Just Dave

The right answer is Ricky Starks, but either of those guys would work too…

I said it about Sasha and Naomi, and I’ll say it here; that’s a shitty fucking thing to do to a co worker. Wardlow really needs this moment to complete his elevation, and if MJF no shows, that’s pretty fucking selfish…

Joe’s was cancelled. The rumor is that he was needed to help train PVZ for her match tomorrow. SRS is now saying a flight out of Las Vegas has been booked for mjf.

SRS is saying it isn’t a work.

I’m providing a public service…

Lot of good stuff on this show. MJF’s red attire was “chefs kiss” perfect. That was everything it needed to be. Wardlow is a STAR. JAS/BCC & the boys is going to absolutely rule. Mox is still in the bad habit of giving inferior opponents too much offense, but that match set up what it needed to. God I hope Punk doesn’t win. AEW needs another 40+ year old former wwe champ like it needs another 20 folks on its roster. I thought Page’s promo was good. I liked Thunder Rosa’s “Crazy Miguel’s Used Cars” getup. The promo needed some work but again, English isn’t her first language. Rosa got hot at the right time and helped carry this company through the pandemic. If they switch the title from her to Deeb so Deeb can drop it to Soho or Storm or Statlander, that would make sense. That 3 way match absolutely fornicated. It was awesome. I will say this until it stops needing to be said, but imagine having Jungle Boy, Swerve Strickland, and Stroke Daddy Starks on your payroll and turning around and building your program around adam Cole and his sawed off boring ass friends. That’s like going to the nicest steakhouse in the city and ordering the chicken nuggets off the kids menu. Just absolutely horrifying. Samoa Joe rules. In a fair and just world he would stomp adam Cole into baloney pudding and reign forever with his Owen trophy. But we live not in a just world. We live in a world where adam Cole and Britt baker are going to be handed yet another opportunity to lead this program into blinding generic mediocrity. Like the homecoming king and queen at a high school with the worst football team ever. This shit should be considered a hate crime. Mostly good show. Oh yeah! I forgot. Jeff Cobb fucking rules. And it was cool of his tag partner to take time off from trying to kill Flash Gordon to be a part of AEW…

The KOR love puzzles me. As far as the Owen goes, I could see him losing to Joe and running Sting/Darby vs. reDRagon…

So, this is the kind of thing I like to think about, and since I got some positive feedback on my post about how I would pitch Alexa on coming to AEW if I were TK, here is how I would pitch Sasha Banks coming to AEW if I were TK; A truckload of money. Just piles upon piles of American currency. While I think she overestimates her star power a bit, I would happily admit to her being the biggest star on aews womens roster the second she signs. Compensate her accordingly. Creative input. Ask her who she wants to work. I’m unfamiliar with who the top female stars in Japan are currently, but I’m certain she does. Move heaven and earth to get her in the ring on the biggest stages against the best the world has to offer. On the AEW roster, the obvious dance partner is Jade Cargill. You build that right and you have the chance to do the biggest business you’ve ever done. I know she’s expressed interest in working Britt Baker and Jamie Hayter. Do it. Put it on featured Dynamites before big time nba games & cross promote the shit out of it. Get Shaq and Chuck going back and forth about who’s gonna win. Shaq rooting for Sasha and Chuck for Britt. Which brings me to… Mainstream media attention. Again, I believe her culture footprint is about half the size she (and certain Stan’s) think it is, but that still dwarfs every woman in AEW and most of the guys. I think she’d actually be worth the investment here more than in the ring. If she gave you 12 matches a year and 125 media appearances promoting Dynamite & Rampage, that’s a home run. Put her in the ring at DoN 2023 with Paige Van Zant and send them both out on press and see if it doesn’t work like gangbusters. One of the few things I’ve ever heard Jim Cornette say that I agree with (and maybe the only thing that doesn’t have to do with the Jackson’s and Dancing Kenny) is that the easiest way to make money in wrestling is to let stars be stars. You bend over backward to accommodate her “movie career,” keep her to about 12-15 matches a year, and make sure she’s on national tv at least once a week wearing your logo….

100%. Even if everyone here thinks I'm a dick, I'd at least like them to know I'm not totally un-self aware...

I hate when folks just baselessly shit on wrestlers they dislike for some arcane reason…

That’s actually an interesting point I hadnt considered…

Some more very interesting observations from Brandon Thurston's quarter hour analyses he releases periodically: Two Dynamites ago, with the opener of Adam Cole vs. Dax Harwood, the show was right around 816k viewers. Decent opener. The next segment gained around 20k viewers and would continue to gain throughout most of the night. The following Dynamite, with the main event of Adam Cole vs. Jeff Hardy, the viewership went from around 900k the segment before to cratering at 777k viewers for their match. Three weeks ago, when I pointed out people aren't watching Adam Cole when the ten man super elite tag lost substantial viewers, I was told "it was their jobber opponents." This is more evidence that people are actively tuning Adam Cole out. At what point do we stop pretending he's a star people will tune in to see?

I really liked this show. The only thing that bothered me, and I will concede that this is a matter of personal taste, is having to miss out on HOB's entrance just so there would be time for the Jacksons and the Alleged Elite to remind us how much more important they are than anything else happening on the show.

Careful. I’ve been specifically told that their body type doesn’t matter. @Dogwill bitch at you for bringing up their bony knees, whatever the fuck that meant. Watching that Super Elite beat down at the end was cringe inducing. Those guys wish so badly they were the nwo. They want to be cool, edgy heels in the worst way. And maybe they could be, if not for the fact that they’re missing the two biggest components that made the nwo believable; size & charisma…

Since I can be a grump sometimes, I''ll list what I liked first. Johnny All was a great pick to be the men's Joker. He's credible enough and over enough to pop a crowd and deliver an intriguing matchup without losing anything if he jobs to Samoa Joe. Made total sense to me. I called the Wardlow thing last week. Him not selling the lashes made him look awesome (and Cody kind of look like a biiiiiiiiiitch). Wardlow is going to dismember MJF at the ppv. I can't wait. Maki Itoh is fun. Really fun. Keith Lee & Swerve have great chemistry. Props to the WHMen for going out of their way to make their opponents look like absolute stars. Ricky Starks is so, so cool. He and Hobbs look fantastic together. That 3 way tag title match is gonna rule, and Christian finally turning on Jungle Boy is gonna be great, too. I'm All In on Jungle Jack being top guy in a year or so. Swerve telling Starks he was dressed like a bar of soap was phenomenal. Serena Deeb tried really, really hard. I appreciate the effort. It was putrid, but that's not on her. She doesn't need to be cutting promos on live tv. That could've been a really good JR interview segment. The BCC/JAS segment kicked all kinds of ass, and that match, whatever it's gonna be, is going to fuck. Glorious wrestling violence, as Mox would say. Him saying he's not doing that shit popped me. Jericho bringing up pissing in Regal's Earl Grey popped me, too. Matt Menaud has the most punchable face in wrestling. The fuck was that Matt Sydal/Dante Martin promo? Sydal's voice sounds like if you listened to Dolph Ziggler on 1.75 speed. What I didn't like: Again, the decision to push nxt refugees over your own homegrown talent is baffling to me. Kyle O'Reilly couldn't draw a dollar with a green crayon, and he's going over Rey Fenix? Maddening. 5'9, charisma free workers grow on trees in the current wrestling scene. There is zero special about that dude, and he and his sawed-off buddies get more TV time than they did at their old jobs. No wonder AEW's audience has stagnated. Adam Cole is truly achieving something special; the chance to kill the audiences of two Wednesday night wrestling shows. Imagine seeing Ricky Starks, Will Hobbs, Swerve Strickland and Keith Lee walk into your building and thinking "we gotta make sure Adam Cole has a match and an interview this week." It's horseshit, and it does nothing for your tv audience, as reflected by the quarter hr numbers. That Serena Deeb promo was fucking awful. She desperately needs a manager.

“Everything Sasha does is ok because she’s the one doing it…”

Thought it was pretty interesting today how Meltzer said there's "almost zero" backstage support for Sasha and Naomi. Said the word he kept hearing over and over again was "mark." She comes off as a mark for herself of the highest order, and I think that's why I dislike her so much. She's not nearly as important to that company's success as she thinks she is...

Man, I like you, but this was the shit that killed the last iteration of nXt. I can't imagine TK being that oblivious....

I would hope Ricky would have the common sense to look at the landscape in WWE in terms of who's being brought in. I love Ricky Starks to death, but his size all but predetermines what his spot would be in modern day WWE. If he wants to go make an obscene amount of money for a couple years before being a "pre-stockholder's call" release, he should go. Bag security matters.

That’s how good Rey Fenix is. He makes Kyle O’Reilly interesting…

Imagine having fucking War Machine on the payroll and having nothing for them…

So, I was listening to SRS’s post show breakdown last night, and I did feel some slight sense of relief that Naomi and Sasha were actually advocating for Piper & Nikki to get a match with them at HitC. I have some worker friends who have met Big Damo through the Indy circuit and they all have glowing things to say about the kind of people Damo & Nikki are. Nikki also famously bought pizza for the dozens of extras wwe was using during the early pandemic days. It really bothered me that Nikki & Piper list a chance at a Raw main event because Sasha and Naomi walked out. I think if it were me, I’d have tried to help a friend and then walked, but I get it. I never side with management. Ever. I’m a proud Union member and have seen what the evil intent of management brings about when workers don’t stand together. It’s just hard for me to take Sasha seriously when she’s going on Stone Cold’s podcast and saying asinine, borderline delusional shit like “I’m on Vince McMahon’s level” and how the company needs her more than she needs the company. It’s also eyeroll inducing to hear people talk about her Hollywood aspirations when she had 3 lines on Mandalorian and wasn’t invited back. I guess it’s natural to have an emotional response when a person I think is an absolute idiot makes a decent point. It kinda seems like a persecution complex from Sasha, when there are twenty women on wwe’s payroll who would give anything to have creative as bad as Sasha’s. But I also understand how maddening it is to have a boss promise something and then not follow through. Idk. I guess what I’m saying is I’m not perfect, and the impulse to speak on an incident before I have a fully formed opinion probably isn’t my best trait. I still think Sasha’s an incredibly overrated in ring performer, and has been blatantly unprofessional at various points in her career (purposely breaking Alexa Bliss’ nose in nXt, for one), but I’m also all for folks telling Vince, Johnny Ace, and Podcast Prichard to fuck off as frequently and loudly as possible.

I never said the Jacksons work like the Road Warriors. I believe I said they sell like the Road Warriors. A statement I stand by and that their recent work has done nothing to disprove. I don't recall mentioning anyone's bony knees. I've said (and believe) that the lack of dudes who legit look like they could kick someone's ass in a real fight is a detriment to the business of making worked fights look legitimate. I stand by that too. @Niners Fan in CT, I think it's just genius of you to attempt to respond to what I said without reading it. I never admitted I was wrong about why Sasha took time off because a) I haven't thought about it for a single second until today, and b) Now that I am thinking about it, I don't really believe what was put in any WWE documentary anymore than I believe it when WWE produced content asserted that Vince McMahon wasn't trying to kill Starrcade by running Survivor Series. I don't recall you standing in support when Ali asked for his release, or when Jon Moxley vocalized the dysfunction in WWE's creative process. I'd respect your opinion on this so much more if you just said "I'm a huge Sasha stan and none of her unprofessional behavior bothers me." What agenda do you think I have? If I have any agenda on this board, it's the relentless and righteous crusade against flippy, tassel wearing dipshits who love to play wrestler until it's their turn to pretend it hurts. I just don't think Sasha Banks has a leg to stand on when complaining about "bad creative" when she's been in a favored spot for coming up on five years.

In this week's episode of "it's okay to be unprofessional because it's Sasha...." Sasha Banks has been one of the most protected stars on the roster since her call-up. She's been allowed to leave to pursue outside interests and to take time for her mental health. There's nothing wrong with any of that. But at what point is it okay to say "she's unprofessional?" First of all, it's a pretty shitty thing to do to two co-workers who could really use the exposure. And the "didn't feel safe" thing feels like horseshit, especially from Sasha, who's purposefully hurt co-workers in the past. Doudrop and Nikki had a chance to main event Raw tonight, and because of Sasha's hurt feelings, they don't get to. Secondly, what is Naomi thinking? Why would you go along with this? You get a chance to go over in a big match on Raw and turn it down why? Because of a pair of meaningless titles that make you the top team in a teamless division? Vince has made it pretty clear how he sees the women's tag team scene. I'm not sure why those titles exist. It's possible I'm making too much of this. Lord knows I've never made too big a deal out of my personal tastes in wrestling on this board before. But Sasha Banks of all people crying about creative while so many folks with legitimate complaints go to work and execute the shitty creative they're given strikes me as a bit disingenuous. Maybe she should ask her good friend Bayley, who was left off Wrestlemania 37 after carrying the company through the most dire time of the Covid 19 pandemic if she thinks Sasha's creative is "bad." At some point the juice isn't worth the squeeze. It's also worth noting that for all the bluster some folks make about Sasha's crossover appeal, she wasn't invited back for the current season of Mandalorian. The only other person on that list is a white nationalist, so it could be that Sasha's acting career isn't on the same fast track that Roman Reigns' is, despite certain posters insisting that she's some transcendent star. I never want to be the guy who says "shut up and do your job." I'm as anti-WWE from a creative and talent relations standpoint as I can possibly be. There are about three dozen WWE talent on the main roster at minimum who would be completely justified to walk out and go home after being given their creative. Sasha Banks has very little to complain about from a creative standpoint.