NoFistsJustFlips

I hear ya, I'm not a fan of the ring announcer announcing time remaining over the house mic either. But to be fair they do it for every title match. Opening tag title match had them calling out every 10 minutes too. Generally I think they've done it for all title matches since the beginning tho. It's just not every title match hits 10mins. I also believe TNT Title matches are only 20 min time limits. So its more frequent in those matches. I think every 5 minutes they announce time gone by. It's 2020 tho and ya gotta think there's maybe a more efficient way to do it. All the national TV companies have big screens. Why can't they do a 10 minutes gone by graphic on the big screen instead? The fans live would surely see it, the production truck could cue up a quick shot of it. The announcers could then acknowledge it. The guys in the ring can just get the time ques from the ref instead of waiting on the ring announcer. It's one of those territory hold overs that is ripe for an update.

Why do Takeovers have generic names now and random episodes of the TV have PPV names? Oh right, because NXT's sole purpose now is to take petty shots at Cody Rhodes via using all of Dusty's gimmicks against AEW head to head. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy some parts of NXT. But it's definitely fallen off since the Wednesday Night Wars started. The great pacing and storytelling that they originally had is mostly gone. I know they've had a string of really bad luck with injuries at the top of the card, so I'm trying not to be too hard on them. But NXT TV is becoming almost as much of a slog to get through as main roster TV. Anyone else feel that way, or am I alone on this island?

Yikes. I can admit when I am wrong and I was way off. They didn't do the same old drop the belt deal, but what they did was farrrrrr far far worse. Jesus. For a company that really pushes title reign numbers, and lengths of reigns, that's such a strange booking choice. And lazy. I think beyond the normal gripes my main issue with current day WWE is the lack of structure. It's all about moments and ADHD randomness with no logic. Why would Raw only draft 2 of the 3 New Day with one pick when they could get all 3?? Why would Raw select a set of champions and just be okay with the title they selected being given back to the other guys?? Nothing makes sense. There's no internal logic or structure to anything. Why are Women's tag champs tri brand belts and the Men's aren't? Maybe I'm too OCD and that's clouding my opinion or something. But all I'm asking for is a little logic & structure. Annoying OCD fantasy booking / brand realigning in spoilers because no one probably cares lol but...

One thing I don't get about how WWE handles these situations, the roster is soooo bloated. Even if you think Lars or Riddle or Dream has a decent chance of being a good player for you, why even take the risk? And the bad PR. The company these days just use the talent like replaceable ingredients to a hamburger. So when you have legitimate behavior issues with sufficient proof, and even multiple incidents with most of these guys, what's the point of sticking by them? Would the Lars Sullivan story really be ANY different if they just swapped in some other developmental monster and did the exact same story?

Yes, this is entirely possible too. But I think they're saving that story for Bailey. She gets drafted to Raw on Monday, and keeps the SD Women's Title until she drops it to Sasha at Hell in A Cell.

That's totally a possibility, them moving with her. But not with the tag belts. They're just gonna have the red belts and be Raw Tag Team Champions on Smackdown? What kinda sense does that make? 90% chance New Day lose them to a team being drafted to Smackdown. 10% chance they unify the tag titles and make them just like the Women's Tag Team Titles (All brands). But you'd really have to merge with NXT's tag titles too to make that work. Honestly NXT UK's tag titles too in a perfect world. One set of Men's Tag Titles for all brands, one set of Women's Tag Titles for all brands. 0% chance they just swap belts and keep them mis-matched.

They do this every year lol. New Day will drop them on Raw to a team that gets drafted to Smackdown immediately afterwards. (Or directly before the match).

Weird. I had a back and forth here a month or two ago with a poster who swore Atticus Cogar's career was over. Are you sure you aren't mistaken? /sarcasm I'm a petty man lol.

This one's pretty solid. I was trying to make another top face with DDP, but he was already a top face. The Diamond Cutter was more over than the title at this point anyways. Goldberg at like 250-0 vs Booker T built up organically with big wins spread out through the year is much more efficient at making a new top star.

1. DDP Cutters Goldberg and beats him clean as a sheet to beat the streak. 2. DDP offers rematch at next PPV. DDP Cutters Goldberg and beats clean as a sheet in the rematch. 3. DDP vs Hogan at Starrcade 1998. DDP Cutters Hogan and beats him clean as a sheet. nWo post match attack Goldberg out to save DDP. They clear the ring together. Goldberg turns and beats the absolute ever loving fuck out of DDP. Hardcore blade job / injury angle / strip the title because DDP may never wrestle again. Goldberg is a murder death heel with no emotions (but DOES NOT join the nWo). 4. Goldberg wins a tournament to get the title back and goes back to wrecking people for a year while DDP slowly relearns how to walk. 5. DDP vs Goldberg for the title at Starrcade 1999 and you make alllll the moneies. It's pretty easy to come up with a story post streak. Just gotta have a plan and stick to it.

I'm pumped about the 2021 NFL Off Season Thread. When does it open? It should be open soon for fans of the Giants, Jets, and Vikings. Yikes Saquon's injury, really all the injuries yesterday... just heart breaking. I don't think The Giants are totally done yet. For whatever reason the passing game has looked pretty solid the last two weeks. Now that there's no sense wasting practice time on run plays we can really open it up lol. Also can The Giants pleaseeee trade away Golden Gator Arms Tate? He only had three or four targets yesterday and ever catch he went down in a heap like he got dusted by Thanos. His first catch there wasn't a player within 6 yards of him and he still went down without trying to get a single extra yard.

Whoever the ESPN rules analyst was made a mistake or got confused or something then lol. By default every play that is called incomplete the whistle blows. Or else games would be 10 hours long because every incomplete pass we'd have to wait until someone chased down the ball and ran it in for a TD, just in case it got overturned to a fumble. If it's incomplete the play is dead and the whistle blows. And when the whistle blows you can't advance a fumble. A clear recovery can change who has possession on a challenge, but no forward advancement.

I'm a Giants fan too and I feel your pain. But the whistle had been blown for the incomplete pass already. A challenge would have been ruled a fumble that could not be advanced because the play was dead. So had The Giants challenged and won, they would have gained.... 1 yard. That's a waste of a challenge. The only way that play results in a touchdown is if they didn't blow the play dead and ruled it a TD on the field to begin with. The passing game looked surprisingly solid. The running game was worse that I could have ever imagined. Defense was about what I was expecting. It's gonna be a rough year. But I did really enjoy seeing them spread it 5 wide a bunch and run the hurry offense a lot. Predicting 6 wins this year. At least it's an improvement.

So I figured out the Retribution angle. It's the nWo backwards. All the over booked water down fuck finishes at first. Then maybe they will worry about getting someone over and weeding people out. And then it ends two years from now when..... The Young Bucks join WWE and Cena is the third man? Nah just kidding. Just the over booked watered down fuck finishes with no thought or narrative. Bonus points for legitimately making it unwatchable with 60 camera cuts per second.

This is actually a specifically requested production technique in big WWE matches that the ref did the delayed three count. At least in older generations. The thought process was that the tension and anticipation grows the longer the count takes (if it's the big last count for a title change) and would lead to a bigger pop. It kinda defies kayfabe, but what doesn't in WWE lol.

Not sure if you saw, but WWE is claiming they own contracted talent's real names now too. The reason they are saying that is to force this loophole closed. Hence why there's a big swell of Fuck Vince posts today. They gave contracted talents 30 days to comply or be fined / suspended / fired.

Because when I hire a plumber I definitely own the rights to his real name WWE is the most miserable environment in the professional wrestling industry. I hope this is the one that gets them to unionize. But it wont. Because they never do. Next Vince is gonna own 10% of all contracted talent's children's lifetime earnings.

Yeahhhh but what were the NXT ratings on Syfy???????? (lol just a playful shit post, not actually trying to be a d-bag to ya)

Raise your hand if you knew they were doing the ring collapsing spot because there were no trons on the post or apron. *Raises hand* At least there's some character progression for the first time in forever. Reigns & Big E have some momentum. Keith Lee got a good rub. Liked the finish to the Women's Tag Title Match. WTF was Nia's cringey celebrating shit tho? Totally unnecessary thrown together ppv, but it was inoffensive and mostly fine-ish.

I love love love that these guys are so legit that people bought into this. I almost don't even want to ruin the magic lol. But no, under no circumstances do you work over a legit injured body part (if said injury happens during that match). If a guy tweaks his knee and it's a partial tear (3-6 weeks out) then his opponent works on it, even gingerly, he could take the partial tear and completely tear it making the recovery time jump to 6-9 months. It's not worth the risk and majorly frowned upon. Now if a guy has a legit injury going into a match where they know the diagnosis and he's off to get surgery after the match (say like when Taker worked through a torn bicep to drop the title once), then sure it's possible they could use that for the story of the match. Also there were like 4 or 5 times during The Buck's portion of the tag where Chuck forgot to sell the knee lol. Total work, and the finish being a leg lock 1) protects Best Friends who still have a blowoff with Santana & Ortiz to work and 2) gets FTR over as old school guys that will work over a body part and win without a finish if it makes sense in the context of the match. Quick hits: -Loved The Bucks / Hangman story advancement. Lots of ways for it to play out. -Loved Brodie Lee's promo. The lawn mower shit was a big miss for me since I haven't seen this week's BTE. But Brodie is killing it in this role. -Sucks the show was running long and the tables match got the shaft. Rushed match almost entirely run during a commercial. And both dudes got hard way fucked up. There's just something about Sammy & Hardy's chemistry, total bad luck every time out. Good match for what they had time to work with tho. -Sucks they missed the Cassidy sprinting dive that destroyed the announcer set. Haven't even seen it on social media yet so they may not have even had a camera on it period. Wonder if that was a Jericho / Cassidy detail they didn't fill production in on because JR also seemed super salty about it lol.

My personal production style preference is gritty and imperfect. I think I am going to absolutely hate this gaudy neon abomination. Hopefully the different squares on the LED boards with the fans on them can be less homogenized and pump in a little pulse to the stale production. But this video (and that ridiculous liability waiver) makes me think it's going to be the exact opposite. Eventually they will have the technology for LED ropes and an LED canvas too. At that point they will develop LED clothing and force all fans to wear it. "God damn pal we need every inch of the screen covered in lights. Blinking neon colors. We can make full bodysuits for our SUPERSTARS *TM* and cover their faces and insure no one ever blows up. We'll own it all pal. No one leaving for movies. No one leaving for UFC. Just NEON BODYSUITS with REPLACEABLE day laborers. God damn, at least until we perfect that WWE UNIVERSE CYBORG TECHNOLOGY!!!!"

I know I'm late to the party, but did anyone notice this week's Smackdown episode was rated TV 14? The rating bug wasn't present until they came back from break with Big E & Morrison in the back. Not sure if it's for the increased man vs woman interaction, or the violent themes of Retribution. But it's the first TV 14 show since what? 2008? 2009? Wonder if they are tinkering and testing short term or if there's a possibility Smackdown stays a little more adult in theme? Kinda bizarre to just throw it out there like that.

I didn't watch. So I don't have an opinion on this week's episode. But I do have an opinion on Raw being good vs being bad / DVRing & FF. So like a few people have said, Raw is impossible to watch without a DVR. Being able to fast forward through the stuff you don't dig goes a long way for helping you enjoy the things you do enjoy more. Ultimately the problem is something that can't be controlled. It's the 3 hour format. The reason why there's so much complaining about the bad content, is because there's so much more of it. Raw as a two hour show had bad content sometimes, but it usually had at least equal good content. Now since they switched to the 3 hour format in 2012 it's been riddled with extra filler to pad out the shows. All of the filler is obvious. And it makes the bad content out weight the good content every single week. That's my theory at least. Raw & WWE in general are viewed as mostly bad shows these days because the ratio of good vs bad content has changed. USA will never let them go back to 2 hours. But I really do feel like that would significantly improve the show and tighten things up.

Definitely not my cup of tea. But I can give them credit on this, when was the last time a Raw thread went 5 pages? It has people talking. Which means people tuned in to check it out. They accomplished not having the lowest rated show of all time for this week. It'll probably have a better than average number too. But man... a few people have brought up this point already but you REALLY can't do "real fighting" on a show about "fake fighting" without breaking the 4th wall. With 10 minutes of actual thought why couldn't they have given this a structure and rules that don't break the normal matches in a kayfabe sense? Punches are illegal in pro wrestling. Say that underground fights have legal punches. No ropes because there are no rope breaks. No five counts. There are no pinfalls. Give the viewer a sense why these matches are structured different and end quicker without saying, or the very least alluding to the only rationale being real vs fake. There's different rules so there's different strategy and that's why the fights look different than matches. But no. They just throw Shane out to be the face of it with zero explanation. In theory this concept *could* work. The Bloodsport shows are proof of concept. But they just Vince everything up, and give you vertigo with all the ridiculous camera cuts. Slick perfection is boring man. Gritty & real is what draws. Whoever posted that old Raw intro video... it's like a whole different genre. That had a pulse. This generic straight to DVD Fight Club rip off is not how you get the pulse back. And also didn't they hype up a new faction debuting? Full on bait and switch. No new faction showed up. Tozawa's ninjas showed up twice. And they were throwing fire at the power grid for some reason... what... ohh... those weren't the ninjas? Are you sure? How am I supposed to know that? They wore the same fucking outfits. Short sighted ass ideas as usual lol.

I haven't seen this belt issue talked about much here. A couple years back I was listening to a Conrad podcast of some sort and they talked about how Savage had velcro on his WWF Title. It blew my mind. As a kid I always noticed how tight of a fit he got, but I never saw the actual velcro deal until I heard that podcast and watched Wrestlemania 4. The strap of the belt is significantly smaller than a normal title. So fast forward to Rollins winning the Universal Title. He asked for velcro. For whatever reason Vince went all Vince with it and now EVERY WWE & NXT BELT are velco. They all look so cheap and fake with the snaps replaced by velcro. I hate it. And I also hate how no one ever seems to talk about it. Am I going crazy? Has no one really noticed? Or have people noticed and just don't find it as off-putting as I do?