NoFistsJustFlips

Raise your hand if you're okay with this change. *raises hand* Hey why am I the only one with my hand raised? lol

Right. They've been just having tv sides open at first. Nothing worse than having everything open in 20k seater then trying to get people to move from the seats they bought to clump together for camera side. Once they get within 500 or a 1000 of the section being sold out they open uo more aections.

Beyond this point, and this is something I haven't seen mentioned, the lack of promotional time is hurting them. Why did that big of a match for that big od a Dynamite get announced one week out. Why did we just get the finalized Blood & Guts members one week before the show? They're leaving money on the table by not announcing things further out. You'd get higher ratings if more people had it in their head gotta tune in on this date. They'd probably sell more tickets with at least a few things announced further out. Blood & Guts has about 3500 tickets out as of now. The first time they did it they had almost 10k in the building. It's nit the end of the world or the biggest issue they have. But it's just an odd quark I've noticed with how they book. Even PPVs don't get many things finalized early. They wait til the last minute. And I think it's legiti.ately hurting them.

I think some of that is them trying their hand at ot to gain experience for later. There's no way OC is producing Dynamite matches. He probably helps with ROH or has a secondary coaching job ala Renee. Like she's not laying out matches. She's helping produce promos. Jon Cruz / Serpentico is most certainly the Dark / ROH agent. There's no way he's producing main roster stuff. I think that's a full list of all coaches for all aspects. I wouldn't take that to mean all of them are equals doing an equal amount of match producing for Dynamite. As for the MJF vs Ospreay match I loved it. It's in my top 5 matches all time in AEW. I understand the criticisms. The knee selling went away. The psychology of the crowd brawl is a little out there. (My take on it was a meta extra layer thing. MJF is a scumbag that tries to stall and find an opening with any dirty cheating he can. He wasn't running to save a title. He was scrambling to find an opening to take over. And that backfired because Ospreay saw it coming and turned it around on him). But that's one of those notes that's not gonna land with the whole audience. To me that match was a perfect blend of the modern style and throw back old school Broadway. There's so much storytelling meat on the bone left to go back to when it's time too. It's amazing to me their tanks had enough in it for that pinball sequence they did at the 55min mark. That's so hard to do as clean as they did it when fresh. Let alone 55mins in. Like how many times have we seen the bridge up transition into the backslide fail? It's crazy they hit that so clean.

To add some details to what I said above I'd also make the C2 winner prize where you can cash it in for any title at anytime. That way you're not forced to try and make a new main eventer every year. Let a midcarder win the C2 in an upset and use it to challenge for the international title. Let the women have a C2 also. I'd also make the prize doe winning the Owen just a trophy. There's no need for the belts. They're a nice nod to Stampede and all that. But a trophy is fine for winning. The less belts there are, the more important all the ones that exist are.

The point in which the brand started getting diluted was incorporating ROH into AEW. If you want to reinvigerate and strengthen the AEW brand you have to de-ephasize the secondary brand. You dont have to completely close it (I probably would). But you do have to scrap any overlap. Separate rosters. Separate taping. Titles kept Separate. Focus on AEW. Make AEW as good as you possibly can. ROH can exist but for in a separate universe with a tiny budget. You kind of have to take the WWE approach and turn it into a developmental brand just so it can have an identity. The title situation is crazy. Keep the ROH belts in ROH. It should be pared down to a men's world and a women's world, a men's pure title & a women's pure title, men's tags and women's tags. And that's it. You don't need tv titles for a brand that doesn't even have tv. As for AEW, the titles desperately need pared down. The International title has become the unquestionable number 2 title. I think you need to restructure. Men's world and women's world. Men's international & women's international. Men's tags and women's tags. Scrap TBS / TNT titles (especially if they end up on another network). Scrap the continental title and make that your cash in gimmick. Do a briefcase or a chip or some shit. Whoever wins the C2 can cash it in whenever. You just don't need a belt for that. Scrap the trios & ftw titles. Basically for shit to be important it has to have focus. There's literally too many things they try to put focus on and it makes nothing have focus. Not every fued needs a belt. You can do fun trios matches without needing a title for it. Make the important shit **feel** important.

I thought for sure Mercedes open challenge would be answered by Jamie Hayter. What a reaction that would get. Fits the story with her having Britt's back. And the match would be a banger. But instead it's the quarterly Nyla match that she has no chance to win. Happy to be getting the double main event matches. They should both be fucking dope. Wonder if Ricochet debuts here in some fashion.

It's so odd to me the routing ended up with show 250 being in a small market like Little Rock Arkansas. The max capacity they're set for according to Wrestle Tix is only like 2500. For this stacked of a card? Kind of an indictment of the live events department if you ask me.

The way Meltzer reported it, Woo has a similar deal to Slim Jim's WCW deal with Savage. They paid his entire salary in exchange for promoting the energy drink. But in the report it said the energy drink is not doing well and can't get into any stores outside of the local market they make it in. So if that reporting is correct I'd bet they just ran out of funding to keep paying for the sponsorship. The Flair component is kind of irrelevant if they're not making enough to pay for their part of the sponsorship. I'm guessing Flair's salary is a hefty fee. $500k a year maybe? That's a lot for a non-wrestler that really doesn't have a spot with no Sting and no Andrade.

Think it's a little crazy everyone thinks MCMGs will go to NXT. While they would certainly help the workers in NXT get better, if you're paying them enough for them to choose you over AEW I gotta think that's a main roster acquisition. And MCMG vs DIY in Cleveland for Summer Slam would be the perfect debut match for them. I almost think that's why DIY got the belts. To give Gargano something he can really sink his teeth into for Cleveland. I mean that might be wishful thinking. But I think them going straight to the main roster is the move here. You stick them in NXT and overlap it with the TNA stuff, then from a performer standpoint it's going to be a bit annoying. You finally get that big deal with the biggest company but you're still kinda just doing the same thing working TNA guys or being loaned for TNA shows. That's a morale killer for a lot of guys.

Well they're not going to give everyone a bye week at the same time in the middle of the season with nothing to put on TV for that week. So doing the same league wide bye week is pretty much dependent on slotting the all star festivities in that week. The idea kinda falls apart without it. The alternative is them still giving out two bye weeks but randomizing the second byes like the first byes. NFLPA isn't going to agree to that extra game without an extra bye week. So that's gonna be a necessary component. Which is going to make scheduling that much more difficult to juggle / more room to complain about teams getting more rest than others / etc. Example: Team A has both byes in the first 13 weeks, Team B gets 2 byes in the last 8 weeks and such. I thought this was a pretty solid way to shift everything around and tweak things. Especially since the day after The Super Bowl would always be a national holiday.

I saw a suggestion being credited to Joe Burrow about the inevitable 18 game season that's pretty genius. If you add in that extra game you're gonna have to give everyone a second bye week. Why not put the whole league on a bye at the same time around week 10 or 11 and do the Pro Bowl games during that week. Since it's all skill drills and no actual game now, injury isn't as much of a concern. Everyone that's healthy can participate. It shifts the league year in a way where The Super Bowl would always be the Sunday before president's day. Meaning almost everyone gets the day off the Monday after the super bowl. Everyone getting a break in the middle of the season makes sense. More people would probably tune into the Pro Bowl with all the big stars there. Seems like all upside with this plan. 18 games, 20 week season. Mid season all star festivities. Day off after The Super Bowl. Win, win, win.

You and I generally agree like 95% of the time, but this is one of those rare times we differ. Not every champ has to be strong. Not every champ has to be booked the same way. Things get a little samey with everyone always having to look so strong. It's perfect for Page's character to luck into a title run and talk shit on how great he is ignoring how it happened. Also keeps Trick strong for him to have the title taken away due to no fault of his own. It was his finish that knocked both dudes out. Just a stroke of bad luck, not him being bested. I like the way it was done. And I think character wise it helps both Page & Trick out.

Yeah and it would have thrown the whole cash in dynamic off. Can't be like oh Drew is cashing in and making it a triple threat if the match is over. That makes Drew the dumbest motherfucker of all time to add an extra dude to his cash in if the match is already over. One of those cases where it was handled the best it could be. Circumstances made that impossible to call it like a shoot.

The downtime and amount of ads will hit you a little less hard when you accept these aren't ppvs. They are tv shows. Peacock has increased the amount of ads they run for the non-ad free tier. Which means WWE can't run actual content during these ad breaks. All they can do is run video packages and hype videos to try and cover for it. It's out of their hands. The ad breaks aren't going away. Maybe they can be better managed. Or do exclusive live promos that the ad people miss? But Im not sure they'd want any segment of the fanbase to miss a chunk of the content for the shows. Maybe you also live stream the ad break promos on social? But I would think that would annoy Peacock. We'll just have to suffer through until the Peacock deal expires (at the end of next year I believe?) and Netflix buy up those rights too.