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I mean, Becky was walking around with a crutch and a bum leg, it's not like she got beat down at full strength. Of course I thought it was silly last week when she came out with a crutch and bum leg last week and laid out Natalya and Rousey despite Ronda ripping her crutch away and hitting her with it (which was no sold) so this is likely one of those "you will never make everyone happy" situations. Or to put it another way, if Rousey can't lay a beating on her when she's hurt and basically cheapshotted then Rousey never will.

They are well known of and I admit would be borderline because of that, but I question how much of their current work is as known. Park is probably the iffiest of the bunch but as noted I assume many haven't tracked down a Ki match in several years and he's still legit pretty great.

I don't think anyone mentioned L.A. Park. I'll do that. WALTER is a definite for me. I've been loving Low Ki in MLW but he's pretty well known, although I assume many haven't thought about him in a while. Some of the AJPW & affiliated folks need some love, although I'm not sure who is most deserving. Doering really surprised me last time I saw him, Ishikawa is prone to overkill but does some things I like, etc. Jun Kasai is a mad man yet I can't look away. I don't know if it would be fair to nominate current Great Sasuke just for his annual end of year madness, but... Barrington Hughes should be included simply because he is beautiful.

Yeah, my main thought here is that it is way too early to make a call on Daniel Bryan in this regard. Perhaps in the future he'll be fine, perhaps he'll be very much not so, and given that these polls are focusing on the whole "positive" deal that feels like kinda a big deal.

It struck me watching the end of Raw unfold that Charlotte is basically added in to ideally function as an actual heat magnet, and I can follow the logic. I think any thoughts that WWE are bothered by Becky being incredibly popular are misplaced, but her being popular in a way that damages the popularity of the people they match her up against is something they are definitely concerned with. While I think they could live with Rousey being booed at Mania I don't think they want her to be ruined as a face going forward because of this... and this is exactly where Charlotte enters. They seem to be laying this out that both Becky and Rousey feel like this is BS, which ideally lets the crowd love Becky and hopefully results in them hating Charlotte more than Rousey. Will it work? That I can't say and there are so many ways things can be screwed up but I can't argue against the logic in trying to protect Rousey in this way. She'll drop the belt at Mania and likely take the fall and the crowd will be into it and people will forget about it in several years when another Mania main event ends up as a 3 way dance that doesn't ruin the moment in the least.

Whenever a champion sets a record length or defenses streak and happens to lose it immediately after I feel it is 95% safe to assume that wasn't by accident. Perhaps before the Naito/Okada Dome match there was an internal debate as to who should win, but once that was figured out I think it is rather safe to say that the length of Okada's reign was rather set in stone. Omega seems to me to have been the only one set up to end it at that point so I'd guess that Gedo had hi penciled in for a while, but that is much more of a guess.

Davis seems to be really committed to signing with the Lakers, but if other teams can push that off until summer of 2020 it brings up the one possibility that no one really wants to consider: Lebron has a metric ton of mileage on his body and there is no guarantee he can go another 100+ games without a legitimate scary injury as while he appears to be an alien, if he is in fact human then something like that happening becomes more and more likely as time goes on. If he were to say suffer the same achilles tear that Kobe did and the Lakers haven't yet manage to acquire a second superstar before then it suddenly becomes a much less attractive destination. The NBA in particular moves fast, it looked very different 18 months back and will almost certainly look very different 18 months from now. Another team investing in Davis for that period is a risk, but I don't buy anything that far off being inevitable.

Ambrose on Raw was either being left high and dry by Seth or put basically zero effort into hiding getting into position for stuff and just waiting there, so either that was some next level work or he was very checked out.

As someone who doesn't watch NXT... Breeze did not make a really good impression on the main roster at all. He had a bit of an initial push with Dolph but he really didn't seem to be either particularly strong in the ring despite being given showcase matches, and his character bits and talking weren't really there beyond the entrance. Vince probably pulled the plug on his push too quickly, but he hadn't really been showing himself to be much more than a mid to low carder at that point. He's much better as a comedy guy and should probably stay there. Revival had some dreadful injury timing, but aside from a few highlights haven't shown themselves to be more than some solid hands. I would shift them over towards the SD side to give fresh match-ups to the teams over there, and perhaps with that focus can show themselves to be legit attractions, but they aren't really built to be the focus of a division and that is what Raw would require of them. Their ceiling seems to be the opponents to a top face team the crowd loves... so yeah let them work with New Day. The whole Raw tag division has been a disaster for the better part of a year now, but it's not like the Revival has been putting out great work during this time.

I know it is early, but that apron... whatever between Sasha and Nia will be a solid contender for worst apron spot of the year.

Hilariously I thought to myself that IDLES was solid enough to avoid the bottom of the list but had enough things you'd be relatively cool on to keep it from the top (plus the Daughters album is legit better), so I was going "I think it could maybe slide in around the 5 spot". I perhaps know your musical tendencies too well now. (Aside: In a bit of game theory thinking I almost just left Uniform in as it probably had a higher list ceiling, but could also have easily ended up in the bottom 3. Also I legit liked it less.) Thanks for doing this again, it's a fun little project to follow at the end of the year.

I know a few people who were impressed with >observer_, so I'd say that one is worth at least giving a try.

Assuming you haven't listened to it in the past two days, I'll take you up on this and switch to Idles: Joy as an Act of Resistance.

I feel rather comfortable at this point saying that Tamina simply doesn't have it. She's shown little if any progress over the years in any area, even in terms of things like speaking or presence. Over the past couple months she has ended up being out there while Nia has to talk for a bit and not only do they not have enough confidence in her to give her even a couple lines, she basically never reacts to anything that anyone says or does during these stretches. She just has no instincts for it. I'd say she's comfortably the worst person on the roster male or female, and I don't even know if there is a close second.

Fun fact: I stumbled upon my probable actual album of the year on December 30th. Next year I'm waiting until the actual cutoff before nominating something.

I mean... I would think that redemption would involve an actual admission of fault and taking steps to make amends and such. If I recall she did the standard "I hate steroids, but they happened to be in this dietary supplement I took" which... god I don't think any MMA fighter has ever intentionally taken PEDs as according to the people who failed the tests they were all accidental ingestions. Now I don't think this means to adopt a transphobic hate boner for her, personally I'm pretty neutral towards Cyborg, but simply being good at sports doesn't absolve someone for previous bad behavior.

So just to see if I am following this correctly, a very very tiny trace amount of the steroid he originally failed for 15 or so months back showed up in this December 9th test result. Also none of this substance popped up in any of his other recent tests, and I believe only popped up in one of his samples from last time (as opposed to all of them)? I can follow a long half-life drug still showing tiny trace amounts well over a year after the fact. It skipping several of the other tests he took both back then and more recently is... harder to digest.

Lashley does not use the slingblade, so I'll at least listen to arguments in favor of him over Balor. I'm mean... I'd give Vince a pass on that one as I'm not really convinced Balor gets it beyond having to crawl a bit more during his entrance.

Yano.

This is a tricky one for me as most of the albums I listened to this year were either older acts releasing rather middling albums, or guilty pleasure bands that I would not put up for any kind of even marginally critical analysis. That leaves one album that... well it is niche, but sure why not. Uniform - The Long Walk

Joe Doering/Zeus.

The ratings always turn around in January, as there is no more Monday Night Football. Of course those in WWE are aware of this.

Debuting him on the same show that Rachael Ostovich will next be fighting on is probably the most counterproductive one to do so on, so yes?

Looking forward to Iconoclasts, kinda bummed that there isn't a PS4 version of Papers, Please to be crossbuyable. Played through Soma a month or so back for Halloween, it was not my cup of tea but I could see others digging it. Steins:Gate is the kind of disaster I might not be able to resist experiencing.

NXT also benefits from rarely having to deal with the "...and then what?" stage of a talent's career. For their most successful wrestlers it generally goes build them up through a title reign, and then when the reign is over they basically wrap things up and move on to the main roster. They generally don't have to deal with moving someone back down the card and finding something else for them to do. This also frees up a good amount of space and time for the new people coming and and being built up. As backwards as this seems, if you go back a few years and leave like Balor, Owens and Joe in NXT it probably makes the show worse as you can't have those guys around and not feature them. They'll likely put in good work but now fewer good new people get a shot, or one of those three ends up missing more shows than one would think is wise and NXT gets sucked into the whole "they don't know how to use their roster" talk many other places have to deal with.