Hagan

Yup - Billie is like tailor made for Impact. She could goof off with Su Yung and Rosemary and do wacky shit or like fuck Johnny Swinger or something. Some of the other names, I imagine, will soon be on a Dark or Elevation near you. Tucky has potential. For some reason, I think he'd be good in ROH. He seems like a new age ROH guy.

Not seeing the Iconics to AEW at all, with the exception of the Spears connection. They're not great workers and AEW doesn't need more goofy undercard acts. Plus, you have the issue of bringing in a lower-card WWE act which has its own pitfalls. I mean, let me amend that - Royce has potential for sure but the jury is way out on her as a singles worker. Of the name acts - Joe has value though I think you bring him in for a few high profile matches to put over other guys. I'd immediately bring in Green who has a total star aura if she can stay healthy. Kalisto is the kind of hidden name here. He's a hell of a worker when given the chance but that's a lot of years being buried.

They released Chelsea? Holy cow. Poor woman is snake-bit. Well, of all these releases - she could be a huge addition to the AEW women's roster. Everyone else will be fun in Impact, I guess.

There hasn't been dramatic viewing figure drop offs, though. Year to year the show is holding up fine. In fact, wasn't it up in the demo last week? A lot of the ratings chatter, especially short-term, is a little reactionary.

Night 2 was a solid if unspectacular night but I will say I am far more interested in WWE coming out of the show than coming in so that makes the show a winner. The Tribal Chief should be champion until next year's Mania, at least.

NXT Mexico legitimately sounds like the most awful idea in wrestling history. Like, even if they hire the best and brightest wrestling minds in lucha and bring over the best talent, everything that makes lucha lucha will die in the WWE system. I mean, I don't even get lucha libre and I have tried my hardest. I can't imagine WWE Peacock subscriber tuning in to watch dives to lead to commercial breaks every match. Edit: okay, so that's not exactly what Hunter suggested but really with the way WWE has run-off the Hispanic fanbase and booked Hispanic stars into oblivion, what's the point?

Flair and Funk's I Quit match was 18 minutes long. Cole and KOR was double that. If there was one thing I would change about modern wrestling it would be to change main event times across the board to under 20 minutes.

Really solid show. - I really don't get Zoey Stark. - Kushida vs Dunne was like low-key really, really great. Maybe the best Kushida WWE match. - Gauntlet was fine but those matches go on forever and are getting to be about as overdone as ladder matches seemingly. Was hoping Swerve would win. - Triple tag match was like a PWG special. All moves but a lot of fun. MSK has really, really overdelivered in a way few others have in NXT. Not many established indie acts can say they left the indies and got markedly better in NXT but they are so much better. - WALTER vs Ciampa was great. Hot take: WALTER should wrestle more and be pushed as a key headline superstar act in the company. - Women's match was good. Don't know if it was great because it was a little paint-by-numbers but good that they put over Gonzalez so strong. It is a little I guess annoying because we're back to kind of the heel dominant champion, which can get tiresome. Like I'm hoping this doesn't lead to Gonzalez being champ for the next year and cleaning everyone out. Would like a little more variety in the booking of the women's division. It's either dominant joshi or dominant monster. Would like to see a more personality driven champion on top for a bit just as a change of pace.

All depends on where you are but I agree that things that are popular are going to draw big. Every single NFL game will sell out this year. UFC shattered its ticket sales records. Things are starting to bounce back in a huge way in the states that are removing the barriers. The issue with WWE is their popularity is down and that's why they're probably less eager to pull the trigger. If they thought they could be like UFC and get immediate sellout for big cards, every PPVs would have already been booked into an arena.

Probably my hottest wrestling take is wrestling companies should ignore Twitter and social media and push/book whomever is best for their business.

Nice post. And yeah, more even than the in-ring stuff I never got his character. I knew what it was on paper as the working class hero but he seemed to kind of be an asshole and just talked about how awesome he was and how women wanted to bang him. Like, I'm supposed to believe Baby Doll was with him? I know he was positioned as the anti-thesis of the Ric Flair character but he really wasn't. Ronnie Garvin was. Ricky Steamboat was. Dusty just seemed like he wanted to out-Flair Flair.

I wonder if fans were allowed to make noise and they could run full arenas whether some of the booking flaws would be mitigated? So much of the company is heat, heat, heat and without that fan emotion to play off of it gets tedious. Main event match times is def a problem as well as the inability to bring in American freelancers to boost up cards. Guys like Moxley and Jericho etc. swooping in added some spice to the depth of the card. Running so many shows and having to split up so many matches is also a huge issue. I think in many ways the pandemic hurt New Japan worse than any company outside of Mexico because a lot of their choices are dictated by trying to sell as many tickets as they can in limited capacities, which is why Korakuen Hall is being run into the ground. That said, both Dome shows were great and this was PROBABLY the best New Japan Cup they've run. New Japan set such a high standard for years though that things def look creaky.

My hot take is: I don't get Dusty Rhodes. I mean, the promos are good but his weird NWA character of John Wayne/ladies man/ guy who also bragged about his money and wore a mink coat despite supposed to be representing the blue collar workers just always rang false to me. He was never super great in the ring and didn't look particularly tough. There was nothing especially cool about him. I get why Vince just turned him into a goofy dancing fat man with an unattractive girlfriend.

I guess the question to me is this switch more of an Evil title switch where the plan is just to make a main eventer moving forward or is this an Omega type switch where they plan on pushing Will as a tippy-top guy and the focal point of the company moving forward. He's certainly an amazing generational talent so him getting an extended run and carrying it to the Dome isn't a bad idea.

Here's the thought experiment: Slippery-slopes arguments are fallacious because they ultimately are arguments in bad faith. However, there is a very logical chance that the end point is the archive gets nuked. That's not pie-in-the-sky conspiracy. Logically, you can look at what they are editing, what they are looking for and all of us can easily name HOURS AND HOURS of content off the top of our head in the archive that is racist, sexist, homophobic and misogynistic. So, show of hands: if Peacock decides to just nerf the archive or put up shows that are so heavily edited as to be basically old VHS clip jobs, are you okay with that? I can certainly accept that maybe it's a better overall for a lot of reasons but it's not bad faith to suggest that that's what we're ending up with AT BEST. .

The poor interns stuck watching 17,000 hours are going to be the arbiter. As has been noted, I'd bet more money that the archive gets quietly killed before I'd bet that they are going to have thoughtful, diligent conversations about what should and shouldn't go. No one watches the archive anyway. Maybe that's a good thing. Get rid of terrible things, let the world know they are terrible and move on. My think is - it's actually not going to change one thing in the industry, Vince still gets his money regardless and it's just going to annoy me that I can't watch Saturday Night's Main Event whenever I want. All First World Problems but we are also a bunch of people on a message board spending time posting about professional wrestling, which is a privilege in and of itself.

Understandably, a l lot of focus on the Edge misfire but the Banks vs Bianca feud is one of the biggest examples of a horribly built match in a while. This was a match that I thought had a legitimate shot to main event one of the nights and now I expect it to be a 10 minute early match that ends on a distraction roll-up finish. Aside from the representation issues, which could have been hyped more, you had a new, well-protected challenger against an established star on her hottest run. They were a billion ways they could have went with it and instead they've gone down the route of comedy and partners who can't get along.

It's not just WWE though. Mid-South has language and representation that is offensive by today's standards. Most of ECW has language and misogyny that is reprehensible. WCW has problematic issues . The issue is that it's not one company. The entire industry (then, now, forever) is filled with stuff that is going to offend people now and in the future. You may as well just say wrestling history begins the day Peacock bought the Network (though even then you have the Apollo Crews stuff). And I mean, getting rid of this stuff is fine because if it offends people, it offends people. No one has the right to tell people what they should or shouldn't approve but none of this affects Vince McMahon AT ALL. Dude got his money. Dude will continue to get his money. Nor will it improve the reputation of wrestling because it by nature will always be what it is. The real loser is all of us because when you throw the baby out with the bathwater a lot of wrestling history we grew up on it is going to only be found on sketchy torrent sites and like Billi Billi. And that is fine but until this week when the last time anyone thought about Piper's bullshit. He's dead. Wrestlemania 6 gets watched by like 15 people every year. If life has become better for that show being edited, I think that's wonderful but, historically, once you go down the path of editing off content that could upset people you end up encountering unintended consequences that don't make anyone happy.

Peacock can do whatever it wants with its content but now that the editing has started it's far more likely that the majority of it ends up getting memory-holed. It's great that people want wrestling to be better than it is morally but 1) it never will be fundamentally because being low-brow is a feature and not a bug 2) the movement to atone for its past really just means that a lot of the history has to be erased. I dunno - sometimes when I hear people be so offended about what they see in wrestling I just wonder "why did you start watching? What did you expect?" I was going back and watching a lot of late '86 WWE and the build to Wrestlemania a few weeks back. The Piper face turn and feud with Adonis and Muraco is so awesome but should also NEVER BE SEEN BY ANYONE because it is blatantly, horrifically homophobic. I'm cool if it gets relegated to the dustbin of history but just realize that once this movement starts it doesn't stop and things you liked, or thought fondly or are not personally offensive to yourself are going to go be erased forever. Anyway - whatever - there's plenty of wrestling to watch in the world.

QT Marshall was all over the early pandemic shows and has been a featured prelim guy from the start of the promotion and associated with Cody. Had a pretty good blow off NHB match with Dustin vs Butcher and Blade a few months ago after a several week built feud. As prelim acts go, he's probably been one of the most established.

I took what Crews is doing as a knock off Black Panther/Killmonger sort of character.

Really fun show but they are over-relying on "someone interrupts a promo" to further feuds. This is a promotion full of great talkers, would be enough to just let them talk.

The match times are killing me. Every main event has the length and style of a Tokyo Dome main event and it's exhausting.

Molly Holly is basically a saint so this is well deserved. Underrated career, as well. WCW '99 was what it was but her flying around and interfering for Savage was fun.

Fair enough. Was having fun and being overly sarcastic but, and not to derail the thread, but Greg Valentine was 100 percent a national star unless the argument is that anyone that wasn't headlining during WWF national expansion wasn't a national star. I mean, every single wrestler before 1984 with the exception of Andre the Giant was a regional star by that logic. Greg Valentine probably drew more money by himself than Nash did, too. Edit: Valentine was IC champ at the first Wrestlemania and US champion at the first Starrcade. Not sure what a star is if that doesn't qualify.