Go2Sleep

I think they can establish Becky very easily via the Paige/Sasha B-feud. Becky beats Sasha in one try after Paige has failed multiple weeks in a row, then between that and Charlotte winning the title, Paige can turn on both of them out of jealousy.

Steph wouldn't even put him over clean. Sidenote: That Steph/Vince angle from 03 was creepy as fuck

Should be noted that Savage and Eddie didn't interact in that match much, if at all, though.

I think Mortis really was his in-ring peak. He had the Uncensored match with Glacier, the tag with Wrath against Glacier and Ernest Miller at BATB, and the FoF match at Fall Brawl that year. All good matches. I can't think of anything that good after he takes off the mask, though. Hmm, I don't know about this. Can't say I'm really buying that the homophobic gimmicks that existed in the territory days and persisted through the attitude era were meta-progressive in any way. I'd speculatively doubt that most of the promoters were beyond "one of the good ones" levels of enlightenment, but even if you assume all the promoters knew better, the best case interpretation is that they still tried to monetize homophobia and generally reinforced that the audience was right to be leery of the gays.

This is interesting, because watching a lot of dying days WCW recently, I thought "Kanyon: Innovator of offense" aged super terribly. His execution wasn't really that great considering that was one of his actual nicknames for a while and he had very little in the way of good matches. I did mark for the Mortis/Glacier feud as a kid, though, and Positively Kanyon ruled so I don't want it to seem like I'm super down on him, but that aspect of his work just didn't hold up for me. I guess I have to pitch an alternate answer now, so I'm going with Daniel Bryan. He may not have been the best in any one area (striking, flying, mat wrestling, high impact moves), but he was really good in all of them. I can't think of anyone with more well-rounded offense and his execution and transitions were always so smooth and crisp.

Hey don't worry, Owens beat Ziggler for no reason too, so it all evens out.

I think that has more to do with him being old and injury-prone. And Sasha probably wanted to roll through a little more on that bump, but her recent big matches indicate she does like to take high angle bumps on purpose.

After seeing Big Show and Sting have a match on Raw tonight, I got to wondering what was the longest time between a first/last match for any two wrestlers? Show and Sting fought at Slamboree 96 which is 19 years and 4 months ago roughly. Perhaps there's a random Nitro that's even earlier.

So the Rusev/Dolph angle has to end with Dolph and Summer hooking up and Lana and Rusev getting back together as a face team, right? The women's stuff is coming along nicely. The title match was whatever, but Paige subtly ruining Charlotte's moment by calling attention to swerve was some really nice pre-heel-turn work. Charlotte winning the title and Becky beating Sasha in one try (according to Raw canon at least) are both logical catalysts to send Paige over the edge at this point. I also liked the Miz TV segment. Bray's chaotic evil side shines the most against other heels. NXT's gonna be in Texas this week, so my fun guess for the partner is Samoa Joe.

Weak offense isn't a big deal if your character is "heel who thinks he's a lot better than he is because all his matches are basically 3 on 1." And I'd be willing to bet reactions to New Day in the main event scene, however briefly, would be way more positive (so to speak) than the current Rollins/Sting angle with fucking Sheamus lurking in the background.

Kofi not getting MITB in favor of the quintessential lame-duck Sheamus is god damn disgrace. I would say that's the biggest missed opportunity of the year, but then I remembered they gave Brock's first post-streak loss to Taker and didn't have Cena put anyone over with the US challenge, so I can't quite say that in good conscience. I'd say it's a bigger travesty than Bryan's Rumble outing at this point, though. This week's Raw proved New Day is main event level (imagine typing that out last December).

I don't know why, but Steve Blackman pretending Terry Taylor was the camera cracked me the fuck up. Ryback's promo was pretty bad, but I didn't notice it live because I was distracted by Kevin Caribbean Cool.

The Fast Lane match was alright. Not the best Cena/Monster match by a long shot, but at least it was in the same vein. Cena's matches went way down hill once he started using that damn springboard stunner. Although, I did like the first Owens match even if it seems retroactively worse now that they failed to build on it in any meaningful way.

She doesn't care about Nikki breaking her record, but this shit right here will bring AJ out of retirement.

I'm not really sure it's been that great of a year for Cena overall. Yeah, he's had some high-end matches, but the overall quality of his work seems way down. The Rusev program didn't do anything for me, and a lot of his open challenge matches were the same "try too hard" style that Kurt Angle got ripped for in his late-WWE and TNA runs.

I wanna say it was Over The Limit this year, where the announce team had Diet Moutain Dews, and Lawler took a sip on camera and very ineffectively tried to no-sell the bad taste. It was one of the most hilarious counter-productive product placement spots I've seen.

Sasha beat Paige totally clean about 2 weeks after the revolution started. But Paige losing a lot is obviously by design. She works better as a heel, and the jealousy angle is the logical catalyst to start breaking up these random-ass teams. Charlotte winning and Paige turning on her during whatever Charlotte's answer to the "Bella-bration" is makes perfect sense.

What times did AJ win/lose the title? She won in Chicago on 6/23/13 (7:34:59) and lost in New Orleans on 4/7/14, but the exact time is tough to determine. The ppv times are easy to get within 30 or seconds or so if you assume they all start 8e/7c on the nose, but with AJ losing her title on Raw, you have to factor in commercial time which means you can't just look at the timestamp on the network relative to the assumed start time. It was definitely in the start of the third hour range, though, so roughly 9:00 central give or take 10 minutes. Still, given that AJ won her title early on the card at Payback as opposed to Nikki who won in the second to last match at Survivor Series, she has at least a full hour (realistically 1:20-1:40) for margin of error. If Nikki loses the title at any point on Raw, I'm pretty sure AJ would have her covered by a few minutes at least, barring a drastic overrun with them as the last segment. ... Don't judge me, someone had to figure this out.

Nikki won the title at 8:51:03 CST, if anyone wants to nitpick the Bella-tron angle next week.

The cops finally catching up to Mickey and Mallory Knox was pretty rough. For a face beatdown/handicap jobber squash, just wait for the part where Tony Jaa stops giving a fuck and starts, uh... Breaking shit.

I'm not sure about this. Seems like Eva was getting some ironic cheers during her last match at least until the late kickout. It's tough to stay ahead of a trendy crowd like Full Sail, and the more it looks like they want the crowd to feel that Eva is being forced, the more they'll cheer because it's the opposite reaction of WWE wants. I'm pretty sure those Cena-style chants are gonna become a big thing during Eva's matches and eventually the "Let's go Eva" side will be noticeably louder. Eva's basically gonna be the Ascension of the women's division.

It would also be a good opportunity to let the women's title be the main, but I'm not sure if they have someone strong enough to pair with Bayley right now.

Brock/Show matches are always fun. I'm not gonna read in to the title dynamics of Rollins/Cena until after NoC. Given both Sheamus and Orton's propensity to get stuck in never-ending B-level feuds, I think we should expect them to still be fighting at Summer Slam 2016.

Is the next Takeover the one in London or is there one before then? Either way, I think it's Joe/Balor taking the tourney. If there's an earlier takeover, they can do a lot of interesting double duty angles, and possibly a Joe heel turn between the matches. If the next Takeover isn't until December, I think they just play it straight with them winning and do a respect angle from there. Jordan and Gable will look great making it to the finals and being competitive, and there's always the tag belts waiting for them afterwards. Really excited to see Gargano/Ciampa. The other reason I don't see Joe/Balor falling apart early is looking at this bracket, Bull and Tyler have to be the first team to implode. I don't see them doing that angle more than once for the tourney.

Rollins gear got better when they added the gold trim at Mania. Looks great with the main belt. I am disappointed that he seems to be phasing the bleached streak out of his hair, though. That was such an awesomely douchey hair style. I'm not sure what I'd do different with Ambrose. He's supposed to be a loner bar-fly or something so the beater and jeans work in that regard. Roman definitely needs to ditch the Shield imagery, though. Not just the gear, but get new music too. I think that's playing a small role in holding him back because it just adds to the forced-ness about him. Both other guys moved on and embraced their new characters, while Roman's entrance might as well have "HEY REMEMBER HOW YOU LIKED THE SHIELD? WELL THIS GUY WAS A PART OF THAT SO YOU SHOULD LOVE HIM!!!" scrolling across the tron and ringside LED panel.