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One thing that struck me this year with AEW is that for much of the year you could ask the question "so who is the top black face in the company?" and really struggle to come up with a respectable answer. The last few months you can at least point to Dante as while he doesn't win a ton he's at least been featured a bit, but for much of the middle 6 months of the year the answer was probably... Red Velvet? Sonny Kiss on the men's side? It actually confused me that people were so struck by Swole's comments as its been pretty clear for a while that AEW has its blind spots, it doesn't make them evil or bad but there are things they legit need to work on. I think a larger issue is that if you are a middle or lower end of the card wrestler you tend to disappear for long stretches of time and it becomes hard to build momentum, and if that is where a lot of your diversity is situated it becomes a more complicated problem. People seem to dig Shida and Riho and they'll disappear off of tv for months at a time, it feels like every single time Team Taz has an angle or feud set up it ends abruptly and they get lost in Darkville for ages (you can do this with a Best Friends feud once rather than have them all go on forever). Basically fixing things requires effort and I think it is fair to look at AEW and wonder if they've been putting in said fair effort.

So transparency time: I realized I had listened to so little new music this year that I couldn't even come up with a halfway decent option to nominate here so for the past few weeks I've just been checking out random albums off the RYM top albums of 2021 list that seemed like they might be interesting so that I could still participate. I did not stumble upon any stone cold classics or obvious "this is clearly the best thing I've heard all year" picks but I did find some interesting new bands to listen to. Anyways I got it down to a final few and am gonna go with Cavalcade by Black Midi as that album is a trip and I like cacophony (that and the runner up was a 4 song EP). I could easily see someone despising this record though so... fingers crossed.

See I don't get this at all, I'm sad that Betty White is no longer with us but someone dying at 99 isn't a life being tragically cut short but more of the inevitable end of a full live lived well. May we all be so blessed.

To me Owens felt like the guy who should have chosen to re-sign with WWE rather than go to AEW, so while a bit surprised that it actually happened I think it was probably the right move? Dude is 37, regularly takes awful looking bumps and has been overweight most of his career (and VERY overweight for stretches of it). At that point you have to assume that the next contract he signs has a good chance to be the last full-time/big money one he'll have the chance to, and given that WWE likely wanted a "win" in terms of having someone choose them instead of AEW the odds of them paying a bit more than they otherwise would have seem fairly high. Dude's put his time and work in, this is likely secure your future time and I'm fine with him doing just that.

I mean, I think one can safely say that was Toni's fault.

Of course he isn't, he's 44. If he was in AEW or New Japan the answer would still be no.

I think this eventually does less to lower WWE's price but elevate what AEW is going to ask for in their next tv deal.

I rarely say this but I am 99% sure Meltz is just straight wrong on this one, at least in the US they were virtually identical when I last checked how many homes they were in six or so months back when the TBS move was first announced. They are negotiated together by Turner, I can't see any way one gained or lost 20 million homes in under a year. Funnily enough I am currently on xfinity and they are on 825 and 826 on the HD line-up, I guess it varies greatly by area of the country.

I can't see anyway that a move to TBS would increase Dynamite's ratings on its own, I normally would chalk up some sort of short-term audience loss to changing networks but TNT and TBS are so similar (they've literally been next to each other in every cable tv channel lineup I've come across) that I assume it will make 0% difference. That said the show's ratings could improve in 2022 for reasons unrelated to the channel it is on.

Yeah for whatever it is worth of WWE's many sins they generally haven't avoiding paying people's medical costs when they are injured or something else comes up when working there. Covid stuff would be something that hasn't come up prior but it would be a change for them to not.

So... am I the only one kinda shocked that Timothy Thatcher still has his WWE/NXT job?

To give Charlotte some benefit of the doubt... this is how her 2021 has gone: - Her fiance has a falling out with her boss and ends up leaving the company on not great terms. - She is pulled from the biggest show of the year (where she likely was gonna win the title) because of a false positive on routine bloodwork. - The story about how her dad may have sexually assaulted a stewardess was featured on a tv series and became big news in the industry she works in. - All the other 2021 crap all of us are stuck having to deal with on a day to day basis. Sometimes you just hit a run of bad luck where even if you are nominally successful it feels like everything in your life is suddenly going wrong. Often times when in that situation people aren't... let's say their best selves. Does this excuse their misbehavior? No, but I also think it makes it misplaced to go "well they're a terrible person who no one should ever have to deal with again". If she's been acting that bad recently then yeah she should be disciplined no questions asked, but I think a lot of the talk beyond that is going too far too soon.

I mean twice in recent times we've seen Cody line himself up against one of the hottest signings they've had, put them over strong then come back immediately with a strong, definitive win way before anyone would say it was a good idea. This is legit the same thing that happened with Brodie, the booking which many disliked at the time while digging the match, which we never got to find out how it would have affected him due to Brodie getting sick shortly after. A big part of the HHH/Jarrett playbook is running as fast as you can to get involved with the hot hand, basking in the reflected heat and generally winning at the end. Those two would also act like working with them and giving them stuff during the body of the feud really established and put them over, even know in the aftermath they were generally less so. As far as I am aware only the fans are doing that part re: Cody atm. Now would I say Cody in general has been anywhere as bad as those two at their worst? No way, that's insane. I don't think anyone can take away how good and generous he was for much of the early AEW run. That said... on this front his past year or so has been very worrisome. He seems very self-interested, everything around him feels like the Cody show and the fact that most people's thoughts were "please get Black away from Cody ASAP before things go bad for him" speaks volumes. He built up the trust in him, and he's effectively cashed it out. From here on things could course-correct after how the crowd has responded, or people's worries may be fully realized. I guess we'll see.

Do we know which 6 man of theirs this was? This looks very much like a match I'd want to watch. EDIT: Figured it out, was from 1/27/91.

I think what you are missing here is not the AEW women's wrestling on the youtube shows... but the lack of it on tv. Say what you will about WWE, no one is shocked when one of their shows has two (or by god more) women's matches on a single show. Hell Shida's only had one match on tv since she dropped the belt and she lost it in May.

Ricochet absolutely wiped Woods out on that dive over the post. While WWE really really overuses putting future opponents/people who dislike each other on the same side in tag matches (really), I thought the women's tag match collapsing into chaos beforehand and shortly after they finally managed to start the match was the way it should end up going more often as opposed to how often said teams end up as tag champs.

I have no idea if this was discussed elsewhere, but I watched that interactive Undertaker/New Day Halloween thing on Netflix (shocker: it was kinda corny) and apparently during filming Undertaker decided to shave his head as in some scenes he is very bald while in others he had rather long hair. There is no explanation and the show even has him do his dramatic hat removal thing multiple times which makes it impossible to ignore.

FWIW reading how everything after this went it does kinda come off like you were trolling, and when every so many months in the larger discussion threads people mention not wanting to participate in the WWE show threads because of negativity and people being let's say aggressive towards those that don't hate said shows they generally are referring to stuff like this. I mention it as I'd wager there's probably a 50-50 shot you weren't trying to be a dick, so if you weren't then the fact that multiple people in this thread afterwards made comments about this suggests that you came off more dickish than you intended and in the future you can use this knowledge to avoid making that mistake again. If you were in fact trying to be a dick then... I guess please don't? Anyways was glad that Rey and Sami got to have a match that actually got some time.

Yeah the DLC pack only has about half of the DLC.

I mean, AEW booked their women awfully for most of the company's existence (although some signs that it is slowly improving in recent months) and doesn't exactly have a lot or any black wrestlers in that prominent of position (quick: Who is the top black face in the company?) so neither of those things being true would be all that shocking.

Shane vs Black Terry brawl on gravel for me.

Yeah, I think interesting is probably the best word to go with. I have a thing about not picking EPs for album of the year over LPs for likely irrational reasons, but I stumbled upon the band and its title track at let's say a very appropriate time and it made an impression on me. FWIW they apparently have a full length album releasing this year so who knows, maybe it'll pop up again in the 2021 edition of this thread... Anyways just wanted to say good job on running this whole thing for another year even if it got delayed a little bit. I wouldn't kick yourself too much over it getting a bit off schedule, I think that has sort of been the running theme for the past year and a half or so.

FWIW given that Terri, a relatively low end "diva", was in the first class section with the bosses I think there is a decent likelihood that they knew enough to keep all of the ladies up there away from the boys.

Joe missed what, 18 months due to getting a pair of concussions in a short period of time, wrestles once and is out again. I hate to say it, but this might be it if it is a concussion again.

Shoot, I liked Highly Questionable, all the other sports shows of its ilk take things way too seriously.