK with it. 

 

 

3 hours ago, Jesse Ewiak said:

1.) As noted above, this has been the plan for a while, because of MNF premiering, not something in response to AEW doing well last week in the ratings or whatever Twitter decided in the last week is the reason why Crazy Senile Vince changed plans. 

The decision to do it this week was only made on Friday, the day after the ratings came out. It's clear that they saw AEW beating Raw in the demo the week before football comes back to eat 20% of their lunch and went balls out to pop a rating this week to prevent getting beat by a larger margin this week.  

Which is fine. It's just historically there's not a lot of evidence that WWE can/will follow up correctly on something they did as a hotshot move. 

I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. 

They're too lazy to keep it up. Any time they have tried to course correct, you maybe get 2 weeks out of it. 

1.67 million for Raw.