NoFistsJustFlips

Don't those two statements conflict with one another? If you're going beyond catering to hardcore indy fans, that would mean changes to ROH's presentation. Pure wrestling sport is a lot of the backbone of the presentation. And if you want a larger audience tuning it you'd have to change that I would think. There's a lot of how this is being handled that confuses me. Maybe it's just me inferring on the bits and pieces we've heard so far. But again to me the way to do it is being hands off. Give an overview to someone you trust and let them do their thing. TK directly managing and formatting all the wrestling and story lines across two companies, 300+ wrestlers, and what like 10+ hours of first run TV a week (counting the You Tube shows) doesn't sound like way too much for one person to anyone else? I know a lot of people are saying collaboration and all that. And that's true it's not him writing scripts for dudes' promos. But it's also a lot more regimented than people are letting on. He isn't letting everyone go out there and have free reign to do whatever. He is personally approving or disapproving all the ideas the all of the talent have. He's the one picking who feuds with who. He's the one formatting this for TV every week. He's the one plotting out the pacing of all the stories. And which story beat goes on what show and when. It's a lot of work. And doubling that workload sounds like a terrible idea to me.

Just a personal belief, but an intermission isn't an intermission if you're still doing stuff. It needs to be a total reset. A period of time where your brain can shut off the event and take a rest. That's what reignites your excitement. I say that as someone who has seen all kinds of different intermission ideas on the indys. Concerts are still essentially part of the show. I've seen companies do "intermission matches" which is just about the dumbest thing in the world. The good indy shows just take a break. Fans can go and hangout and get autographs and pictures and stuff. The narrative of the show stops so your brain can breathe. That's why I name dropped WrestleMania 3. They just put up a 20 minute clock on PPV with the WrestleMania logo. That's it. Not Excalibur continuing to rattle off story beats and narrative recaps. Just 20 minutes to go grab food or a smoke or play on your phone. It would refresh people's brains. If you keep doing stuff, regardless of what that stuff is, then it's really not a break. Your mind still feels immersed in the event. I know that sounds a bit like a waste of 20 minutes of PPV time. But it worked before and it could work again. I don't remember seeing anyone talk about WrestleMania 3 being too long or them being burnt out ya know? There's probably a reason for that. But it's all really a guessing game until someone tries it.

Couple random thoughts... I was worried about Sting after that table bump. The AEW view of it made it looking like the other top table was broken entirely by Sting bouncing his head off of it. Thought for sure he had a concussion and possible damage to his neck. Thankfully the video posted in here shows it was his forearm / hand actually hitting the table and not his head. That match WAY over delivered. Jericho vs Kingston also WAY over delivered. Kingston is having some of the best matches in the whole company these days and you just love to see it. The new Women's Title is about 80,000x better than the original two designs. I also noticed the JR flub in the men's title match thinking they had a new belt. 5 hours and 12 matches is just too much. Unless we go back to the days of WrestleMania 3 having an intermission on PPV, the crowd is always going to be dead by the main event. Sometimes restraint is more important that fitting in everyone that deserves a spot. The match order will always suffer too. I loved just about everything on the show. But I think I would have loved it even more if there was time to breathe. Odd choices for Hangman. I don't think he's turning heel so I'm not sure why they had him do two very heelish spots that semi turned the crowd on him. Why did he shove Alex Reynolds? I know they wanted a brawl to start. But that was a bad starting point. The tying Cole to the ropes thing would have been fine, an eye for an eye after all, had he not also got physical with The Dark Order guys. Just weird decisions. Tag Three Way, both Trios Matches, Jericho v Kingston were my favorites. I get there are people that don't enjoy The Bucks. But they are god tier at that style of tag match. That shit was insane. Regal showing up was a legit big moment. This is one of the best overall PPVs I can remember. Trim two or three matches and it may have been able to hit the best of all time.

For the record, I take back what I said about the Jericho transformation pics. Even after that match was over he retained the six pack. Didn't realize how much his body had changed. And I think it's because generally he always looked good during his entrances even when he wasn't in this good of shape. But he deserves a ton of credit for getting into that good of shape, especially when he's a made man and doesn't have to.

That's a mistake. Burn out is real. Plus AEW will suffer because of it. Whatever good ideas and stories he comes up with will now be split between two companies, instead of AEW getting all of them. Just don't see the benefit to spreading himself this thin. AEW is your baby. Keep that the number one priority. Give one of the talented behind the scenes people a promotion. Shit man everyone's talking about Cody booking it, give Dustin a shot. ROH is no frills pure wrestling at it's core. See if Dustin has that Dusty booking gene. Anything is better than TK being Florida Vince and letting this be his XFL.

Bruce : We're having trouble selling tickets to MSG. Vince : Let's tease a meaningful surprise opponent for Brock to generate some interest. Bruce : Okay sounds great, who did you have in mind? Vince : I don't have anyone in mind. We're not really doing a surprise Bruce, just tease one. Bruce : Couldn't that piss the crowd off, not delivering? Vince : We'll have Roman say it was his idea and transfer that heat to him. Triple H : That's not how heat works... That's not how any of this works...

I know they've mostly only had Wardlow do squashes on tv. But he can hang with anyone they got. He's way more ready than they let on. He's less 2004 Batista teaming with Flair to learn and more 2003 Lesnar who could hang with Kurt Angle right out of the gate. The depth of the roster and the deliberate pace of their story telling is why he isn't working long competitive matches, not his lack of readiness. When they give him the green light I think a lot of people are going to be shocked just how complete of a performer he is.

Okay I understand your point more clearly now. This is the exact point of why weight classes are out dated and unnecessary now. Let's look at March of 1996 - August of 1999. WCW before Russo came in when the cruiserweight division was at it's most prominent. Who held the world title in this period. Flair, Big Show, Hogan, Luger, Savage, Sting, Nash, & Goldberg. Not a single smaller worker get a run. There needed to be a separate prize for those amazing workers that had no chance of breaking through. Now who were the main cruiserweight champions during this period? Rey, Eddy, Jericho, Malenko, Syxx, & Juvi. Half of this list have been world champions since. The business has evolved. In 1996 an Eddy Guerrero couldn't beat a Hulk Hogan. In the mid 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, he could. With Eddy & Rey & Jericho the glass ceiling broke. Having a dedicated title for the smaller guys to fight over didn't really make sense anymore. Rey Mysterio is the world heavyweight champion and Jamie Knoble is the cruiserweight champion. What merit did a cruiserweight title have if the small guy was also the top guy? It made a cruiserweight title redundant in an era when the best worker, regardless of size, could potentially get world title runs. It's valid to say comparing profitability over time isn't a fair argument because of inflation / changes in finances. That is a good point. But that point would then also extend to say comparing viewership over time and how that isn't a fair argument because of the increase in networks available / streaming & cord cutters. You don't get to have it both ways. If you disregard the money comparisons as apples to oranges, the viewership would also apples to oranges. Because in 1996 my cable tv had 50 channels. In 2022 my DirecTV has over 1,000 channels with the sports and music channels. You throwing out my profitability talking point is just as fair as me throwing out your viewership talking point. So the highest rated / most watched episodes having a cruiserweight division is irrelevant. Just like the most profitable eras not having weight divisions is irrelevant.

Por que? The 80s WWF expansion with Hogan had zero weight classes. The world title was a heavyweight title but any male in the company could compete for it essentially. The Monday Night Wars era only had one weight class exception, Cruiserweight / Light Heavyweight. And the most profitable era in the history of pro wrestling is the current era of WWE. And there are officially zero now. I'm not sure if I misunderstood your statement or what. But pretttyyy far off base with this claim. So what are you referring to? You take that back right now! I am certainly no Russo-ist. I enjoy my wrestling with structure and rules. Rankings are a good storytelling tool. Having a pseudo sports like presentation of your rules I am on board with. I think weight classes just segment things too much. In your instance of a super heavyweight title consider this, to justify the existence of the title it needs to have a certain amount of people active in the division. So while you said having it wouldn't preclude Wardlow or Keith Lee from challenging for the world title, the practicality of needing bodies for it would. If you have 8 hosses and you take two away to be in a world title feud, you're risking the super heavyweight title division getting pretty bare. If that's hard to follow liken it to current day WWE. They kept moving cruiserweights from NXT to the main roster. Buddy Murphy. Gulak. Lucha House Party. At certain point if you keep elevating people without restocking then the segmented weight class becomes stale and repetitive. And it's easy to say well just restock it. Well it's not that easy to juggle. It's just too limiting of a thing in practicality with no upside. Run a hoss tournament. Do a hoss specialty match once a year. There's a lot more creative ideas to showcase the idea you're in favor of than just throwing another title onto the pile. This will get me heat with the majority of the AEW posters here, but I am also against trios titles for much the same reason. But that's a discussion for a different day lol.

Your first paragraph is your opinion so I won't fight too hard to sway any of that. But I will say getting closer to UFC weight classes is a bad idea. So we all know MMA is a shoot and pro wrestling is a work. That's not a negative in the pro wrestling column, that's a positive. The purpose of wrestling is entertainment. The medium to do that is storytelling. Where as UFC (MMA as a whole) is for sport. People get entertainment out of watching it, but that's not it's purpose. It's real competition vs artistic storytelling. Putting more and more restrictions on your art makes it suffer. It can't be this. It can't be that. Ect. Going further with the weight classes essentially takes a bunch of tools out of your bag. No more David vs Goliath stories. No more big man squashes two smaller guys to look dominant. If you lean pseudo MMA too heard you take the heart out of what pro wrestling is. It's not for the sake of simplicity that I saw weight classes are outdated. It's for the sake of boredom. Wrestling would be too same-y if you broke it down into 10 different weight classes like MMA. Thematically what is different between a match of UFC welterweights (155 lbs to 170 lbs) and a match of UFC middleweights (170 lbs to 185 lbs)?? In MMA the fight difference is negligible because it's mostly because of safety and fairness they breakdown into weight classes. But in pro wrestling there would be zero difference between a middleweight match and a welterweight match stylistically. So it's essentially a waste of time to do. I sense we won't be agreeing on this lol. But in a world where Buddy Murphy was a "cruiserweight" champion simultaneously as AJ Styles was a "heavyweight" champion, weight classes sure aren't adding any more realism to the art form.

That three way was great. The creativity was off the charts. Best Triple Threat I've seen in forever. And that crowd was hot. Into the three way and Keith Lee like crazy. This is exhibit A for why live Rampages need to be an every week thing. Also it needs to be said, Alex Abrahantis is the most cringe thing in all of pro wrestling right now. Even before he started dressing like a kid on Halloween. Dude does not fit with Penta and Fenix at all, other than he can speak the same language as them. He's nerdy and his be-popping high energy does not fit. It's like he won a fan raffle to get the spot. ESPECIALLY with Pena doing the dark shit he does not fit. It's not an association organic to the characters. It's lame and I wish he would stop being paired with Death Triangle at ringside. You want the dude to translate, fine have him be the one interviewing them and do the Penta says deal. It's subtraction by addition because the whole stable looks less cool with him out there.

Admittedly this is just my opinion, and I'm not trying to pass it off as a fact or anything. But man, weight classes in wrestling are so out dated. Segmenting the roster and adding titles for all of those segments don't make all the champions look more important, they make the top champions less important. If you do a super heavyweight title and you got Wardlow, & Keith Lee, & Hobbs, & Miro, & Archer in there... you're subtracting them from the World Title picture. I'd rather Wardlow & Lee get involved in the world title mix without this whole side division muddying the waters. You can still do a bunch of super heavyweight matches and make a staple of the formula you use. But all the fragmenting of the roster based on weights just lowers the whole presentation. Especially when you have guys like Sammy, Darby, Garcia, and Bryan Danielson who would, by weight, be considered cruiserweights. AEW is doing it right. They don't have any weight classes. Their top title is a world title and not a heavyweight title. Anyone is eligible to challenge for it so everyone has the same goal. It's just easier to follow. The Super Bowl in The NFL wouldn't mean as much if there was also a west coast Super Bowl for only teams in the Pacific time zone, and a Super Bowl for east coast time zones / ect. THE Super Bowl winner would be less important if there were also other lower tier Super Bowl winners muddying the waters.

I don't think many people are assuming it because anything points to him being good at it per-se. Just that according to the rumors a big part of what attracted him to AEW was the desire to book and be part of the office. So not based off of results or merit, just off of his known desire to want a creative & executive role. I too also liked a lot of what he was doing (minus anything with Ogogo or The Factory). But I'm fairly sure he is night after WrestleMania Raw bound. Had all this developed under a different timeline maybe it could have worked out. But I'm of the thinking he's already signed to WWE.

Comparing post match pics of a blown up Jericho pics to his pre match un blown up physique is preeettttyyyy disingenuous.... Those two bad looking shots are after he worked a match. Matches in which, during his entrances he looked just as good as the good looking pics. It's just how an older body with a lot of miles on it works.

Ugly as fuckkkkkk.

I love this idea. Think of the heat. Super babyface World Champion (in ROH) invades and nullifies his word and becomes super heel AEW World Champion via that loophole. That's almost an ECW One Night Stand if Cena had won scenario, with the added caveat of a Hogan heel turn / breaking your word and being a lying scumbag. I would love to see this idea.

I do appreciate you trying to make that idea wrestling related. Springboards and verticals doing dropkicks make wayy more sense than the alternative. Which by the way WWE already does with the performance center. It's just a social media thing. But all the developmental people do a combine. Men & Women do the weight bench and vertical leap and all that. I think it just happened a week or two ago. So it kind of already is a thing, to a very small degree. But your spin is way more logical than just straight workout stuff.

Along those lines I genuinely wonder if the August PPV will be called All In or All Out this year. Obviously All Out was a riff off of the original getting as close as they could legally. But for all intents and purposes All In should be the brand name for it. It was the spark that started AEW. But TK has also shown to be pretty sentimental and prideful, would he want to scrap the All Out name? Jericho was crowned the first AEW World Champion at All Out, not All In. Will be interesting to see, at least to me.

I too feel optimism about Tony buying ROH. My only hope is that if he intends on keeping it a separate brand, he is totally hands off. AEW is his baby. He is very meticulous about it and that's great. But I would love to see him hire a competent executive to have full reign over ROH. Sure have a working agreement where AEW guys can go down there for work. And ROH guys can get signed to AEW and move up. But a distinct separate promotion that Kahn himself doesn't actually have anything to do with day to day. Let a Regal or Christopher Daniels or Cody or someone have full autonomy. They would be the TK of ROH. Every decision from booking to production to what they serve at catering is all under their umbrella. And TK just gets monthly reports on their progress and numbers. It's not the only way to make it work, but it's the most effective way in my opinion.

I hear ya, but I actually think that's a GOOD thing. When WWE bought WCW they took like 24 people with it. And those 24 were nowhere near stars. TK has a blank slate to do whatever he wants with it now. Everyone knows there are no people under contract. He can run it like an indy if he chooses to, like ROH had planned to do going forward. And there is a lot of merit in that. Don't worry about a TV deal. Just get a touring weekend indy up and running again. The purpose would be develop and trying out new talent. Maybe AEW is too full to sign a Biff Busick. But an indy ROH can book him on a three month run and try him out. If he gets way over and you enjoy his stuff, sign him for AEW. If not you get a seasoned vet working with younger guys and making them better. Garcia getting an extended run with Biff in an ROH would certainly help him learn and grow. That's worth it alone, but double so if Biff ends up catching on big too. The TV competent is not even necessary. Listen where there's smoke there's fire. There is something in the works with HBO Max. For argument's sake let's say Max has agreed to do a deal with TK. They get quarterly AEW live PPVs. They get the library of all of AEW & ROH. And they also get monthly ROH PPVs. Envision ROH being like NXT was when it was Network only. 4 PPVs a year and only 3 years of a history on it's own probably couldn't score a big rights fee yet. But 16 PPVs, 3 years of AEW, & 20 years of ROH sure could. They essentially expanded their library exponentially. There's def a component to this that hasn't dropped yet. Kahn is way too savy of a business man to buy a dead brand that he doesn't have plans for just to mark out for it's history. There is a purpose and a reason for this purchase and he probably will reveal more once this PPV is done. DON 2019 was their first event. Technically this is the last PPV of year three for them. Seems like DoN 2022 would be the perfect point for a new streaming plan to start, if that's in the works. But admittedly this is just me speculating.

I missed Engrams's contract being up. He had so much potential but any time a pass hit him right in the hands you knew FOR SURE it was a drop coming. It's like a player that had all the tools to be the next Gronk but they had to play with one of those club casts on both hands at all times. My neighbors will be quite happy he's gone because I will be screaming at my TV a little less on Sundays now.

Huh? Didn't hear a single Shane heckle. I did hear noted lifelong wrestling fan Tony Kahn riffing off of WWE buying WCW by saying Shane's not here. As in there isn't a twist coming, like Shane actually being the owner of WCW instead of Vince. "The name on the contract does read McMahon... but it says Shane McMahon. I now own WCW". It was his nerdy attempt at a joke. Nothing to do with any heckles.

Gettleman really put them in a hole. How did he get hired in the first place? Ugh. I'm a Barkley fan and don't want to see him go, but the rumor is he's available via trade. It's about the only way to free up cap space quickly. I do expect him to have a bounce back year this year, but regardless work horse RBs are just not worth it anymore. Zeke's number is crushing the Cowboys and he didn't do shit last year. The only work horse RB worth the money is Derek Henry. He's one in a million tho. Might as well blow the team up. None of their skill position players are worth building around. Golliday was a bust. Engram's hands are made of baby oil. Sheppard is solid but he's become injury prone. Go young and cheap and hope your scouting department lands a few gems.

I think this is the first Sunday PPV not followed up by a holiday, correct? They normally only do the Sunday PPVs if the majority of people have off the following Monday, like for Labor Day & Memorial Day. I wonder why they went with a Sunday this time. Pure guess but there's probably something scheduling-wise making them need to do a Sunday. Like the building they wanted wasn't free Saturday? Or something necessary for Tony's duties with The Jags taking up his Saturday or something? In reality I think the true reason they do Sunday ppvs when they do them has nothing to do with holidays. I feel like TK would do Sunday PPVs every time if they don't conflict with the NFL. While the holiday reasoning makes sense, it's funny that the Sundays they do run PPVs just happen to be the Sundays during football's off season.

Funny story along these lines. I worked Necro before. I'm smaller than he is. Very politely in the back he says to me ' Hey on the punch, chop, punch, chop spot would you mind putting your hands up once the chops are done and I go to just punchign you in the corner? It'll be a lot more believable that way'. I'm cool with that made total sense and I assured him I wouldn't try and show him up or make him look bad or anything. The first punch hits me right in the temple so hard I am legit out on my feet. My eyes are open and I'm reacting to his strikes, but I am legit out. So we get to the point where I'm supposed to get my hands up, and no one is home. So he thinks I'm trying to be a tough guy showing him up and he starts blasting me full force with punches to my jaw and head lol. He eventually got me down to the mat but hands never did go up to protect myself. (For clarity dude was a total sweetheart and apologized a million times in the back when I explained what happened. Necro was one of the softest spoken and nicest guy you could ever meet. Shitty political rants he currently posts on Facebook aside).