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Why has nobody said they want to see Cash vs Yuta? Battle of the Wheelers!

That's okay, he can take the year off tv wrestling by remaining with ROH.

It’s highly possible that like any workplace (especially in a creative field) some people enjoy the opportunities they are given, some want to do more and are happy to keep trying, some are really frustrated and some people just want a paycheck. And like any workplace it’s highly possible some have bought into TK’s vision, others think he is a goof they can work, and others think he’s a clown and see WWE as a much better chance to lock up a paycheck to secure their future in a few years. There’s also a highly likely chance that even when Vince was running the show there were people who enjoyed working for the WWE for many different reasons, and there is also a highly likely chance that not everyone is on board with HHH. That’s just the workplace. Some people are going to want to leave.

Is this the new metric I am going to have to start using? ”Guys in the NFL who went to college with one of Dean’s kids”

Why would he grind his feet on Ric Flair's couch like it's the thing to do? He's got a little more sense than that. But yeah, he ground his feet on Ric Flair's couch.

"Fuck yo couch, Naitcha, fuck yo couch!"

Special Whole-Buncha-Gordlow's-Favourites Edition of Elevation Write-up Legit way more stoked for this than I was for RAMPAGE Higane Shinno is from Ehime! I have been to Ehime several times, as my mother-in-law is from the neighbouring prefecture. I love Ehime! I think even most gaijin who live in Japan never make it out there. The small city of Matsuyama is in my top 5 or 10 places in Japan. The onsen there looks just like the one from Spirited Away. i was gonna say "Too bad Nicky Boy's gonna kill him" but then AEW gave us the SHOCKING UPSET (spoiler). Hot damn! I wonder who will team with Shinno vs Nicky Boy & Solo. Maybe Lard Lad?!?! Comoroto, like Hobbs, somehow seems to keep getting MORE jacked. Unreal. LOVE the ending to that match! I generally enjoy Nyla more as a Twitter personality than as a wrestler, but Shafir tying ladies in knots and Nyla subsequently crushing them really works as a tag team deal. Plus they are building an intriguing "Disinterested Vickie" storyline here, too! LOVE Kittie LeFleur's Old School look! Kiera Hogan looks great in there, in both senses, but I was hoping she'd work more as a face and play to the crowd a bit, now that she's an ex-baddie. Outrunners also have a great old-school look and style! I am intrigued by the Indianapolis Indie Scene. Is this a thing there? I like it! Outrunners vs FTR, please! Maybe next time AEW hits Indiana. Top Flight gets a big crowd chant right away, then goes out and EARNS it. The Ethan/Matt/PP story they are telling here is pretty great. I love YouTube-exclusive stories. Way to reward the really hardcore fans, AEW! If they put Madison over Emi, I riot! We Will Chop You gets more over with the crowd every week. Sadly, they didn't pop for Tea Time this week. Tigastyle! Sir Pentico!! Jacked Up Luther!!! Big Cass. Will Luther and Cass get into it on the outside? Sadly, no. Big Paul adds some frisson to the match by saying Serp is 99-0 in AEW. Even heel announcer Matt Menard excitedly pulls for the underdog here. To no avail. (spoiler). I am enjoying ALL OF THIS so very much. Then we get GATES OF AGONY & Brian Cage. Local Guy Dan Adams, who wears glasses and dad shorts, is a huge crowd favourite. Awesome. Cage catching Neon Ninja in vertical suplex position is totally sick! YES! Dalton & The Boys come out to challenge the hoss team! Team Castle representing 2020s style wrestling. Cage & GoA representing 1990s hoss style! Oh boy oh boy oh boy! Presumably on the ROH PPV. Great addition! Reynolds vs Kip! Another fun YouTube-exclusive minifeud! Announcers do a great job of explaining it without over-explaining. And you can feel the hatred in the ring. TAKESHITA gets the YouTube main event! And Nicky Boy comes out with Solo! Oh baby! Takeshita & Shinno vs The Factory! Give it me! Takeshita gets a MASSIVE POP and they are maybe doing an Elite Recruits Lard Lad Story! That was GREAT! Thank you, DEAN, for the heads up. Also, w/r/t Ehime. Their mandarin oranges are famously delicious. They make a special orange juice there named Pon Juice. If you go to a convenience store in Matsuyama you can buy Pon Juice flavoured EVERYTHING. Pon Juice flavoured Pocky, chewing gum, hard candies, gummy candies, etc etc etc. I recommend treating that stuff like Takeshita treats Cinnabon. Also try the grilled fish cakes called jakoten.

Think I’m going to go to the WWE thread every week and post photos from Twitter of half-full arenas.

Jarrett as Traveling NWA Champ/Cosplay Flair is better than HHH Traveling NWA Champ/Cosplay Harley Race. Jarrett could have great Hometown baby face v Traveling champ matches against guys like Jay Lethal and Chase Stevens @SirSmellingtonofCascadiaI liked Jarretts WCW US title run but don't remember what his best match would be. I didn't care for the No gimmick need Jarrett, Country Singer 2.0, or Woman beater Jarrett (although his Hair match v X-pac seemed decent at the time)

Grief. Phase 4's direction was grief, and overcoming it.

I don't get this "everyone want's to leave" Narrative when it seems like guys such as AmDrag, Dax and Jericho are having the time of their lives (and some of those guys have had hot and cold realtionships with HHH)

I don't want to overreact, but I'm beginning to suspect that the Dallas Cowboys might be a better football team than the Indianapolis Colts.

Kerning fail yet again

I'm gonna miss Regal thirsting over Excalibur.

I'm in, this'll give me something positive to do. After watching all this Territories stuff I would really like to see some good World Class and surely some more Mid-South. Vintage joshi (or more GAIA) would be another option, or any new stuff from any company in the world that's up MY territory... which you know what that means.

@GuerrillaMonsoon mentioned the Giant match on PPV, which is legitimately dope. That's at Havoc '96. The Starrcade '96 match with Benoit goes hard, too. He's also good for a fun match almost every week he's on Nitro, including a surprisingly enjoyable match against a washed Bubba Rogers on the 10/14/96 Nitro. Hmm, I looked back really quickly at what I've written about him in the Nitro re-watch thread I'm writing and would suggest those three matches plus these from Nitro as a quick smattering of what Jarrett was doing at that time: Jarrett/Alex Wright on 11/25/96 Another decent match against Bubba on 12/2/96 Jarrett/DDP on 12/9/96 which is excellent, definitely one of the better Nitro matches in its history Jarrett/Eddy Guerrero on 1/27/97 I think what's cool about the Jarrett Nitro matches is that he always wrestles them with a plan in mind and often will work around some major concept - Jimmy Hart liberally involving himself in his match, knocking out his opponent's mobility, etc. - that is threaded through the match and that often leads to its conclusion in a satisfying way. He feels more like a complete worker than he'd ever felt. I was extremely low on him before the rewatch and I will note that as the weeks passed, I flipped my opinion on Jarrett's work in the ring entirely.

I think Jarrett's work in WWF isn't as good as there's such a mentality for heels, especially as he wasn't a big guy and low on the card, to show ass and not much else. I find his work leans too much into that and he's not as athletically impressive as a Shawn or a Hennig to make it work beyond being a better talent than the dregs of a 94/95 or late 97 midcard, and he doesn't have the heat in much of his stuff that wasn't with Shawn or Razor to make his Memphis stalling schtique matter. (or look significantly less when Lawler was regularly on the same card and doing it far better). Once he goes to WCW, he's allowed to take a decent chunk of the match, and get a reaction from the crowd. The match on a PPV with The Giant was a great example of that. Even his stuff with Mongo is far more tolerable because he's not as restricted by, or leaning into shitty cowardly heel tropes.

I agree with your overall assessment of Jarrett's proper level, but his short WCW stint after this is his high-water mark, IMO. He has good-to-great matches on TV and on PPV against a wide range of people. Then he goes back to WWF and immediately starts a downhill trend in his work that he never recovered from.

Well played. I personally think Dax wants take a year off just to drink beer and turn in to a true BAH GAWD hoss. Did I say think? I meant hope.

I disagree with most of this. Mayfield was smoke and mirrors from the beginning. He was one of those quarterbacks who looked great when everything worked exactly how it was drawn up, but showed little to no ability to make a positive play if anything went wrong. He also seemed to alienate his teammates, which is a huge red flag for a quarterback. You have to be Aaron Rodgers or young Russell Wilson for people to tolerate your bullshit. If you're average and an asshole, your best wide receiver's dad might make YouTube videos about you.

Another of those 'quiet part out loud' things was that Colorado's AD admitted on Sunday that he "currently" doesn't have the money to pay Deion the $5.5M for his salary this year (nor the full value of his contract, obviously). He's confident he'll get the money for it, but still. And I'm sure that interview was aimed directly at the alums/boosters to pony up. Because I'm sure the Colorado state government isn't keen to throw around an additional $2 million at CU because they thought they needed a big name HC that hasn't beaten anyone above a My Little Sister State-level college.

You'd think the Colts' head coach had never coached a professional game before.

I’m game. MY TERMS: Gotta be free on YouTube or similar as I currently have no streaming subscriptions, nor do I have any plans to get one. No WWE or any of its subsidiaries, acquisitions or “partners,” as I am a petulant child and will not let go of an almost-sixteen-year grudge. Beyond that? Anything goes.

I could see him entering the Rumble as either 1-2-3 Kid or X-Pac. The nostalgia pop is one of my favorite things about the Rumble...

And, if I remember correctly, that was the end of WWE. So, once again, we are forced to admit that the doomsayers are making a great point. Also, let's remember the story of the boy who cried "Wolf!" As I recall, the boy kept yelling that there was a wolf among the sheep or goats and disaster was immanent and everyone came running and he got to be the centre of attention for a while and everyone was happy and said, "Gee whiz, boy who keeps crying wolf even though there is no wolf, you sure are smart and cool." And everybody liked him and we all learned something . So there's that as well.

Since Regal is signing with WWE (per Fightful and Meltzer today) - wouldn't that mean that definitely means they are killing Scott off?

My God; I never realized how much a GTA game world could easily be a Territories-era wrestling life game. Missions are constant driving from town to town to make the shows; working your way up the card makes you more money; then at the end of a chapter the promoter finishes you up and you drive off to a newly-unlocked territory on the other side of the country. Evading the police, petty crime side missions, avoiding hostile fans. Set it beginning in 1983 and the background plot is a Vince figure going national and taking over the game map.

Could you imagine, if the pec injury left a hideous blotch on his torso?

Hanage Shinno is back again! Versus NICKY BOY! HEY! Cagematch.net was wrong! It said NICKY BOY won this match. Shinno with the flash pin! Postmatch, the Factory RETAIN THEIR HEAT! Totally awesome! NYLA! It's Thunder Kitty! She takes a beating like a champ. Alice Crowley is bulking up. Something is up with Vickie! It's Kiera Hogan! It's Nikki Victory! SUPERKICK! Victory with a nearfall. WRECKED EM! Hogan should go the ATHENA route and start beating the hell out folks. NICE Backdrop Driver by Hogan! The Outrunners are the best enhancement talent of December! The Martins are SPECTACULAR! The Outrunners ARE the Mod Squad! The Outrunners are fucking AWESOME. Matt Hardy is BREAKING! EMI! EMI! EMI! It's Madison Rayne! Emi starts beating on Rayne early! SPANKY BUTT! Madison goes on offense! EMI wins with La Majistral after a BEAUTIFUL eye rake! Lee Moriaty takes on SERP! SERP uses lucha stylings to counter Moriarty's BattlARTS stylings. SERP fights against losing number 100! Border City Stretch puts SERP into triple digit losses. Hey! It's Facade! He gets to get beaten to death by the Gates of Agony! It's Dan the Dad! Dan is OVER in Indy! Facade is awesome in this. His set up for the Drill Claw was so such a lunatic set up. This was your match of the night so far. Alex Reynolds starts off totally ATHENA on Kip Sabien! Daddy Magic is awesome. Reynolds is laying it in. Toprope Double Stomp for TWO! Reynolds hits a Tiger Suplex! Penelope distracts Reynolds! Sabian with a win! Konosuke Takeshita! Aaron Solo! Solo is with NICKY BOY! Lard Boy is OVER in Indianapolis! Takeshita hits a SWEET in ring Rana! BLUE THUNDER BOMB! GREAT EVEREST GERMAN SUPLEX FOR THE WIN! Konosuke Takeshita is fucking AWESOME.

TNA Jarrett is unwatchable. He's not a bad worker in a vacuum, but he learned all the wrong lessons from the Attitude/Russo-WCW era. Too many run-ins and gaga to the point that you'd just be waiting for the inevitable and it almost made the twenty minutes you had to sit through almost pointless because who gave a shit until the run-ins/weapon shots started.

Ive said this before (to varying reactions) but I think it's not just the 'boss' kid' factor, but also the fact that HHH was doing a similar thing with his reign of terror at the same time (down to the obvious 'boss' kid...in law' factor there, too, along with the constant Evolution/Planet Jarrett chicanery). It's tough to sell your promotion as an alternative when the booking suffers from a near-identical problem.

53 year old Jun Akiyama won the DDT Extreme Championship. He defeated Joey Janela in a TLC match to win it. Jun became the oldest Extreme Champion.

Hopefully a speedy recovery for Windham.

Oh, it's enough that I have to read your posts. @Gonzo and I go back to the Delphi days, so he knows why I hate him. Also, the Dolphins just signed Eric Fisher. They just put OL Austin Jackson on the IR, so this was a critically needed move.

Guessing SF will snatch him up because he is (probably(??)) better than Brock Purdy. (And before you say it, let me get this out of the way... shut up.)

Don't know why Jericho would give up his spot as the company's Iago (and I don't mean the parrot. RIP Gilbert)

Bret: "Yeah, I dug my feet on his coach. Ric could afford another one..."

Does it say “Champions!” or is that like squiggle?

That new Andre suit jacket figure is awesome, though I admit the original Twitter cropping did get my hopes up that they pulled the trigger on a "Rock N Wrestling" cartoon Andre variant.

Don’t worry, he’s trading up for *checks notes* oh no, Corey Graves.

Yeah, the leap in logic from “non wrestler wants to go work with his best friend who stuck by him through multiple bouts of drug addiction AND his son, who is a very promising prospect” to “Tony Khan is a moron and everyone wants to leave” is baffling. Truly breathtaking. AEW doesn’t really have a developmental program. Whether or not they need one is another discussion, but why make a guy do a job he doesn’t want to when the job he wants to do isn’t one your company offers? As far as Mox goes, it wouldn’t shock me if he’s one of the guys who told TK just to let Regal out of his deal. What actual harm can letting a 50+ year old non wrestler go do AEW?

The Year of the Takeshita

The trolls are trying too hard if they are selling the potential loss of Regal as a big deal. He's strictly a seldom-used on-screen character, it would be a bigger deal if he had a backstage role. If TK knew that Regal's contract was ending soon, or had an out, they've known since before this entire current storyline started. As far as we knew, they cooked this up in October to give Regal's character a two-month "out" storyline to put a bow on his run in AEW. To put over MJF on his way out. Either way he's not a key player, the BCC was a fun but really loose faction that rarely involved Regal, and if he never shows up in AEW again its not going to ruin anything or even matter to what they are doing.

Finally, somebody with some sense when it comes to their opinion on Paul Roma. It's like finally finding the needle in the hay stack. Thanks!

Although it was more like Gooker mistreating Mean Gene, making the poor bastard attempt a cartwheel with near catastrophic results.

Cocaine Bear is just missing Samuel L Jackson yelling "Enough is enough! I've had it with this motherfucking bear snorting all the motherfucking coke!"

I've been reading the Stan Hansen autobiography, and one of the best things about it is that it gives a very good look at the Amarillo territory (NWA Western States) in the early 70s, which is one of the toughest territories for us to really know anything about as we have no meaningful footage. So far, however, my favorite thing was the story about Terry Funk and a cop from Happy, TX. Funk would speed like crazy, including through towns where the speed limit dropped from 55 to 25. He'd be going 100 at 2 am the same time every week since they had their weekly loop. So apparently there was one cop in Happy, TX that waited for him every week and tried to chase him down to give him speeding tickets and Funk would try to outrace him. Every week. There needs to be a movie about this. Just this.