offical wwe thread

[famicommander]

Death Before Dishonor was an incredible show. Top three of 2016, from any promotion.

Adam Cole pinned Lethal cleanly for the ROH World Title. It was time. Lethal had a great reign but there was nothing left for him to do with the title. I

Every single match on the card was great.

I would've preferred to see Dalton Castle or Silas Young get a win, but nobody's going to pin Okada and they weren't going to have Shibata lose his US debut.

Dijak and Lio Rush clearly have excellent chemistry.

 

[neo_X7]

Death Before Dishonor was an incredible show. Top three of 2016, from any promotion.

Adam Cole pinned Lethal cleanly for the ROH World Title. It was time. Lethal had a great reign but there was nothing left for him to do with the title. I

Every single match on the card was great.


I would've preferred to see Dalton Castle or Silas Young get a win, but nobody's going to pin Okada and they weren't going to have Shibata lose his US debut.

Dijak and Lio Rush clearly have excellent chemistry.

Mark should have beaten Fish for the TV title.

 

[Hot Chocolate]

Death Before Dishonor was an incredible show. Top three of 2016, from any promotion.

Adam Cole pinned Lethal cleanly for the ROH World Title. It was time. Lethal had a great reign but there was nothing left for him to do with the title. I

Every single match on the card was great.

I would've preferred to see Dalton Castle or Silas Young get a win, but nobody's going to pin Okada and they weren't going to have Shibata lose his US debut.

Dijak and Lio Rush clearly have excellent chemistry.

And now we get Kyle O vs. Cole again and I can't be happier, Cole gets to be the third man ever to be a 2x champ and they've been building to Kyle O getting the title for a long time

I watched this weeks TNA and it was utter garbage. The random ending to Gail vs Jade to keep the "we want Gail to be champ as we induct her into our HoF" at the expense of the few women wrestlers they have left and the story of Lashly getting all the tiles did indeed go nowhere and Cowboy is probably NXT bound again

NXT Takeover Brooklyn 2 lived up to the hype. I didn't like how the tag title match ended but it doesn't take away from the fact that the match was amazing, I can get behind Hideo/Aries and it looks like Hideo can use the G2S( with no Punk chants ), Bayley/Asuka 2 was awesome and she definitely should be popping up tonight for Summerslam as now a member of the main roster and while Joe/Nakumara got off to a slow start I enjoyed the fuck out of it and I hope Joe's jaw is ok since the ref threw up the x after he rolled out of the ring and Nakamura asked the ref if he was ok before the show closed out

 

[Syn]

Renee looks like she's under the influence on the preshow.

 

[famicommander]

I don't know who had the idea to do whatever they've done to La Sombra, but they should be kicked square in the dick repeatedly.

Right now it's

LU, ROH, NJPW








CMLL
Noah




AJPW

TNA




WWE






AAA

I wish they would stop signing good talent to WWE/NXT. They're just going to make good promotions worse while squandering them.

 

[Syn]

Summer Slam has had some pretty good matches so far. Just saw AJ pin Cena cleanly...at last!

 

[Alpha Skyhawk]

Did the Summerslam WWE Network stream crap out on anyone else really badly? I tried two different PS3 systems, one wired and one wireless. I eventually settled on my Windows PC watching it in the browser.

 

[Hot Chocolate]

Did the Summerslam WWE Network stream crap out on anyone else really badly? I tried two different PS3 systems, one wired and one wireless. I eventually settled on my Windows PC watching it in the browser.

It's been smooth for me with the only bumps being during the preshow

I've enjoyed Summerslam overall even with the odd ending to the women's title match but now that Roman/Rusev and Brock/Orton are going last I'm slowly tuning out

 

[Syn]

My phone has crashed a lot but my Xbone has been fine. I smoke outside so I use both.

The match order seems odd, I'm sure you're not alone HC.

 

[famicommander]

Summer Slam has had some pretty good matches so far. Just saw AJ pin Cena cleanly...at last!

Cena's going to tape another reality show.

He'll be back to ruin everybody's fun in a few months.

 

[FilthyRear]

Holy shit, what a fucking awful ending.

Imagine paying all that money to watch a taping of Raw dressed up like a PPV.

 

[Hot Chocolate]

That's what you get with a Brock match

Some bullshit

 

[famicommander]

That new belt is the worst one since the spinner belt

 

[Renmauzo]

NXT Takeover wins hands down again, the show was just electric (felt bad for Joe though).

Summerslam had weak match-ups by and large, a card order that made no sense, and the wrestlers were missing cues and botching their sells all night. The show felt mostly dialed in, and you knew the crowd could tell, especially since they were dead for pretty much everything from Ziggler/Ambrose onward.
Putting your 'Universal title' match three from the end instead of last on the card as you'd expect further diminishes the value in a belt of already questionable value (the whole thing reeks of "I can't be in your club? Fine, I'll make my own club!'), and the ridiculous amount of recoveries from finishers...it felt far more organic and believable in not only the Styles/Cena match, but the NXT tagteam champion match last night as well.

Because of all that, and the 7-8 min. promo packages between each match, I ended up using the slider bar on the in browser player quite a bit.

 

[famicommander]

smoooooooooooooth

 

[FilthyRear]

"Wellness violation"

 

[famicommander]

word is Balor may need major shoulder surgery because of this

Rollins seems to hurt a lot of people in WWE. Weird, because he never had a reputation for being unsafe in ROH. But Sting's neck, Cena's nose, and now Balor's shoulder.

Either he's getting more reckless/sloppy or he is just having a long stretch of really bad luck

 

[JoeAwesome]

The throw was short, and could've avoided the risk if it was done closer, so maybe Balor was expecting the padding to be closer? Idk. Part of me thinks the better technique would've been to put his hands behind his head instead of at his side, trying to "catch" the padding.

 

[Hot Chocolate]

New belts for Smackdown

 

[famicommander]

Still awful.

Not as bad as the Universal belt though.

Also find it very tacky that they referred to it as the "Smackdown Women's Champion"

Just sort of cements it as a specified belt rather than a "world championship". It's really no different from the NXT Women's title now.

WWE now has 11 active championships, but almost all of them are just multiples of the same damn thing
WWE Championship, Universal Championship, NXT Championship
WWE Tag Team Titles, Smackdown Tag Team Titles, NXT Tag Team Titles
WWE Women's Championship, Smackdown Women's Championship, NXT Women's Championship
US Championship, Intercontinental Championship

They have three sets of the same tag belts, three sets of the same world title belts, three sets of the same women's belts, and two sets of the same midcard belts. So it really just devalues each championship. How can they call themselves the world champions when there are 1-2 other champions in the same divisions working for the same company? It just highlights what a stupid concept brand extension is. It's an intentional watering down of the product.

The WWE belts are just meaningless props. Ugly, meaningless props.

NJPW has a lot of championships too, but at least they're separated by weight classes and different rule sets. And they still only have 7:
IWGP Heavyweight Championship
IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championship
IWGP Intercontinental Championship
IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship
IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship
NEVER Openweight Championship
NEVER Openweight Six Man Tag Team Championships

 

[famicommander]

Lucha Underground/AAA star Brian Cage on the difference between WWE and LU, and his time in WWE developmental:

“I think it’s really just the factor that everyone’s having fun. There’s no restrictions, they’re not like, ‘Hey, sorry guys you can’t do this because this guy’s doing this,’ or ‘Hey you guys have to have a crap match because we want this guy who’s not so good to look the best today.’ It’s whether you have four minutes or fourteen minutes, go out there and have the best match you can have, whatever allotted time that you have. The fact that nobody is trying to politic or back stab each other or get one over on somebody else or a crybaby, protective over this or that or whatever. The fact they’re all there as a team effort to have a bad ass show and have a great time doing it, all getting to live and do what we love to do, is I think probably the main factor. I think you can just tell too. [Johnny Mundo], towards the end of his run in WWE, he’s solid athlete, a great worker, but he just didn’t seem the same presence. When he comes out now at Lucha Underground you can tell he’s enjoying himself and having more fun and doing more stuff, where in the [WWE] it gets daunting whether it’s the travel schedule or what you can or can’t do.”

...
“My lifelong dream was to be there by the time I was 24, which is when I got signed, I was in their developmental league, and though I never made it full-time to the main roster, it was a little bit of a dream killer to see the ins and outs, how depressing it seems like a lot of people were, because if you weren’t that top five guy or wherever, which realistically if you’re not a that guy that they want to be that guy, no matter what you do, how good you are, how charismatic, how over you get with the crowd, you’re not going to be that guy. They say you got to get yourself over, which was the biggest load of garbage ever heard my life. They get you over and if they don’t want you to be over, you’re not going to get over. I mean Zack Ryder’s probably one of best examples of that. He totally got himself over and he had the fans chanting for him over The Rock, when The Rock was in the damn ring, and what did they do, use that to get some sort of B.S. rub to Cena? I mean come on, get real.”

 

[FilthyRear]

Still awful.

Not as bad as the Universal belt though.

Also find it very tacky that they referred to it as the "Smackdown Women's Champion"

Just sort of cements it as a specified belt rather than a "world championship". It's really no different from the NXT Women's title now.

WWE now has 11 active championships, but almost all of them are just multiples of the same damn thing
WWE Championship, Universal Championship, NXT Championship
WWE Tag Team Titles, Smackdown Tag Team Titles, NXT Tag Team Titles
WWE Women's Championship, Smackdown Women's Championship, NXT Women's Championship
US Championship, Intercontinental Championship

They have three sets of the same tag belts, three sets of the same world title belts, three sets of the same women's belts, and two sets of the same midcard belts. So it really just devalues each championship. How can they call themselves the world champions when there are 1-2 other champions in the same divisions working for the same company? It just highlights what a stupid concept brand extension is. It's an intentional watering down of the product.

The WWE belts are just meaningless props. Ugly, meaningless props.

NJPW has a lot of championships too, but at least they're separated by weight classes and different rule sets. And they still only have 7:
IWGP Heavyweight Championship
IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championship
IWGP Intercontinental Championship
IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship
IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship
NEVER Openweight Championship
NEVER Openweight Six Man Tag Team Championships

Watching SummerSlam, Raw, and TRUDGING through SmackDown made me realize that I should be watching puro and not this bullshit that VKM has fed us since 2001.

 

[famicommander]

Welcome to the dark side.

NJPW, ROH, Lucha Underground, CMLL, and Noah are the major promotions to watch. I only watch a handful each of CMLL or Noah shows a year but they're usually pretty good.

AJPW, TNA, WWE, and AAA are usually more trouble than they're worth to follow for me. I've been enjoying TNA recently but I'm sure they'll fuck it up soon. Sometimes I hatewatch WWE. But with these four I usually just wait to hear something get a really good/bad reaction and then go watch it on Youtube.

If you want to go indie check out Pro Wrestling Guerilla, Insane Championship Wrestling (Scotland), RevPro (England), EVOLVE, SHIMMER, and Chikara. Or Paragon. It's not the best but the show is easily accessible and they put out a new episode for free every week. And they don't run house shows, iPPVs, DVD exclusives, or any other special events so you don't actually ever have to buy anything to keep up.

 

[herb]

Watching SummerSlam, Raw, and TRUDGING through SmackDown made me realize that I should be watching puro and not this bullshit that VKM has fed us since 2001.

Just watch Kenny Omega vs Tetsuya Naito from this year's G1 tournament for a pallet cleanser.

 

[Hot Chocolate]

Promotion with actual useless belts is TNA who openly last week told you all but the heavyweight title isn't worth shit excluding Jeff Hardy's version, while I love NJPW they too have fallen into the titles as props in all of their titles except barely their world title with Naito's run being the most interesting thing they've done with it and it looks like they got cold feet on it


Can we really call LU a promotion since it is more grindhouse film segment style heavy then wrestling