EVA

Surely a Jimmy Jacobs creative contribution.

Yeah, as the weekend has progressed, it definitely seems like they’re astroturfing a Yes Movement gimmick for the Code Man.

This BCC vs. CMLL angle is the epitome of “ give them what they didn’t know they wanted.”

Hold up. Granted, I wasn’t paying SUPER close attention that Miro/CJ angle, but I’m pretty sure the point wasn’t that she was fucking all those guys.

Flashback?

Never seen a promotion work as diligently to cool off their product as WWE has over the past year. I mean, plenty of other promotions have done it quicker and more spectacularly, but no one has matched WWE’s steadfast commitment to not giving their red-hot fans what they want circa Elimination Chamber 2023 to Now. They haven’t actually achieved it yet, but I have full faith in their ability to keep their nose to the grindstone and get the job done, eventually.

This does beg us to ask the question, exactly what were they supposed to get excited about? I didn’t make it home for the women’s match, but the men’s rumble was a brutal slog. The flow of the Rumble has always been built on entrance pops, new guys getting their shine, elimination teases, rare/odd face-offs, and, yes finally, dudes getting yeeted* over the top. Probably some other things I’m forgetting, but generally that’s what the crowd responds to. Well, most modern WWE theme music sucks and you can barely tell one from the next, so nobody pops for entrances. The intervals between entrances are so short, especially when they speed it up in the middle, so guys get very little time to shine. (Punk was in the ring for what felt like 30 seconds before he was on his ass, getting worked over, in his big return to a WWE ring. The crowd could barely get a decent CM Punk chant going.) And most of the time, if guys aren’t involved in a scripted shine/elimination moment, nobody is really doing anything of dramatic interest. Which really becomes a problem when the match goes long stretches without any eliminations, as last night’s match did. *Like Jey Uso was in the match for almost an hour, and I couldn’t tell you a single thing he did between the opening face-off with Jimmy and his elimination sequence. The guy’s whole thing is yeeting people AND YOU DIDN’T BOOK HIM TO YEET A BUNCH OF PEOPLE? The crowd was clearly ready to chant YEET all night, and instead you had him take a long nap in a corner most of the match. What are we even doing here? So I was not the least bit surprised that the crowd was dead.

Somebody could write a book about how Vince’s own body dysmorphia has influenced generations of young men.

Bron getting Brock’s run is interesting to think about. Would suggest a Brock/Judgment Day program heading into Mania season. Delusional Dom crowing about eliminating Lesnar would’ve been amusing. Speaking of JD—obviously fuck Vince forever, but part of my brain can’t help but wonder how he would’ve responded to Priest’s complete lack of star response last night. Crowd was giving big Just A Guy energy.

Big mad that TK outbid them for Okada and Ospreay.

They had 48 hours to either cancel this press conference or prep HHH on how to handle these inevitable questions. The fact that they evidently did neither might suggest to me that key players at TKO expected and wanted HHH to embarrass himself up there.

In the world of million dollar corporations, mealy-mouthed weakness like HHH displayed tonight will get you canned quicker than anything. Those people only respect strength. Dana White was caught on video slapping his wife, and he literally stood in front of the press and was like “I won’t be accepting any punishment for that,” and that is exactly how it went down.

“I haven’t read the lawsuit” was a wild thing to say. Really wish somebody would’ve followed up on that.

One of the things recent rumbles have brought into focus is how terrible and indistinguishable from one another most current WWE theme songs are. I felt like on at least half the men’s rumble entrances you didn’t even get the big countdown pop because nobody could tell who was coming out based on the music hitting. Just this delayed “oh yeah, that guy.”

No great surprise that HHH is not covering himself in glory here. Should’ve cribbed from Press Conference Master Tony Khan and just said it’s an ongoing legal matter and he can’t comment. His tact tonight was pathetic.

I realize there’s only one Pat Patterson, but it’s shocking the degree to which they’ve completely forgotten what makes a Rumble good. This shit was so boring.

Bruce Pritchard has had his head so far up Vince’s ass for so long, you can bet he knows who Vince has defecated on. He’d be one of the next motherfuckers out the door for sure if I was in charge.

I’m glad to hear TKO did the right thing, even if I’m sure it wasn’t for the right reasons. Just have to hope that they don’t stop there and continue to investigate who else was involved, aided and abetted, etc.

Plenty of reason think Michigan with Moore can have the same long tail of the Harbaugh era that Stanford did with David Shaw. But I’ll be interested to see if they extend him as much grace as they did Harbaugh. Its wild to think about now, but if not for Covid cancelling the 2020 Game, Harbaugh was, barring a minor miracle given how bad Michigan was that year, going to be fired after six (!!!!) fairly underwhelming seasons by the metrics that matter most to Michigan. With NIL and the portal, it’s never been harder to keep a good thing going, and Michigan’s schedule year in and year out is about to get a lot tougher with the West Coast schools coming in (2024 looks absolutely brutal by recent Michigan standards). They gonna stand by him if they drop back down to 10 wins, but not the wins that matter, for a few years?

I guarantee you TKO is not going to just not put on the show.

I realize this might not be fair, and my brain is so broken by society that I may not even be able to hold to his, but…Right now, I feel like I’m going to have a difficult time respecting anyone who performs at the Royal Rumble, ever again. If they’re as outraged as we are (and they rightly should be), they actually have a tremendous amount of leverage to get something done in this moment. If the roster came together and said, “This is heinous, and nobody’s walking through that curtain until Vince is gone and a serious investigation into this is started,” you can bet your ass TKO would find a way to get Vince out the door by bell time. IMO any other act is a tacit admission that you’re a self-interested dirtbag who doesn’t care that the yield of your labor enables horrific shit to happen, so long as your check arrives on time. Of course, I’m sure the wrestlers will use the fans as a shield. We don’t want to disappoint the fans. The fans already paid to see the show. Etc. But that’s all self-serving bullshit. The fans can get a refund. Card subject to change, motherfuckers.

Yeah, degrading this poor woman was clearly part of the thrill for them. Sickening stuff.

“You don’t want a celebrity doctor. You want a celebrity doctor.”

Ultimately, the NCAA is in a precious state of affairs, and I don’t think it’s in their immediate interests to bring the hammer down too hard on a big, influential program like Michigan, so I would honestly be surprised if too much comes of the Stalions investigation. But it is rather ironic that Harbaugh appears to be leaving college football under very similar circumstances as his old pal, Pete Caroll, in 2009: getting out of town just before the posse comes.

Moore is the obvious pic in a lot of ways. The only potential hiccup there is the Connor Stalions investigation. If there’s real smoke there (and Harbaugh’s insistence on an immunity clause suggests he certainly thought sanctions were possible), Moore is almost certain to be involved in it. Honestly, you could convince me that Harbaugh was insulated from it in the way that politicians get insulated from the dirt their underlings do, but there’s no way Moore and Minter weren’t involved, because they’d have to be the guys changing the plays. Michigan might want to make a clean break from the Harbaugh era to mitigate any potential sanctions, if they think that threat is real.* *I’m not so sure!