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SDL is NXT Too - 2/19/2019


Dolfan in NYC

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39 minutes ago, Overly Critical Man said:

Apparently Tye Dillinger...

Well in theory - he won't be on the roster much longer

And while we are all joking about it I would say the following people are not over on SDL

Lana

Gallows & Anderson

Sanity

But pretty much all of them aren't on shows anyway

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Just now, Greggulator said:

To be fair, were Sanity even really that over in NXT besides Nikki? 

I'd say they were fairly over. At the very least, Dain and Nikki were the standouts. EY and Wolfe made for a good tag team too. 

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Asuka jobbing to Mandy (presumably to set up a program at WM) and Almas jobbing to Black annoyed me to no end.  Other than that, decent show.  The problem with Charlotte being in the Becky-Ronda program is that it really leaves noone interesting for Asuka to face.  And, in true WWE fashion, coming up with two good women's angles at the same time seems to be too much for them.

As for Almas.... they have a bloated roster with a lot of guys who either don't get on TV or aren't going to get a push.  And yet they can't think of anyone for Black to face except Almas.  I was kinda hoping the Rey series meant they were going to do something with him, but maybe not.

 

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10 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

Huh? Rusev's only main event match he was over as hell getting 50/50 crowd reactions against AJ. It didn't just click, it was a hit.

They just didn't care.

Seriously, why couldn’t Rusev Day have been the act to get hot with crowd right when they’re looking for something new.

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I made the case for Asuka being perceived as a big deal once she returned to television.. I'll take my L on that one. No build-up. No ''ASUKA RETURNS TONIGHT!'' during the opening. No elaborate explanation as to where she's been. Then loses to Mandy Rose with a lame roll-up. What has she been doing during her time off? Playing video games eating doritos? These details should not be left open to interpretation. Sad!

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Asuka losing to Mandy was just...eh. I know that the WWE are high on Mandy but she’s so bland. Both her and Sonya. They’re perfectly fine in-ring but I just feel nothing for them as characters. Hopefully Asuka is done with them quickly. 

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This was a fun show but the booking is just terrible. You finally start getting Andrade heated up with the series with Mysterio, and then you have him do a job here to the shiny new toy. Asuka returns after tapping out the biggest star in the company, and then loses to Mandy fucking Rose. It's so infuriating.

This show also killed any lingering hope I had that they were going to do Asuka/Charlotte at Mania. I'm now resigned to the triple threat match.

I don't honestly know why they're bringing up more people when the roster is already so fucking big, and half the people have absolutely nothing to do.

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11 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

Huh? Rusev's only main event match he was over as hell getting 50/50 crowd reactions against AJ. It didn't just click, it was a hit.

They just didn't care.

Hey, I'm not one to keep debates going and I certainly respect everyone's opinion here but since I got quoted by multiple people I feel I should respond and counter. After, I'll be happy to step back and let it all play out. I think there's a cool story they can tell with Kofi but the history of WWE kind of tells me what this is going to be at most. 

They certainly missed the boat on the hottest period of the Rusev Day angle but by the time they got to the AJ match it was clearly just a filler stop-gap on AJ's long reign. It wasn't an especially hot match or angle and, yeah, the crowd was doing dueling chants and into it but it wasn't lighting the world on fire. No one thought he could win. The fact that they let DOLPH main event over it shows how the company felt about it and the fact that the match wasn't lighting the world on fire.  If you want to say that it was because Rusev was poorly booked for years, then that's fine but that also reinforces my point on Kingston. Sometimes you can't undo years of being buried.  

11 hours ago, West Newbury Bad Boy said:

They have comedy leanings but they’ve been in major, serious situations often enough that this criticism doesn’t really hold water. Actual midcard comedy tag guys aren’t throwing down in high-quality Hell in a Cell matches. 

If being a comedy tag act were prohibitive to main event ambitions, the Young Bucks wouldn’t have a big money mark and massive viral following caught in their web. 

I really don't want to get into a Young Buck's debate. However, the New Day is an anime/gamer inspired act designed to appeal to kids/nerd culture crowds that features brightly attired men dancing.  You have one playing a trombone, a large man pulling PANCAKES out of his singlet while air humping,  a cereal called Booty-Os that they pour down children's throats and promos that are designed to make the crowd laugh. And they ARE great at it. But I mean, this is a comedy gimmick. Also, it's also been a pretty cold act for the past year and they've been spinning their wheels until seven days ago.  They can certainly go in the ring and they've had great matches and been in some serious feuds (the Bludgeon Brothers and Usos feuds in particular but their characters have always stayed pretty goofy. To be fair, a lot of babyfaces get booked like that in WWE but they've never been booked as a serious act that can hang at the top of the card. Maybe this run changes that but next week I'm afraid they're gonna be throwing pancakes at Bryan and he's gonna be slipping on Maplel Syrup and this match is gonna end up third from the top on Fastlane behind whatever Charlotte/Becky and Rollins are doing. 

Shit, I feel like I'm going full Cornette here and that's not my intent.

The Bucks, with the exception of the vaudeville six-men tag matches with the Elite which are definitely comedic, are by and large pretty serious in their match presentation. They either do the car-crash spotfests or, as they've done for much of the last year, work story-telling matches centered around Matt's selling of his back. Even as goofy as Being The Elite, which veers more on meta-comedy, very rarely does it bleed into their in-ring matches and I don't think it is ever geared explicitly to children the way The New Day are. 

5 hours ago, MORELOCK said:

What the fuck?
Why the fuck?
The ONLY angle that has EVER gotten these three truly over and you want to run it through your stupid bullshit McMahon breakup angle?
And why? So E and X can change their characters completely and cut stereotypical jealous heel promos? Flying in the face of years of them fighting for Kofi to get a World Title shot? And Kofi can go back to being a generic babyface by himself, cutting the legs out from under the biggest run of his career?

I've literally never heard anyone on this board call for a New Day breakup angle, and I think it's because literally everyone else seems to understand what a terrible, terrible idea this is - it is most certainly not "money."

Okay - let's play this out. So, I see posts of "give him a quick run and he can lose it back at Mania" or "have him win at Mania." Okay, then what? You gonna have a babyface stable backing up the champion? That's very difficult to do and flies in the face of how these things are usually booked. Does he have the quick run and Big E and Xavier stand there like dopes when he drops it back to Bryan and they all go back to feuding with The Bar? 

The whole point of wrestling booking is "okay and then what?" This act is six years old and they can stay together and sell a shit of merch and win 15 tag titles and that's great but we all know the limitations of stables and tag teams in the WWE. They'll never be pushed as main event acts.  And, if we all think that Big E can be more than he is...you can use THIS moment to send all these guys to a higher level. It's classic booking.

Have Kofi win and you have Big E get jealous and turn and that leads to a main event level feud. Have E cost Kofi the belt out of jealousy and you have a main event level feud. Just because we all know WWE fucks these stories up doesn't mean it's not the right story to tell. Or we just have guys spinning their wheel for a decade with characters that never evolve, no real angles and everyone stays stuck on the hampster wheel.

It's like basically the argument is "WWE would screw up the breakup so don't do it" when the fact is that this is actually a moment that Kofi and Big E could become main event guys in a way that being a tag team never will. Has awful as The Shield breakup was (and it was definitely a year too early) all three guys ended up becoming main event single stars and getting extended title runs. Creatively it was bad but they all became singles main eventers off it.  

If it all plays out like you guys want - then Kofi gets a short little run with the belt like Jeff and Christian did and Big E and Xavier stand outside like cheerleaders and then they all go back to throwing pancakes with the crowd and having tag matches against whichever random tag team in maybe the opening matches of PPVS. 

 

As I said, I feel I'm going off too strident here and that is not my intent and I mean, y'all all make good points. Good debate. 

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3 hours ago, Greggulator said:

To be fair, were Sanity even really that over in NXT besides Nikki? 

They fell into the generally respected area after being on NXT after a while and had decent enough reactions as heels their first year, but otherwise it was mainly Nikki getting the good-great reactions.

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4 hours ago, Jamal said:

Asuka losing to Mandy was just...eh. I know that the WWE are high on Mandy but she’s so bland. Both her and Sonya. They’re perfectly fine in-ring but I just feel nothing for them as characters. Hopefully Asuka is done with them quickly. 

I think Sonya has potential. She's shown good instinct and has impactful offense, IMO. Mandy does nothing for me. She has a robotic personality, which relies far too much on her screaming "You'll never look like me!" It doesn't help that Graves orgasms he sees her come out to her softcore entrance. I could live with Asuka losing to Mandy if it wasn't done in such a way to make Asuka look dumb. 

The Aleister-Andrade match highlights the problem of supposedly everyone being over on SDL. No, they aren't. Aleister needed a heel to go against. Bryan, Orton, and Joe are main-event heels and weren't going to be used to put over a NXT guy. The next level of heels are Shinsuke, Rusev, and Andrade. Rusev is pretty much being sat on for him and Lana being too salty online; Shinsuke is MIA 80% of the time. So that only left Andrade, with whom Aleister had a rivalry and the only available heel who beating means something. But as several have mentioned, Andrade needed to be protected more. And with how these callups/showcases are going, that probably won't happen. 

They had to pull Eric Young out of the mothballs to make sure Ricochet had a match. SDL has similar booking issues as RAW, but SDL tends to cover it better. As more NXT people come up, the problem will become more apparent on both shows. Lots of great talent, but not everyone can be protected or pushed equally. Who do they sacrifice? And will fans accept those choices?

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 SDL's big booking advantage over RAW is that it's an hour shorter. Although it does make it easier for people to disappear, they do on RAW as well anyway. In the meantime, the SmackDown team has one third less segments to write, so they can fine tune the ones they have a bit more.

Even if RAW was being booked by an absolute master at the top of his game, three hours is just too fucking long for a weekly wrestling show like this. It's an underrated element of what helped kill WCW.

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The other benefit I find is that RAW still has that at-war mentality to it, it's scripted to ensure that the good stuff is going to coincide or be hidden from its competitors - Monday Night Football, NBA playoffs, and then you also have to make sure that the right stuff is on before the third hour switch off. All in all, it makes for a really poor pacing.

Smackdown never really has that issue. 

I wonder if its not so much the third hour thats the issue so much as it shouldn't be on Monday night?

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7 hours ago, Hagan said:

As I said, I feel I'm going off too strident here and that is not my intent and I mean, y'all all make good points. Good debate. 

Nah, I'm with ya even if I wasn't in the original conversation. A lot of that needed to be hashed out re: post Mania plans for New Day. 

Bring on the Big E Hall of Pain tbh.

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I don't disagree about the third hour being too much, but we all know it's not going away.

I wonder, if they decide to have some folks float between shows, if they would consider putting on more NXT-centric stuff during the third hour. Even if the ratings aren't great, it's more eyeballs on a product that someone may move toward watching on the Network. And it would allow for some current main show-only people to move around without it looking like a demotion.

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The Asuka booking will be quite interesting next couple weeks because I remember the debates and even optimism in the Royal Rumble thread on here directly after Askua tapped out Becky. I thought after you go with the tap out ending you should push Askua hard leading to Mania because she is a clear next opponent for one of the losers (or even winner) of the triple-threat Main Event at Mania.  We'll see.

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Yeah,  you'd think they would want to build up another serious opponent for Becky and Charlotte once Ronda goes away. After the brand shake-up, all three might end up on RAW so it might not even matter when Rose or whatever other annoying flavor of the month beats Asuka for the title. The tap-out win over Becky was probably nothing more than a restorative win for Asuka just so people could forget how badly and underwhelming she's been booked overall except for a couple of signature wins (first women's Royal Rumble winner and beating Becky) thus giving a bigger rub to Mandy Rose when she wins the title. I dig Lacey but because I've seen more NXT Take-Overs than regular weekly episodes since subscribing around WrestleMania last year, I couldn't tell you how green she is. Of course, being green to the point that someone can barely even sell and has to control 95 percent of the match on offense hasn't stopped them from giving prolonged reigns to others. 

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2 hours ago, Yo-Yo's Roomie said:

Not to belabour the point, but adding Charlotte to the Becky/Ronda match isn't making it any bigger a match, whereas if they do Charlotte/Asuka that gives them two main event level women's matches.

This. You get Asuka wanting to gain retribution for WrestleMania a year earlier and its 1-1 between them.

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