Should’ve heard Dave LaGreca on SiriusXM’s Busted Open show yesterday. He went absolutely ballistic (makes his “New Jersey Isn’t New York!” bit seem well-composed by comparison) when somebody called in and said that Corbin doesn’t have “heel heat” but “go away heat” (i.e. they’re not booing him because they want him to lose; they’re booing him because he’s there in the first place).
It almost feels as if they’ve given up on advancing these storylines and have just decided to let them feud in place indefinitely while they wait for the move to Fox.
Vince’s newest off-the-cuff spur-of-the-moment edict has made things worse once again. Every other match is 2-out-of-3 falls, or they switch it midway (tag team match becomes 8 man tag), or last night AJ pauses the match until Gallows & Anderson leave. Going to rest holds (but enough tope suicidas please) was a better flow option, better than the start and stop. HHH should get Vince involuntarily committed. Vince needs to step away from the creative, but he won’t as long as he is breathing.
The sad thing is that Lucha Underground proved you can do a match without commercial interruptions if you do longer breaks further apart, but WWE is so addicted to advertiser money that they can’t help but break for another round of Popeye’s ads every five minutes. I can only imagine how bogged down the product must now feel for the live audience who has to watch the action grind to a halt for no reason every couple minutes.
You know what would really piss me off, if I was live in attendance for a WWE show?
They don’t use the TitanTron to actually show the matches! They just have the RAW/SmackDown/PPV logo on it, and the video packages. Well, what if my seats aren’t all that good?
So does this mean no more 60-minute battle royals on TV, no more 25 minute classics, Just 5-8 minute matches to fit them between commercial breaks?
That would be epic levels of stupid.
I only got two matches wrong for Stomping Grounds. KO & Sami beat New Day and the put a title on Ricochet. I’m quite ok with those choices. I’m just still wondering where the fuck Aleister Black is. Not using him doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Got those two wrong also along w/ the Cruiserweight Triple Threat.
Who “swoons” these days? I don’t recall hearing any women squeal for him when he appears. Maybe because they’re too busy swooning.
I haven’t been watching nearly as much as usual because I’ve had extracurriculars that just so happened to be on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I didn’t ask “Yo, where is Black?” because I figured I just missed him.
Are they really not using him?
They’ve been having vignettes of him on Smackdown where he existentially struggles with nobody taking him up on his open challenge. In the last one, there was a knock on his door. Dirt sheets say he’s going to take on Cesaro at Extreme Rules.
Which makes him look extremely stupid, since everyone knows you challenge people for their titles and otherwise go out and seek opponents, not sit in a dressing room like Mojo Rawley talking to a mirror.
One doesn’t challenge others for title shots; one sneak attacks the title holder. Because who else should be the number 1 contender except for a guy who LOST a title the previous night? I really like Ricochet and think he has enormous upside, but if Joe is to become the next World Title challenger, he shouldn’t lose the big match right before it. WWE is becoming more and more like 1970s and earlier TV. Nothing that happened previously matters. AEW is promising wins will matter (with a little quality of opponent thrown in). It just makes sense, something that Vince has lost even all pretense of trying to make.
I love wrestling. I’ve loved wrestling since around the time Bob Backlund won his first WWWF World Heavyweight Championship. But Vince is making it really hard to like his product, which is a shame when one sees what can be done with NXT and 205 Live.
WWE today announced that Paul Heyman has been named Executive Director of Raw and Eric Bischoff is Executive Director of Smackdown Live! Both positions report directly to Vince. There is no on-air role anticipated at this time for either position.
I’m a Paul Heyman guy so I may have to start watching Raw again to see if he can turn it around.
Bischoff probably isn’t a bad choice for Smackdown either as he has a lot of experience dealing with wrestling (WCW) and corporate television (TNT) at the same time.
I thought the headlines were accidentally republished from 15 years ago. As I recall, that angle only lasted a few weeks.
I can’t think that Heyman would agree to this without getting some degree of creative control. As long as Bischoff doesn’t get to decide how to spend money, he should be OK.
If this means RAW and SD are competing shows now, will this end the stupid Wild Card rule? No more Shane & Roman drama across two shows? No McMahons booking themselves over talent? No more of Vince micromanaging both shows?
I’ remain skeptical, but am prepared to be pleased with the change.
This appears to be the general consensus of everyone discussing the issue. Maybe, just maybe, Vince finally realized something needed to be done.
I dunno, appointing two guys who were responsible for his competition over 20 years ago doesn’t seem like the proper solution here. Especially if Vince is still Head of Creative for both shows and controlling the scripts.
Stolen from elsewhere; Fox must have sat Vince down and told him “We love the marketability of your brand, but we sure as hell ain’t letting you book it”.
In preparation for Fyter Fest, here’s Darby Allin taking the Death Nut Challenge. No wonder this guy does so many sick bumps.
His gf Priscilla Kelley also eats a nut, and this video is a testament of their true love for each other at about the 8 minute mark.
Q: What do you get when you let a network suggest your booking for you?
A: The Fingerpoke of Doom.
Seriously - “the version I heard was,” the only reason the Fingerpoke of Doom match happened in the first place was, NBC wanted the belt on Hogan for a Sunday night WCW show it wanted to replace the canceled 1999 NBA All-Star Game. Okay, the Vader-Foley “asses in the seats” match had something to do with it as well (that’s why it only lasted a minute - WCW wanted to wait until the WWE match ended and catch the people switching over), but that’s why they put the belt back on Hogan.
(“I don’t remember any Sunday night WCW show on NBC” - that’s because when the lockout ended, the NBA rewrote the schedule, and NBC decided to air an NBA regular season game that night instead.)
Still, the Fox CEO has already made it clear that Smackdown on Fox on Friday nights in the fall is one thing, but Smackdown on Fox on Friday (or any other) nights as of mid-January is not carved in stone.