JonnyLaw

He’s actually had a decent storyline running that’s built up to this. He was fed up with Gable’s silliness on Smackdown and seemed more serious, was traded to Raw where he had a good, long match with Black that proved he could still go, pulled off the upset to qualify for MITB, got injured by Andrade and lost his spot, came back and got revenge against Andrade. Simple, straightforward stuff.

I wonder if Raw superstars will be in the audience for NXT.

What the hell did they do to Arn?!?

I feel like they intended to push a couple of people early, like Sabian, Private Party, and Sonny Kiss, but for whatever reason, they dropped those pushes.

Great news, because the problem with that title is definitely that it was silver instead of gold.

This. They said early on that H2H was the tiebreaker, and then there was a promo a week or two ago where Jake Atlas was pulling for Drake, because Drake beating Kushida was his only hope of advancing.

Also known as the Stranger Things theme.

Does he normally provide daily updates on his whereabouts?

I thought the problem was the opposite: taking “cast-off” WWE guys and immediately pushing them over homegrown stars. And really, that’s the issue. WCW and WWE signed fired, underused guys all the time. But instead of immediately pushing them to the moon, they tended to slot them appropriately and built them slowly.

For me personally, Gulak was one of the few can’t miss guys in WWE. Everything he did, he committed to and made work. Character-wise, he was practically the second coming of Kurt Angle, as far as being able to slide seamlessly from over the top goofiness (he was the best part of Enzo’s 205 run) to serious asskicker. This. He hasn’t been a 205 Live prelim guy in a long time, and anyone arguing he has been is just setting up a strawman so they can argue for their own personal preferences.

That’s kind of where I would be at, except pulling the offer as a result of Gulak making a counteroffer is ridiculous. Presumably they saw him as expendable enough to serve as a warning to the rest of the roster.

Based on the promo from Smackdown, the “We’re mad because we fought for America and America treated us like shit when we got back” gimmick isn’t really the type of rah-rah, we love our country, blind patriotism deal a right-wing militia gimmick would be. It’s even a shift from their last (iirc) “Hey, you foreigners are bad-mouthing our country, love it or leave it” promo/gimmick in NXT against the Grizzled Young Vets.

For those who may have missed it:

Remember when Rikishi ran over Austin, and Austin was like, “LOL, how crazy was that?!?”