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I feel like a good 65% to 70% of the people on this board are willing to spend a Friday watching hours upon hours of wrestling, then waking up and doing the same with college football on Saturday, and then doing it all over again on Sunday with the NFL.  

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so i watched all 16 episodes (via the 4 TNA specials) of Global Force Wrestling "Amped".

the overall presentation is low key. the look of the Orleans arena is fine, but there's not much to get excited about. I'm a fan of the six-sided ring, whereas i know many people aren't. The sound (on entrance music, on the handheld mics when in the ring, etc.) is overall pretty decent. The lights were, again, perfectly acceptable. Now that i'm thinking about how to word this, i feel like this phrase sums up GFW as a whole "it's alright"

the matches: overall a pretty high quality. there was a lot of talent here, and none of the matches felt rushed. A few were a bit long to my taste, but there wasn't much that was "bad". It was nice seeing them play up the "worldwide" aspect, with Japanese wrestlers (Kushida, Seiya Sanada), and luchadores (Bestia 666, Los Luchas), and the Indian contingent (Bollywood Boyz, Sonjay Dutt). Would've liked to see this spotlighted even more. 

the tournaments: i love tournaments. Running 4 at the same time was too many. Especially over 16 episodes, you would go a month-plus between seeing or hearing about certain competitors. There were a total of 3 women's matches over 16 weeks. Unacceptable. The World Global Championship tournament finals were extremely obvious from the opening episode- Nick "Magnus" Aldis vs. Bobby Roode. everybody else was fodder.

the pacing: these shows were timed horribly. EVERY episode started with a short hype video, followed by an 8 minute match, followed by 15 minutes of videos (sometimes a replay of the opening video) with the occasional in-ring promo, and then a 15 minute main event match, and capped off with a hype video for next week. This was exacerbated for me by watching multiple episodes in a row, but the formula wore itself out, fast.

the announcers: Chael Sonnen did a good job of analyzing, connecting holds to their MMA counterparts, and a bit of fan rolled into one. The other guy (Cyrus Fees) was pretty bland, but that's the worst i can say about him. They tried to play up a playful antagonistic dynamic, but it usually fell flat. Not funny enough, not mean enough, and/or not sold enough. The worst part is that the commentary was added later, so they would talk up what the talent was doing now ("you can see him on WWE NXT"). It was off-putting. At one point, Chael spoils the final of the women's tournament (Chael: "from now on you can call her 'Champion'" Cyrus: ".....Yes, that's if she can get by this last challenge") This is also recorded during the time that TNA/Impact merges with GFW or whatever that mess was about, so Cyrus uses each of those names kind of interchangeably. 

overall, again, this was "alright". i can't imagine how this would have survived on traditional TV. I was ready for this to be over by around episode 12-13, but i toughed it out. I would love to hear Jarrett talk about this on his podcast, similar to his TNA pods. we'll see.

 

P.S. Jeff Jarrett comes out to his TNA entrance theme. On the first chord, i got PTSD. i didn't even know that i had such a negative feeling about it. 

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7 hours ago, supremebve said:

I feel like a good 65% to 70% of the people on this board are willing to spend a Friday watching hours upon hours of wrestling, then waking up and doing the same with college football on Saturday, and then doing it all over again on Sunday with the NFL.  

You think? I find it hard to fathom there's a country out there where people actually give half a shit about college sports, much less be willing to watch it for hours at a time.

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Yeah, its mot the best analogy, but best analogy to college sports that came to mind. Same as maiing a comparison to lower league futbol in Europe. 
 

ive always said college football is the closest thing we have in the US to futbol tribalism. Hashtag poisoned trees

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8 hours ago, supremebve said:

I feel like a good 65% to 70% of the people on this board are willing to spend a Friday watching hours upon hours of wrestling, then waking up and doing the same with college football on Saturday, and then doing it all over again on Sunday with the NFL.  

I fall in this. Heck, for a good portion of the pandemic, I'd watch a ton of wrestling with my buddy on Thurs during our Zoom watch along, then watch AEW/Smackdown on Fri and then watch whatever college/NFL games were on Sat and Sun.

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1 hour ago, tbarrie said:

You think? I find it hard to fathom there's a country out there where people actually give half a shit about college sports, much less be willing to watch it for hours at a time.

You ever been to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Kentucky, New York etc? Shit, you ever been anywhere in the US? There's a pretty big portion of the country that watches college football and basketball for hours every weekend.

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20 minutes ago, cwoy2j said:

You ever been to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Kentucky, New York etc? Shit, you ever been anywhere in the US?

Florida yes, but it was about forty years ago. I may have passed through some of the others on the way to Florida.

20 minutes ago, cwoy2j said:

There's a pretty big portion of the country that watches college football and basketball for hours every weekend.

See, on a purely factual level, I'm aware that people in the US actually care about college sports. But I can't fathom it. These kids aren't even pros. If you're not a family member of a player, why would you care?

I mean, my university had a football team, yeah. But the only reason I know that is because one of the players was in my D&D group. It certainly wasn't a big deal.

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43 minutes ago, tbarrie said:

These kids aren't even pros.

And? Just with American football and basketball alone, a good portion of them already have been playing organized sports for the more than half their life by the time they're a redshirt freshman or w/e. The regular joe who signs up for a job at that age ain't got 10 years experience in jackshit work related. All a collegiate athlete at a certain level in those respective sports has to do is stay on a track for another 2-3 years (which isn't a given of course cause you're playing against essentially mutants who also have otherworldly gifts) and they're absolutely a professional.

Hell, even the corrupt ass NCAA  *somewhat* decided these kids are basically pros anyway. It only took forever, but eventually it happened.

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Id say high level college football and badketball are realistically more professional than some of the lesser pro sports in the US, like the lacrosse league and prob the NWSL. Until the 90s, maybebthe 00s, college football may have been the 3rd biggest grossing sport behind the NFL and MLB. Could be 3rd behind nfl and nba now, but i dont folliw them anymore to know for sure.

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30 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Id say high level college football and badketball are realistically more professional than some of the lesser pro sports in the US, like the lacrosse league and prob the NWSL. Until the 90s, maybebthe 00s, college football may have been the 3rd biggest grossing sport behind the NFL and MLB. Could be 3rd behind nfl and nba now, but i dont folliw them anymore to know for sure.

The US has a population of what? Just shy of 350 million people or thereabouts? If you toss out like USC/UCLA or Ohio State, damn every major college program in Division 1 football is in some sleepy ass college town or a place that barely qualifies as a real city (meaning real city compared to your major media markets). The University of Miami ain't even in Miami proper. There are only but so many cities with real sports franchises. Even though clearly people outside those cities support their closest local pro teams (save like the Chargers mind you) or other teams (which would explain the fandom of the Dallas Cowboys and them being the most valuable franchise in sports), up until the last 40 going on 50 years, college sports was bigger than any pro sport in America besides baseball, professional boxing, and horse racing. Why? Middle America was more attached to those traditions, and in some part even with the proliferation of pro sports on TV, still very much attached to those traditions. 

For example, just from living in Northwest Arkansas for the last 5 and 1/2 years, I can tell you the people LOVE the Kansas City Chiefs. But the Chiefs ain't got shit on the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Chiefs only won a Super Bowl not even two years ago.

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7 minutes ago, Matt D said:

It was better when the primary local entertainment people had was wrestling territories. 

Even with that, I'm pretty sure someone living in Texas years ago was a fan of one of the teams in the Southwest Conference for football AND following World Class, Boesch's promotion, Amarillo, and/or Southwest Championship Wrestling. A person living Knoxville was probably following the wrestling scene AND following the Vols. 

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12 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

If you believe Ron, Southeastern would get better ratings on TV than Tennessee. Maybe because those 100,000 people were at the game and not watching it ? 

I wouldn't doubt they drew strong ratings, but for how long compared to a sports team that would exist before and after that promotion was gone? I mean there was a local magazine cover I saw fairly recently from the 70s saying Lawler was more famous the Memphis team for the start up WFL. Shit, I wouldn't doubt that at all. However, I think it speaks to the fact that despite Memphis wrestling being popular as all get out in the city of Memphis, they had like a bunch of aborted attempts to get a pro football team. For a city that eats and breathes pro wrestling, the desire was to get something akin to what other cities around the country had with expansion teams at the time.

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And Tennessee would have only had 11 games at most on a Saturday afternoon per year? That would give wrestling the other 40 weeks to compete against baseball, college basketball and things like Wide World if Sports? 
 

Ron’s show i think ran at 2 pm local time on Saturdays. Memphis had the advantage of  being at 11am on before college football got going. 

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4 minutes ago, Cobra Commander said:

That, and for the longest time, a lot of CFB wasn't on TV, which is why I was amused at the outrage over Notre Dame having a game vs Ball State on Peacock... like those people don't remember programs trying to do PPV broadcasts of games even 15 years ago.

It's funny that the NFL, even with the move to Amazon and trying simulcast games, is basically on 3 to 4 channels. I dare you try to avoid CFB flipping through your channels tomorrow if you still have a decent cable package like me and see if you don't accidently hit AT LEAST six or seven CFB games in the span of 1-2 minutes.

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