NoFistsJustFlips

Someone left Madden franchise mode loaded on a GM's computer. That's the only way this insane trade makes any sense. Two 1sts and a 3rd for a QB starting his 13th season that is only slightly better than average? Oh and they threw in a younger version of the exact same slightly better than average QB on top to sweeten the deal? McVay must really hate Goff. He's so disgusted by the sight of him he gave away the farm just so he didn't ever have to talk to him again. Watson's agent has been up all night pricing out small islands knowing his cut of that deal is gonna be like 3x this haul.

This is basically gonna be an old man yelling at clouds post, but man I wish they would make the big 4 two night events. So like, one Rumble main events Saturday one main event Sunday. You can fit all the titles on this way. But separate them from that gender's Rumble night. Like all women's title matches and the men's Rumble on Saturday, all the men's title matches and women's Rumble on Sunday. Could do the same with the Survivor Series gimmicks. Could make each world title main event a night at Mania, or one night be the big men's main and the other the big women's main. But even more importantly... the doubled up gimmicks would cease to be an issue if they, ya know, went back to booking gimmicks based on story telling vs 'hey it's October let's cue up two Hell in a Cell matches'. And this year it was fucking 3 of them wasn't it? They've been doing the shoe-horned gimmick PPVs for a decade now so they aren't going anywhere. But back in my day Cactus Jack vs Triple H in a Hell in a Cell was because the wanted to fucking kill each other, not just because the calendar said October

I know the cgi thing was a joke my dude. Obviously lol. But there's been 2 pages of posts wondering if staying in one place / doing thunderdome was viable.

What are you guys going on about lol.... WWE is not going to scrap touring / live audiences. They know how much harder their shows are to enjoy in an empty building. Wrestling needs a live crowd to feed off of. So zero percent chance they go all thunderdome all the time. Setting up shop in one location is also a no go. You remember how Impact Zone TNA guys used to get over by drinking with the same 300 people who came every week? Can you imagine Vince finding out the crowd is going ape shit for like Gulak every week because he drinks with the fans, and it starts hijacking the show? Not to mention if they stay in one place they are drawing from a pool of the same 5,000-6,000 people every week which will dwindle and not spend money on merch over time. When things open up they are going balls to the wall touring again. House shows will be gone. But Raw / SD / PPVs will be all over the country / world. There's money to be made from entertainment starved audiences. The optics of crowds being so hyped because it's been 3 years since they've been to a live event are a can't miss prospect. Everyone is right they are a content company now. But that doesn't mean they're going full studio / cgi / tape a year in advance. It's still a touring live event and it always will be.

If you mean in the in-between time, from say Mania until fall-ish when things are *supposed* to open back up for real, sure. I could see that. But ain't no fucking way if things are completely opened up they stick with a virtual crowd. They've done an admirable job trying to roll with the punches. But the art form of wrestling just doesn't work the same without the live audience. I couldn't tell which one you meant from your post. Honestly until things are fully opened back up, Mania and Summerslam are the only events I expect them to try and use a live audience for.

Setting yourself up for failure my dude. When has WWE made anyone quarantine to work there?? I've seen zero buzz or insinuation of Punk being involved outside of your post. Think you're connecting dots that just aren't there. Would love to see it happen, but it just doesn't make any sense. Where would he even fit in? Why would WWE shell out for him in the empty arena era? If they ever make up, you'd think they'd want a huge crowd there for the reaction. Think you're also setting yourself up for failure on the men's 30 / women's 1 & 2 being on Backstage. That show was drawing dismal ratings. Like less that 40,000 people were watching, hence why it was cancelled. I think them announcing that you'll find out a couple Rumble spots on there is a their way to drive eyeballs to the show. Why would they give away a big name on a show no one watches? If it was meant to be important it would stay a surprise, or they'd announce it on TV and beat us over the head with it like everything else they push. My random predictions for winners based on absolutely nothing: Women's Rhea Ripley. Flair & Asuka lose the tag titles in February. Flair beats Auska in March. Rhea vs Flair for the Raw title at Mania. Men's Cena. Mind you I'm picturing some kind of smoke and mirrors video editing where Cena doesn't have to leave his tv show set up in Canada. Somehow they send a ring up there and film something wacky that everyone hates. Goldberg beats McIntyre. Cena vs Goldberg for The Raw title. Yuck.

Yeah carny math indeed lol. JR's first territory he drove around the promoter everywhere because he was blind. Forget the promoter's name. Leo McGirk maybe? But even carny math is better than no math... If you're THE GUY like Stone Cold or Hogan, let's say you get 5k a night as your bonus. (The amounts varied on the draw, who else was booked ect). But for the sake of easy math: 5k x 4 night a week (leaving one night as a tv night where I don't think they did bonuses) = 20k a week x 52... you're pulling in a bonus of $1,040,000. A million dollars on top of your salary for the major top stars. Even if you're the lowest guy on the card you're getting at least 200 a night as your bonus. 200 x 4 = 800 a week x 52... even the lowest of the low card dudes where pulling in a bonus of $41,000 a year on top of their salary. So depending on where you were on the card, how often you worked, how much the office like you... you're getting between $40,000 - $1,000,000 extra a year on top of your salary. And that's how they operated for almost 40 years. Now, it's just gone. You get your downside and no house show bonus. No ppv bonus. No third party money. You get salary, merch sales cut, and a bonus if you make one of the video games. But in recent year's they've cut the video game bonus significantly as well. The whole pay structure of the talent keeps getting cut. It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it. They've singed multiple billion dollar deals in the last 18 months. I'd love to see what the revenue share is in WWE vs NFL or UFC or NBA. Them signing 500 people and trying to open up territories all over the world surely add to the total talent budget, but the overall slice any one person gets has got to be tiny compared to the company's profits. And that's before we even start on how every single person on any single episode of any single television show that's shown on Peacock gets royalties, EXCEPT for professional wrestlers appearing in all that WWE content they just purchased now. It sucks that Andrew Yang was apparently just blowing smoke a few months ago. Because wrestlers need a union / collective bargaining so very badly.

Except for the fact the performer contracts are still heavily skewed towards the majority of your income is based off of house show bonuses. WWE did away with PPV bonuses when the network started. They took away third party platforms last year. They are now scrapping house shows completely. Merch bonuses is legitimately the only source of income now for the performers, outside of the downside guarantee. Which kind of makes downside guarantees obsolete and carny as fuck. Hey pal take a lower salary here but you'll make it up in bonuses if you do well. (But we're gonna take away 75% of the bonus opportunities so actually you'll pretty much just make your downside. Haha. Capitalism pal, gotta love it.). Multiple billion dollar deals in the last 18 months for the company. But the earning power of the performer has never been lower than it is now.

One thing I don't think I've seen mentioned about the Peacock purchase... what is the advertising budget of Peacock? And what amount of that did they allocate to this purchase? In addition to the actual network they purchased, they've now get what amounts to 5 prime time hours of promotion every week on USA Network, and probably more importantly 2 prime time hours of promotion on Fox. We all know how WWE hammers people over the head non-stop with whatever they're pushing. They are gonna run the promotion of Peacock into the ground during the weekly shows. And that advertising makes the price make a little more sense. They get the WWE Network and 1,800ish hours of potential promotion over the next 5 years. On two networks. It's a ton of content. It's a ton of advertising. It's roughly 1 million subscription growth. I still think $1 billion is a major overvaluation. But I kinda get it when you look at the whole package.

Fuck. Yes. Pleasantly surprised to see this. When you give up on the players you've lost the team. I'm so happy Doug Pederson got that long look at a practice squad player that has no relevance to Philly's future. Hopefully it was worth losing his job over. Bye Felicia.

I like this idea. I think everyone universally agrees Roman's new character is the best act in the company. Unify the titles, make a singular world title mean something again, and get Roman on both shows as the touring champion. It would kind of kill Drew's momentum. But on the other hand, what momentum? Have Edge win The Rumble and instead of wanting his world title shot he wants revenge on Orton or whatever. Lots of ways to get around the Rumble winner thing. Dont know why Miz has MITB again. But just have him get squashed somewhere along the way too.

His stat line wasn't setting the world on fire, but he was single handedly keeping them in the game. Because tanking for draft picks is busch league Madden shit. This is the NFL the GOAL is to win. Jason Kelce, The Eagles' Center, had a recent rant about how winning is the only thing that matters in football. And that teams that worry about tanking and the draft and free agency over winning are consistantly a part of a losing culture. Pederson is safe because he won the city their only Super Bowl ever. But if you look at his leadership since then, he's been a train wreck. Kept the wrong QB (Wentz instead of Foles). Gave Wentz big money. Had a lack of leadership that led to a QB controversy with Hurts now. Plus that micky mouse bullshit where he put in a practice squad player in a 3 point win-able game. I'm telling you now he lost the team. Kelce and Wentz sat on the field alone hours after the game ended last night. No doubt venting about what a piece of shit their coach is. Look I said at the outset The Giants should have won more if they didn't want to be in this position. But your lack of understanding of professionalism and how tanking is offensive to both the players and fan bases is pretty tone-deaf. Also, Eagles could have went into the off season with positive momentum and really feeling good about Hurts had he pulled out another win to add to his resume. In actuality they literally have zero momentum and a coach who lost respect from his players. But hey, three spots up in the draft certainly insures a Division Title next year

***The Giants should have won more games if they didn't want to be put into this position*** That being said, real fucking annoying that The Eagles are losing this game on purpose. Fine I can understand not taking the easy points because you're go for it on 4th down all the time kinda team. But putting in the third string QB when you're down by 3 and Hurts is playing well? Fuck Doug Pederson & Fuck The Eagles. Happy for Alex Smith tho. Hell of a journey to get back to a starting QB for a playoff team.

What a strange season. The Giants are one win away from a Division Title (along with a Washington loss), but they're also only one loss away from the number 3 draft pick (admittedly a long shot tho needing wins from the Bengals, Broncos, Texans, Eagles, Falcons, Panthers, & Lions). But I have to think that's a first. Entering Week 17 with the ceiling of winning your division & hosting a playoff game and a basement of the third overall pick. I'm not delusional enough to think The Giants are a good team this year. But I am delusional enough to think if they get in they could actually get the win against The Bucs in the wildcard round. They almost beat them once. Plus in NY with possible bad weather to slow the Bucs offense down. And old man Brady will probably have some arthritis going lol. No matter what happens, it's nice to finally have a meaningful game at the end of the season again.

Do people not understand how Twitter works? If it's only 10 people you would never see the tweets. 10 isn't enough for the algorithm to pull it up in your "for you" section. Generally tweets need to be in the 10,000s to trend, but has to at least be in the 1,000s to show up on anyone's radar in the "for you" section. So thousands and thousands of people were talking about Jericho not 10. Doesn't negate your main point. Just felt the need to point out it's a way bigger sample size than 10. Okay you win the thread. This is a GOOD take lol.

Honestly I didn't think anyone was making a big deal to begin with lol. It's an interesting insight into what non fans think, and considering what might appeal to them. Their follower amounts are kind of irrelevant. Does a person's opinion matter less if they're unpopular? Maybe it's coming off like I'm saying they should change things based off of that insight. That's not what I'm trying to say at all. I look at it more like it was a free market research group. Don't like take Jericho off tv because they were making fat jokes or anything drastic like that. But the consensus was that it looked like a bootleg WWE. Maybe that was a blind spot for AEW. So in that sense maybe they can learn from this free marketing research and tweak some visuals. But his original idea my first post was talking about was that "maybe just focus on retaining the audience you have" is a bad thought process to have. That's all.

Meh. I read it lol. I just narrowed down your point to this : Then my response, narrowed down was essentially : -Focusing on retaining the audience you have, aka not looking for a new audience (or as I phrased it, growing your audience) is dumb. -Then I explained the NBA viewing universe is way bigger than the wrestling viewing universe. So relegating the NBA twitter responses to a "group of friends" is dumb when it's probably closer to 5 or 6 million people... but maybe you have a lot of friends and 5 or 6 mil is no big deal for you playa lol. On this, we agree lol.

This is a bad take. It's a bad take in the sense that you seem to not understand why growing an audience is important. So what, market to only the people who watch already? Never grow? Never get bigger? Never make more money? The current audience is finite. Even if you keep 100% of the current audience for the next 50 years, they'll eventually move on / die out / pass away / ect. We were all non-fans at a point in our life. We checked it out a show, liked it, and got hooked. That's just how it works. If you don't try and reach for more than you already have, you'll never replenish the ones that leave. The (conventional) TV consuming universe in The United States is roughly 120 million-ish. AEW doesn't even capture a full 1% of the possible viewers. Your take is basically saying it's futile to make steps to get any of the other 99% to try it out (so some of them can get hooked like we did). Or that analyzing what people who sampled did or didn't like is a waste. The NBA TV audience is larger than the Pro Wrestling audience. It's not wrong of people in here just making observations on what worked with them and what didn't. I'm not a physical therapist so this is just a Google-Fu medical diagnosis. But it sounds like when you tear the pec muscle off of the bone, if you don't have surgery to reattach it, you get the Jericho / Undertaker / Scott Steiner chest. If you have the surgery to reattach it, it can heal. But if you don't, the center of your chest basically atrophies and the muscle tissue dies. Certain muscle injuries don't heal without surgery. And wrestlers, besides being tough guys, don't want to have to take a year to rehab. Because a year of rehab means a year of only making your downside guarantee and not any bigger payoffs.

I went into this with low expectations. The low expectations went to zero when The Giants decided to rush their punter on the field for a 4th and goal trick play on the opening drive where he threw a pass to the center. It's been all down hill from there. Freddie Kitchens is the worst play caller I think I've ever seen. What a world, I'm longing for Jason Garrett's return? 2020 is pure evil.

If I see one person defend that little end segment, I will fly off into an uncontrollable rage. Pure utter dog shit. The work was fine in the match. Solid psychology. A few good teases. But then legit cable access level effects to set a body on fire that they didn't even PRETEND TO TRY and make look authentic. Just hokey embarrassing horse shit. I don't mind Asuka & Charlotte winning, but it sure would be nice if they could balance a Women's Tag Title feud without needing the singles champions to be a part of it. I hate when they do that for the men too. But it's even more egregious with the women. But yeah man. Burning sex dolls with a Fiend mask on them is not my idea of high art, or good storytelling. Just so fucking depressing that this is what the number once pro wrestling company in the world is. Bad fake hokey cringe worthy stupid low grade horror effects. That will just be ignored when Fiend shows up tomorrow like nothing happened.

They announced an INFERNO MATCH a couple days before the PPV? What? God damn pal, that's a hell of an attraction... like one maybe you'd wanna promote? On TV? Or nah? 9 Hours of TV a week, but let's not use ANY of it to promote an INFERNO MATCH? LOL. Okay.

The ratings don't matter point is valid. WWE is more profitable now than ever before. Compare that to Disney, who also is more profitable than ever as well. But Disney is also clicking at the highest quality they've ever had. WWE's quality isn't an all-time low, but it's not far behind. What counts more to a corporation tho? Profits or quality? Nothing is going to change in WWE until the profits change. So accept the poor quality programming, or jump off the ship (like 4 million + other viewers have in the last 15 years). Even when Vince steps down, not much is gonna change if the profits are still there. It's the gourmet restaurant vs fast food argument. 99 billion served, even middle of the road food, is still 99 billion served

As someone who grew up on 80s WWE and hasn't taken a break watching since, two main problems are very apparent to me. 1. In the late 80s the stories had a beginning a middle and an end. Shit happened that progressed the stories, and the stories didn't change randomly because Vince showed up to the building cranky and demanded rewrites. Now the time between story beats was very much stretched out because they were a syndication model and not a weekly cable model. But you got distinctive easy to understand, UNINTERUPTED stories. Hogan & Savage form a team because Andre & Dibiase together are too strong for either one of them. They vanquish Andre & Dibiase. Savage doesn't like Hogan being overly friendly with Liz. Liz gets hurt and Hogan leaves Savage hanging to tend to her. Savage snaps. Big money match, Hogan wins. Easy as fuck to follow. Even more importantly the in between filler was compelling promos from easily defined characters in their own words. Hogan or Savage standing there with Mean Gene just spitting fire that flowed effortlessly because they knew their own characters. I'm gonna send you to the hospital. You aren't gonna take this belt. Ect. Not I'm gonna send you to a local medical facility. You won't defeat me in your championship opportunity. Today shit is so overly scripted and phony sounding. Everyone has to use official Vince McMahon verbiage and it ruins everything. Everyone sounds the same. And every writer is like a 4th grader trying to increase the font to stretch his book reportto hit the page count minimum. Over compensating and making things sound WAY more fake then just letting a wrestler cut a fucking promo. Like @Burgundy LaRue said, the best stuff in the women's tag story line was all on Raw Talk. And that's not surprising to me. That's the characters themselves cutting promos that aren't trying to over compensate. It's insanely simple. And simple is usually best. 2. The brand split fucking sucks. It waters down every single thing about WWE. There's 18 fucking titles in WWE. That's way too many. None of them mean anything. Trying to make Raw & Smackdown as distinctive brands has largely failed because they're the exact same thing. Same crew, same writers, and the talent rotates so frequently there's no REAL separation. Like, there's 4 world champions right now. How can you promote someone as the best when there are 4 equals under the same roof? Sure NXT & NXT UK champions aren't portrayed as equal to Raw & Smackdown. But it's so muddy because Raw & Smackdown are supposed to be equals. So a lot of fans would assume all top brand champs are supposed to be equals. When Hogan was on top, he was THE man. When Austin was on top he was THE man. Compare that to now. Who is supposed to be THE man? Reigns right? We all know that. But WWE tries to say Reigns & McIntyre are both THE man. So neither of them actually come off as THE man. The whole product needs restructured to make sense. Have one WWE. With one world champion. One women's world champion. One set roster. Instead of spreading the talent so thin, load ONE roster with the very best you can. Keep NXT it's own thing, but streamline that shit too. Have a main roster. Have a developmental roster. NXT / NXT UK / NXT India. It's all developmental. Do the separate shows but quit acting like they all need to have separate brands. TLDR : Scripted promos, frequent story tinkering, and the brand split make WWE a chore to get through. Restructuring and scraping the overly scripted promos are the only way to put a pulse back into the product.

Which is how it should be on the main roster too. You can't tell me Raw & SD wouldn't benefit from the format being finalized a week before the show goes live vs a few hours / minutes before they go live. Not saying you're saying this per se, but I've seen that used as a knock a lot. That NXT workers get more time to prepare. That shouldn't be a knock. That's a good thing. And if the main roster had their shit together they'd have a week every week to talk out psychology and spots instead of so little forethought being put in.

But like, is current day WWE "the next level"? How come he can't have that same aura? NXT gets 50% of Raw's viewers. Do you think those people don't also watch Raw? Or that the half that don't watch NXT would automatically hate any presentation created by NXT? It's a weird disconnect. You have the minor leagues to get people ready for the major leagues, but then you make them completely start over in the major leagues and take away everything you taught them to rely on. The only true answer for the system to work is put the same vision at the head of both tables. If Vince hates NXT wrestlers' work / aura / presentation, then put someone there that creates the work / aura / presentation that Vince likes. (I mean I would rather vice versa, keep NXT how it is and give Triple H the head of creative on the main roster too but I digress). WWE is bleeding viewers. This isn't me shitting on anyone who likes it. There's still plenty of positives to get enjoyment out of it. The top of the women's roster kills it all the time. Reigns new character work is awesome. But this is eerily similar to 1994 / 1995 to me. Yeah there's some good shit like Bret Hart & Shawn Michaels on the shows, but you gotta sit through so much dumb TL Hopper / Aldo Montoya / The Sultan shit to get to it. They need a creative shake up that totally re imagines the product like the attitude era did. Like the rock and wrestling era did. Something so stark and different that it jumps interest. And I just don't think Vince has it in him.