just drew

There’s something to the idea of Bray coming in to “take up his brother’s sword” and leading the Dark Order in Brodie’s stead. If you want to get back to them being heels, spin off Jon Silver & Colt Cabana and replace them with Rowan. Have them get back to recruiting people & stuff.

The 10 man tag was well booked, but I still think Page/Omega is the endgame. My guess is they use Rick Knox being crooked to give Page another opportunity or something. Maybe he wins a battle royal under a Dark Order hood. Punk & Bryan aren't gonna be at tv every week, and I would hope that TK isn't dumb enough to repeat the mistakes we've seen WWE make. Punk/Omega wouldn't need the title to be awesome, especially if Punk is involved in the finish to Omega/Page. That Page/Dark Order opening video was THEE. SHIT. Ricky Starks is so damn cool. I like the dynamic with Christian & Jurassic Express. I figure Christian is turning on them at some point but it's fun as hell. Thunder Rosa rules. Glad she's "All Elite." Julia Hart is gonna be really good when she gets some more experience. She adds a lot to the Varsity Blondes act. That Gage/Jericho thing was brutal. In a good way. Juvy will be fun next week. Tony Khan must be having a ball. He can book whatever weird shit he wants. Solid show.

Man, TK getting Paige Van Zant to come in and do something after all the overtures wwe has made would be some shit. I’d lol.

There’s room to add, too. I’d love to see Ruby, Cassie & Jessie there. Ruby to work and J&C to do some entertaining shit. Also, you left Statlander & Anna Jay off your potential list.

You stated what they did right right there in your conclusion; no Bucks match. ;).

Man, it's cool they broke a million viewers again. Good for them. Seriously. It's insane how loaded next week's show is. A couple of my buddies are road-tripping from Atlanta. Having an infant son makes it a tough go for me. Andrade just looks like a star. It boggles my mind that Vince and Nicky K couldn't figure out how to make money with that dude. I mean, it doesn't, because they can't figure out how to make money with Keith fucking Lee, but it kinda does. When was the last time you figure a crowd was that happy to see Chavito? You can tell he loves the business, so I'm happy for him. He's also a much better foil for Andrade than Vickie. I can't decide if this Death Triangle thing means Penta and Rey are turning on PAC or if RUSH and Dragon Lee are coming in. Either way it outta be dope. Hangman Page is over as fuck. They have to go the distance with him and Omega. If it were me, I'd have Page go over, have Danielson congratulate the winner and offer a friendly challenge, then have Bryan go full American Dragon on Page. Page is probably the only guy an AEW crowd would boo Bryan Danielson for. Maybe Jungle Boy. Nyla Rose is not good at wrestling. Now that Thunder Rosa is "All Elite," I hope they pivot to her and maybe some debuting ex-WWE ladies. That main event was absolute lunacy. AEW seems to have all the momentum in the world right now. Their competitor has burnt up a ton of goodwill with their audience, and every Dynamite lately has delivered surprises and great matches. It makes me happy. They don't do everything perfect, but it's easy to tell when a wrestling company doesn't actively despise its audience. Very cool.

I'm immediately thinking of two EVP's that CM Punk would beat like a rented mule. But I do think they'll have to be careful who they program him with, at least initially. Or shit, make that the story. Punk earning respect from the Miros and Lance Archers of the world by how he's hanging in with them.

I was at both Dome shows. The first one made it cool to be wrestling fan. 40k diehards watching Goldberg go over the Immortal clean as a sheet. I was 15 years old high-fiving strangers and screaming like a child. Even my dad, who only took me because he liked spending time with me, managed a smile and an appreciative nod. The second one made me miss the Foley title win on tv. The finger-poke of doom felt like a middle finger to the fans so intense that it wouldn't be repeated until, imo, the "my friend Mark" speech Triple H gave in 2014. I remember feeling cheated. I worked extra shifts at my shitheel job to get good seats to that show, and that's what I got? Fuck that. I didn't watch WCW for almost a year after that, and I only watched then because some of the guys I liked were finally getting some run. Like I said earlier, AEW has a chance to write their own legacy in Atlanta. WWE just had to cancel a Smackdown live because of slow ticket sales. I think a string of lackluster shows has ruined a lot of goodwill with wrestling fans here. I mean, we got the worst Wrestlemania ever. The Dynamite we got was amazing, and fans showed up. It was like a concert. Insanely loud crowd. We deserve this. I am biased. I am making too big a deal of this. But dammit, we delivered the US Senate from the hands of lunatics and we deserve to break the non-WWE wrestling show crowd record in our shiny ass new baseball park.

I love the Fenway idea. As a native Atlantan, I can think of a gorgeous new baseball park that holds a little over 40k right in the heart of WCW Country. That ballpark is also a short(ish) Uber ride from the busiest and most accessible airport in the world. Ideally you'd go for the non-WWE record in the stadium that the previous record took place in, but the Dome doesn't exist anymore. It's successor, MBS, is a cavernous monument to excessive government spending with zero character. AEW should go for it at Truist Park. The area surrounding it is gorgeous and set up to easily accommodate a crowd that size.

Eddie said in an interview recently that Cesaro was supposed to put him over before he went to WWE. I think it was Chikara, maybe? Wherever they were together before. Then Cesaro refused on the day of. Eddie appears to be a bit of a grudge carrier.

It was a really fun little show for a long time. Those first couple of years with Bayley, Sasha, Charlotte, Bo Dallas, the Wyatts, Enzo & Cass (don't kid yourselves, they were absolute diesel fuel there), AA, The Revival, all the way through until right around when KOR and Bobby Fish came out of the crowd to ambush Drew McIntyre with Adam Cole. Always felt like HHH was trying to make what he thought PWG was after tht. But damn early nXt was fun...

Listen, I understand. Go over to the AEW side and you'll see that no one loves a good rant more than I do. I personally don't get why anyone would invest anything emotionally in nXt at this point, but people like what they like. Unless they like the Young Bucks. Then they're fucking idiots. ;).

Here's the problem; To Vince, and probably to a lot of people around him, nxt just does not fucking matter. We've seen too many times in the last 5 years or so that outside of one Survivor Series, the higher-ups don't see nxt as anything but a closet to keep performers they think they might need one day. Vince is too busy eating steak wraps with horseradish sauce and ketchup to give fuck number one about big dumb dipshit Karrion Kross and his unbeaten streak in nxt, or how it makes Cole, Ciampa et al. look like jerks for not being able to beat him. None of those guys ever have a chance of being anything on the main roster anyway. Cole, O'Reilly, Gargano, Thatcher, Dunne, whoever. Not a single one of them has anything approaching main event size. I can hear some of you saying "size doesn't matter anymore," but let's look at the two top guys on the main shows and the performers orbiting them. WWE is the only institution on earth where Kofi Kingston would be considered "small" and he just got his ass handed to him to build Lashley up even more. So the welfare of the remaining nxt performers is inconsequential. They don't matter and if there were any doubt remaining, VInce sees that show as something to keep Hunter busy. Karrion Kross also has what I like to call "Mike Awesome Syndrome." He's big for the small pond he was in, but he's gonna wind up in the ring with guys like Drew McIntyre, Jinder Mahal, Sheamus, Randy Orton and Damien Priest and he isn't gonna stand out. He isn't charismatic enough to get over without Scarlett, and she ain't walkin' through that door. If Vince sees Keith Lee as "just another guy," Karrion Kross has no chance. No sense in getting yourself worked up over how him losing makes the third brand look.

Adam Cole’s got (at least) two things working against him; his complete lack of size, and a significant other succeeding elsewhere. At this point, if Vince, Nicky K or Podcast Prichard thought he could help a main roster show, he’d be on that show. These dudes who are just stagnated on the top of nxt’s roster should pray they either stay there forever or get released before they get brought up to job to Jaxson fucking Ryker…

He’ll make this same face when the Feds show up at his front door to ask him where he was January 6th…