That ensemble is all sorts of wrong. You could wear your Bull Dempsey singlet over it.
Hey, the announcer from NXT is now on Smackdown, I mean Total Divas. Eva Marie’s wardrobe malfunctions are sure to draw in zillions of new viewers.
Nothing really changes. The 2 weeks before a PPV usually suck because they don’t want to risk injuries and they have to talk it up. At least Mauro drops some surprising references, like the name of ADR’s martial arts trainer.
Long story short, the wrestling board I post on has a long-running thread of “weird facts about Sheamus” - basically that board’s version of Chuck Norris Facts.
Among the running gags that have developed over time are that Sheamus is obsessed with brutally torturing Daniel Bryan, both physically and psychologically, and that the one thing in this world that he loves more than anything else is a Glow-Worm he calls Snuggly (which may itself be an Old God that feeds upon the souls of the weak.)
Last December, I found the mask on Amazon and the Glow Worm on eBay and paired them with the Bryan shirt to create that ensemble so I could use it as my avatar for that site, and I wore it to the Raw in Seattle where Daniel Bryan retired, and I figure I may as well make it my standard televised-wrestling-show attire for the time being so that people who know me can recognize me on TV.
There’s only one word to describe last night’s Smackdown and I’m gonna spell it out for you…
Eva Marie is one of the few things that WWE has gotten right in the women’s division since the brand split: she’s basically trolling smarks right now.
Oooh, link plz! I haven’t found any wrestling forums that venture into the bizarre like I like. I have to bring it here and hope I don’t wind up with a lock by my name.
Here’s the thread. It starts out perfectly sane, then takes a hard left turn into Crazytown and never looks back. Do note that the forum is considerably less SFW than this place.
Thank you, Cedrick!
Awesome performance.
I’m loving how the performers are both allowed to get in their best shots, to show off, to be extremely damned impressive and competitive and not a single match is phoning it in at any level.
Sweet Jesus God. If you’re putting a Cruiserweight title on RAW, then my suggestion going forward is to hold this tournament ON RAW every year. Give them that entire second hour of the show, or even the entire last hour of the show, for the duration of the tournament, to do this in front of the millions of casual viewers who don’t own the Network.
If you think these guys are performing at this level in front of Full Sail because they know it’ll be great exposure on the WWE Network, imagine how it’ll look when they’re doing it on LIVE TV IN FRONT OF MILLIONS. Best exposure those guys could hope for, even the one-off appearances.
Make it so.
Quoting this again…
What the hell is the X-Division? Is it their Cruiserweight? How the hell does Lashley qualify for that? And King of Mountain is…their…King of the Ring? That can be transferred?
God it’s confusing.
God I can’t wait.
hey maybe Sandow will be there…
They started with the X-Division for smaller guys. AJ Styles was their X-Division star for a while, then he began to compete with the big boys. Over time they decided it was something like an Xtreme Division, Samoa Joe was the X-Division champion not long before he left. I don’t know if they ever clearly defined it. Nor do I care because it sucks so bad.
When TNA moved from monthly PPVs to cable, one of the things they kept saying was, “The X Division isn’t about ‘weight limits’; it’s about ‘no limits’!”
PLEASE SIGN HIM!
PLEASE SIGN HIM!
Very classy of HHH to come out and raise Cedrick’s hand. I’ve seen Ced before in RoH, but he always looked like the guy designated to work awesome matches with the top talent and then lose. Since he’s trimmed off the baby fat, he’s gotten multitudes better and looks like a winner. He and Ibushi had a few disconnects, but more than made up for it.
I hope Tajiri sticks around. He and Gran Mek worked smoothly together.
I’m kind of skeptical about moving the CWs to RAW, because commercial breaks and on-the-spot changes will decrease the time of the matches. I also prefer the “real life” angles and don’t want to see them immersed in soap opera storylines.
Definitely a good idea to hold a one-time event like this live. The regular shows shouldn’t be live, too many matches are just phoned in, and as mentioned earlier they get watered down to prevent injuries before a big event. But that ship has sailed.
I want to agree with this, but the “real life” storyline of KO and Zayn is sooooo boring.
It’s interesting for a while, but once the “ohhh we knew each other back in the day, and now we’re mad” lines are done there’s just…nothing
Ok then, perhaps just the finals. Then talk about the awesome first and second round matches available on the network for only $9.99. 
Repeated “Here’s what you missed from such-and-such match” videos can also sell it as a huge annual deal.
If you know you’re doing it and how long the matches are going to be, you can schedule the commercial breaks around them. They all had a 20 minute limit, so you’ll never be more than about 23 minutes between breaks at the worst, and so far they haven’t thrown the time limit draw at us.
They overdo it. They need to introduce the story, repeat it for a couple of shows to make sure everyone hears it, the announcerators would mention it occasionally after that, but they need content since they don’t have enough decent wrestling to fill the time, so we’re going to hear the most boring and pointless background stories over and over again. And this ‘you took my spot on the roster’ stuff is the worst. In the old days wrestlers hated each other because they tried to cripple and kill each other in the ring. Dusty Rhodes grabbed a knife from Terry Funk and tried to put his eye out with it. At a minimum there was hate for stealing a title by cheating, these guys can’t even pull that off now. A failure to foster long term rivalries has taken a lot away from wrestling.
As others have mentioned, defining the X-division has been kinda difficult over the years. “Indy-style wrestlers that do a lot of high-flying flippy stuff, or can hang with and have good matches with people doing high-flying flippy stuff” may be a decent summary, at least as the intent. There have been short times when weight limits have been imposed to make it more cruiserweight-like, but they don’t last long.
A few years back, Austin Aries was X-Division champ and had the idea that, at teh Destination X PPV/event he would give up his championship for a World Heavyweight title shot. That became an annual thing, but this year there were lots of shenanigans around the match, and it eventually became a pure title vs title match, which Lashley won, beating Eddie Edwards.
King of the Mountain. Ok. The physical title is the one they used for the TV title may years ago that got retired. Many years ago, when Jeff Jarrett was still owner, they had a “King of the Mountain” match that was a many-person ladder match, but you couldn’t even climb the ladder until you first pinned at least one person. Anytime someone got pinned, they got sent out into a cage for two minutes. Yeah.
Anyway, it was just a novelty match that had been used for special matches until they brought Jarrett back last year for an invasion angle, and they ran the match, he won and declared himself “King of the Mountain Champion” with the belt.
It eventually just became a title that’s defended in normal matches, so for all of that, it’s really just a secondary singles title.
Yup. Might as well say it’s the eXtra belt.
Well, you can add one more name that you know to the mix - Damien Sandow debuted on Impact tonight, calling himself “Aron Rex” and having a stare-down with Lashley.
What? No riveting monologue? No Intellectual Savior of the Masses? Just a staredown? His new ringname is a DOG? Welcome to to mediocrity, Damian.
If I had to make a guess, I would think that his name is his real name (Aron) and a play off of Oedipus Rex.
Only because the promo for him was his old “hallelujah” song, so his character could be a play off of the “intellectual saviour of the masses” thing