rolling Jericho calls The New Day trap queens 2016

considering how obvious it is ziggler wins the ic, i just presumed the title is dead

i like your fantasy mania because there is no charlotte

http://411mania.com/wrestling/hideo-itami-and-the-unfortunate-side-of-nxt/

generally agreeing w this as more of a "get these international superstars out of nxt wtf", have heard that itami's injury was possibly not due to greenness? idk. but dudes shouldn't be in nxt. joe, nak, asuka and itami should not be in nxt, especially now that the bullet club skipped it for some reason, and now the cruisers who never even got trained in the "style" and in some cases are still pretty green are skipping to raw. i don't really get it anymore. it was alrght when joe ended up there because the expectation was that everyone had to go through it first, but having him and nak feuding when they're clearly leagues above everyone else is just dumb. nxt doesn't need to be on equal footing with the main roster, just go back to the old days when everyone loved it anyway. keep the brand good and you can keep selling out barclays, you don't need seasoned 35 year olds with a million miles on their bodies to draw.

absolutely agree with sending guys like young and swagger down to help with the green guys. more of that. they did it with kidd and ryder and it worked great. you can afford to make nxt the actual minor leagues because wrestling is fake and all it takes is good booking and good ideas to make it worthwhile.

Still missing the point of NXT, no? Maybe the greenhorns shouldn't be working against the main eventers there, but Joe, Nakamura, etc are there for a reason: they're the faces of the brand, and they bring the crowds to the shows on their A tours. NXT as it is now is not what it was three or even two years ago. It's really not that complicated.

they were bringing crowds to their shows when they were actually making their own stars and giving seasoned but still young guys like zayn and neville the spotlight. they never needed to bring in guys like joe and nak to be in that spot. complete overkill. big names coming from outside WWE were never the main draw until HHH decided to make them the main draw. it was a bad decision.

and there's a problem with their developmental if this mega hot brand that was built on developed talent and smart booking can't sell out 1500 seats in international 'one time only' tours without the help of international megastars from other companies

yeah totally disagree with MacDara on this; there is no necessity whatsoever to have these "faces of the brand" in situ, never was. it doesn't do anything for WWE business-wise. NXT is and always has been a loss leader.

it's verging on unfit for purpose as a developmental brand right now. Tye Dillinger seems to be getting over but you know he's gonna get stepped on by any and all of the supposedly "superior" talent coming in from the indy scene. i have hopes for the women's division - that still feels like a place where the talent come in green as grass and have room for development as you watch.

but the real joy of watching NXT was always founded on watching ppl that were nothing really before NXT - the vast majority of the women grads, Enzo & Cass, Tyler Breeze, American Alpha, the Revival, Baron Corbin, whoever - progress from being functionally useless to being very nearly the finished article - that's where the emotion comes from, the link between the fans and the talent, the genuine investment in seeing how far they got. that's why NXT was so hot for that 12 / 18 month period as the brand started booming - those stories that fans had been watching play out in real time for a year or more started paying off.

arguing that the likes of Joe, Nakamura, Aries, Itami, potentially now Strong should be spending their time in NXT because they are "drawing" the house is insane. why do you even need to draw a house?! they're not making any money on it!

Given the questions that they were asking in their market research, it would appear that nxt is a huge part of their wwe network subs. to the point where they're exploring the idea of a "tier" system where the second tier has the four big ppvs, and the third tier has cwc/nxt/other ppvs.

also they're selling a bit more than "the house" if they continue doing these big stadium events. toronto is the fourth one this year that isn't at full sail, and while they aren't pulling wrestlemania ticket numbers, they're still hovering around 10,000 per show. who's to say this won't expand to 6, or, 8, or 12 next year? if nxt went straight developmental again, how many subscriptions would they lose? i don't think holy foley is keeping anyone around, and when you're paying a monthly fee for a monthly ppv... i don't think that keeps people.

i dunno why i'm taking this side in the argument, i don't really have an opinion.

side note, is roderick strong actually good? he's a literal punchline with me and a friend, because "master of the backbreaker" sounds like the most masturbatory indie-wrestling-is-the-only-wrestling type nickname we've ever heard.

double side note, my PWG BOLA 16 dvds arrived the other day. first wrestling videos i've ever bought (not counting subscribing to the wwe network a couple months ago when cwc started). i guess i like indie wrestling! PWG at least. i have still never enjoyed any of my random bits and pieces of ROH i've watched.

i guess, perhaps i am underestimating the number of people who subscribe to the WWE network solely in order to get their Nakamura fix each week or w/e. i mean if you can afford it and you like wrestling that much then you should probably be subscribing just to watch Tuesday Night Titans and old Bret Hart matches imo

it's overstating things. yes, nxt drives network subs, not denying that, but I reject the idea that you need massive stars from other companies to keep that going. they decided to make that jump rather than continuing to grow the developmental brand, and maybe they can't turn back from it now, though you have to wonder who's even left out there after nak and joe finally do come up (or retire, who knows)

tbh people who sub to watch nak on nxt would mostly probably sub to watch nak on a ppv once a month. then you'd get even more subs, because nak's on the usa network and not wasting away in front of 200 horrible floridians each week

look look lads i think we're all broadly in agreement that the Smackdown Wrestlemania main-event this year should be WWE champion AJ Styles defending against Shinsuke Nakamura, let's not quibble over the details

NXT is still a place where you can expect good wrestlers to have well-built feuds with really good matches. That's much less true of the main roster. So as a fan, I want as many good wrestlers in NXT as possible, regardless of whether it makes sense. Don't send Nakamura and Joe up, bring Cesaro and Neville back down.

Or send everyone to Smackdown, since the guy who used to write NXT is there. Just don't send anyone good to Raw.

yeah was gonna say, Smackdown is totally decent these days and they build their shit up properly. more so than NXT

Sympathetic to the idea that NXT is more of a standalone brand now and needs some star power

Joe has still been down there too long though; in virtue of his 2014 career trajectory and the gap they had in the NXT main event picture when he debuted it's understandable that he started out down there, but he's long since sold lots of merch and proven himself to be someone who should be causing Cena to do a worried face as his music interrupts a "I am the face that runs the place" type promo

Nakamura was and is a bonafide megastar who should have been quickly catapulted into the main roster upper card so he could have had as many big matches as possible before people start realising it's the same match every time (but what a match!!)

Roderick Strong does need to "learn how to work" a bit imo

NXT suffers from the slight ghost-town vibe it has now and everybody has maybe figured out the rhythm that main event feuds will be a bunch of unearned rematches between a challenger and a champion, one of whom will definitely eventually lose decisively because they're getting called up. It's benefitted a lot from not actively dropping too many storylines or doing things that blatantly make no sense in the way Raw frequently has

I don't want anyone to get me wrong about this - I can't wait to see the likes of Joe and Shinsuke on bigger shows. But kinda pointless if they may not be treated the right way. You can say 'But AJ!' but he's an aberration. I take as evidence the Tyler Breeze fuck-up, Sami Zayn's aimlessness, and the mishandling of Bayley (they missed her window to move up 'cause the main roster wasn't ready for a gimmick like hers; now they've misunderstood what that gimmick is). Can you blame me for maybe not dying to see NXT people move up so quickly, the melancholy of seeing Nakamura work an armory in Florida notwithstanding?

Anyway, screw Kevin Dunn. It's all his fault anyway.

look look lads i think we're all broadly in agreement that the Smackdown Wrestlemania main-event this year should be WWE champion AJ Styles defending against Shinsuke Nakamura, let's not quibble over the details

This is true.

tyler black and kevin steen fighting for the biggest title in the world in HIAC and who could give a shit

charlotte and sasha banks literally main eventing HIAC inside HIAC and who could give a shit

charlotte/sasha is shortlist for my MOTY and i really enjoyed nu-day/celtzerland and kevin/seth! this was actually one of the better ppvs for me this year! despite roman reminding me why i didn't like him with a reign-by-numbers match and bayley having an ok match that reminds me she can't make literally EVERYONE look good (remember when she made nia look good?).

also i was a little eyeroll about the idea of "raw talk" (which shoulda been called talkin' raw imo) but it was SO much fun

should be called RAW DAWGIN IT

I really liked Rollins/Owens and thought it was easily the best match on the card. The Jericho interference was a bit much (a run-in that goes on for ten minutes?) but it fits the ongoing storyline and there was a solid build throughout the match outside of the Jericho stuff.

Sasha vs Charlotte seemed to fizzle out halfway through. People are used to these matches building toward big spots at the end but the finish was flat. What hurt it the most was Sasha's nonsensical selling of the back -- Charlotte was punishing the back for half an hour, and one minute she'd be unable to stand and the next minute she's doing the three amigos, or she'd be running around the ring throwing double knees in every corner and then suddenly can't stand up for a powerbomb. The effort was there but the match was poorly laid out. Oh and of course Sasha jobbed in her hometown like every other WWE babyface for the past fifteen years.

it was still more consistent selling of a specific body part than most of the roster ever does

ending needed sasha to actually go through the table, can charlotte really not just... slam her? obviously a lightly tossed sasha isn't gonna do it

and of course she lost in her hometown, don't you know it's 1978

anyway i just put raw on and they're literally doing a rematch of the... meaningless 6-man pre-show match ?

I didn't dislike the PPV, though it dragged in spots like Raw does week to week, and most if not all the matches had moments that were just a bit off. I'm still annoyed that WWE copped out with that 'triple main event' bull even if Sasha and Charlotte transcended that situation, a few quirks notwithstanding.

it was still more consistent selling of a specific body part than most of the roster ever does

This is true -- at least the hurt body part factored into the finish, which almost never happens in WWE (like earlier in the show where Rusev dominated 80% of the match, but Reigns casually broke out of his finisher and pinned him with two moves).

ending needed sasha to actually go through the table, can charlotte really not just... slam her? obviously a lightly tossed sasha isn't gonna do it

This is more what I was getting at. At the start of the match Sasha was powerbombed through a table and nearly wheeled out on a stretcher, but made the heroic comeback and insisted on continuing the match. Then, after twenty five minutes of wrestling (and a few more miracle comebacks), sliding across a table and falling to the mat fucks up her back to the point where she can't move and gets pinned with Charlotte's secondary finisher?

It was a good match, but could have been so much better by tweaking the match layout a bit and of course by having the babyface champion make her superhuman comebacks and WIN the match in her HOMETOWN.

i've had a njpw world sub for months now and i haven't used it since BOSJ. which i still haven't gotten through. i have a general "paralyzed by too many things so i do nothing" problem but it's so bad with wrestling.

close to giving up and just restarting with power struggle. if anyone wants to give me a should-watch list of NJPW since day 2 (lol) of BOSJ that would be great, though i can't promise i'll actually watch any of it

I did exactly what you did, though I burnt out on the G1 Climax and just said screw it and skipped ahead to Power Struggle this weekend. Might go back and watch King of Pro-Wrestling but just for the matches I might care about - Kenny and KUSHIDA, skipping the tags, etc.

Oh yeah, the best matches from BOSJ for me are on the final weekend, and that great KUSHIDA/KOR match from the first few days. The rest was hit or miss for me, but y'know, everything in context.

I really cannot be bothered with anything wrestling related atm, unless anyone mentions something really good watching I think I might tale some time off until the rumble. Goldberg v brock sounds like the worst.

Just skip Raw and SmackDown, if you're even still watching them. That's 20 hours a month saved right there.

The G1 was so much more fun this year with a NJPW World sub. I was watching most of the matches on a few days delay but avoided spoilers. But I also burned out on NJPW a bit and haven't seen all the major shows since then. I saw just one of the three Destruction events, but KOPW was great and Power Struggle (which I just finished with last night) set up everything nicely for the Dome show. I haven't had any time for the various "road to..." events lately, but there's usually some good stuff there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/11/what-donald-trump-learned-about-politics-from-pro-wrestling/

Hillary Clinton = the Roman Reigns of politics. Makes sense!

If the rumours of Linda McMahon joining Trump's cabinet are true, we might end up with a real life Authority too.

Hope it's zombie Linda.

Are they gonna mention the election? Vince's glee about all this must be particularly odious.

TakeOver Toronto was great. Best tag title match in ages, with a finish for the ages. A women's title match that will probably get picked apart but I loved it as I was watching, and it was so good to see Mickie James go. And a main event NXT Championship match that didn't suffer so much as previous ones from the undercard stealing the show. Hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.

The tag title match was indeed great and perfectly booked with callbacks to their previous match in all the right places, and a really memorable finish. I'll have to rewatch Mickie vs Asuka because I was a bit out of it following the Tag Title match, but Mickie was great and the finish came out of nowhere and left enough room for a rematch. Roode vs Dillinger accomplished everything it needed to, and the main event was two hosses throwing down and again leaving room for a rematch to settle things once and for all. The Brooklyn match was more technical and focused on Joe working Nakamura's leg, but as part one of a trilogy it makes sense. The second match in the series was more personal and needed to come across more like a fight, and it did.

fucking hell, didn't see that coming

i guess wm33 has one match wrapped up

I tuned in live only for the main event (no time for a four hour show the night after Takeover, I'll watch the rest of the card another time). Goldberg was cheered -- in Toronto! I guess this is leading to Brock screwing Goldberg in the Rumble and getting a WM rematch, although if Brock wins the rematch I'm not sure what the point of any of this was.

The initial emotion of 'WTF?' quickly turned into embarrassment at what this company will stoop to for a 'moment'. First SummerSlam, now Survivor Series: the contrast between NXT and the WWE main roster grows starker. And some of you want Shinsuke brought up, ha!

I think that's a stretch -- sure, it was a "moment", but it still made sense as a wrestling storyline, where Goldberg makes the heroic comeback to the ring and crushes the overconfident dick heel.

Oh I get that, but it also tells the story of 'even older part-timer comes into destroy part-timer who's spent the last couple of years treating WWE's top full-time talent like ragdolls'.

Part timers and attitude era guys have been the *real* stars of WWE for such a long time, I guess I've gotten used to it.

I think Brock's value (as in the rub to be had from beating him or at least hanging with him) has been declining for well over a year though. Getting eliminated from the Rumble like just another guy by the Wyatts (in a feud that was forgotten about the next month) really crushed his mystique IMO.

The other thing that gets to me about the ending is this: MMA-style upsets do not work in wrestling. It's the same instinctual reaction I had to Brock and Orton at SummerSlam; it just doesn't fly with me. I watch MMA for MMA and wrestling for wrestling; the crossed influence is undeniable, but you can't lift wholesale from one and expect it to work in the other. Because it doesn't.

That being said, context is also key. If this exact same match, as booked, went down back in the day, like in 2002, when Brock was at his original peak and Goldberg was only out of the limelight for a year or so? I think I would have loved it. It's not really the match itself, but what it represents.

Anyway, enough moaning from me. TakeOver was great. And how about that Miz/Zayn match, eh?

Enhhhh if Nakamura was on smackdown he'd probably have had more good PPV matches than he's had in NXT by now, notwithstanding everyone in WWE creative getting lead poisoning in the last three months of every year

Think the thing that would most improve WWE booking at this point would be if all bookmakers stopped taking bets on the outcome of pro wrestling matches

i was at takeover toronto! took a train from mtl, drank in a park, saw the show, took a train to hmailton (!) to stay with a friend, turned around next morning and did the whole trip backwards... great fun but i am NEVER doing 12 hours of trains in ~30 hours again unless there's a death in the family or something.

then i got home and started watching survivor series and i was exhausted. by the time the goldberg/brock match started i was like "i am so tired. i am going to bed" but decided to like watch the first couple of minutes of the match? so in a sense i liked the end bc i didn't care abt it and wanted to go to bed