What a clown LOL...that's good, how on earth do you **** Pat's name up...

Dead serious, pretty sure he's been losing some of his mental faculties over the past few years. Actually kind of sad to listen to.

LMAO Did anybody else catch Bill Belichick laughing his ass off at Tony Khan ****ing up the neck brace gimmick. Comedy gold.

Good lord what an insane crowd

Surprised at France's crowd usually when the WWE tours Europe it is pretty much the British Isles and Germany.

G.o.d in wwe oh my!

That was an absolute banger.

Personally found the crowd a distraction. They were too busy chanting and singing to follow the flow of the matches. Bailey getting beaten up and they're singing songs about her. Cody and aj going at it and they can't even stop chanting to pop for some of the biggest kickoffs.

I mean they were loud and making noise the whole time but after about the 300th "slapper whopper" chant after a kickout, i wanted to mute them. Lol.

Don't think Jey is going to last much longer as is. They need to do SOMETHING or he's going to end up as an unintentional heel. Folks thought they were gearing the KOTR finals to be Tonga vs Jey and were ready to flip absolute shit about Jey beating Gunther.

I think they are planning to do Old Bloodline vs New Bloodline at Survivor Series.

Jey does need to win a big match though.

That's way too far off.

MJF is AEW's Rock or Stone Cold. WWE should be colluding like crazy to steal him away.

Nobody else gets the energy that he gets from the crowd.

The Blue Meanie

Unsurprisingly AEW and Khan are less than thrilled with the current offer from WBD.

They were well on their way to killing his heat as well before he ****ed off. Doing a bunch of stupid buddy shit with Adam Cole before he got stabbed in the back by him and his 4th or 5th iteration of mid card stooges.

AEW seemed so promising when it started.

It's turning into TNA now.

Okada has surprised me in the worst way with how absolutely shit he's been since moving to AEW full time, and it's not on Khan at all. He's TRYING to make him a lynchpin of the top heel group, and he doesn't even have the goddamn courtesy to even put appearances on that he's not here to coast on Khans dime. Hell, even Nakamura gave WWE a couple runs in NXT and the main shows before dropping all pretense that he cared.

TNAs booking usually was better. It seems like Khan gets a new toy, plays with it for a while and then puts in a toy box never to be seen again.

AEW has a lot of problems with the booking, bloated roster, talents just not being used, talents that are being used but in the wrong roles, no sense of continuity, and the inability to pivot.

It's been said succinctly enough too many times to count at this point; Tony Khan seems like a really nice person and that correlates to him being a pretty bad boss/wrestling promotor.

Are you Twitter trolling? That is the type of shit WWE stan accounts post all the time "oh this Okada guy isn't any good"

Uhh, no? He's legitimately coasting with minimal effort compared to what I've seen and know he's capable of.

Gable's heel turn has been excellent. Real Fox Catcher descent into madness vibes going on.

Probably the most interesting thing in WWE at the moment. Sure, Drew and Punk going back and forth has been entertaining but they're at the point where they need to actually wrestle to keep it interesting. I guess Doms little love triangle as well.

I'll give credit to them for somehow making Tama Tonga interesting. I actually think he'd be a much better placeholder leader than Solo at the moment, but Solo does **** all for me in this role.

Another thing I was disappointed by is just how much of a tool Brian Gewirtz apparently is. Tried to blame the storyline of Cody Rhodes giving up his title shot to The Rock failing solely due to Cody giving the wrong reaction the night he did it. Hell, they were apparently planning to write Cody Rhodes off of Wrestlemania ENTIRELY. Kind of killed my enthusiasm for any future Rock involvement knowing this knuckle dragging buffoon will be right there with him and how out of touch they both seemingly were to think that was a good idea.

So Adam Copeland broke his leg doing a stupid spot on the PPV Sunday.

Oh wow - Jordynne Grace on NXT

It really did. It's unbelievable how bad they screwed it up

People expected things they weren't going to get..they're a 5 year old company. From a business perspective what they've accomplished is pretty remarkable.

AEW went from getting carte blanche because they got a nice honeymoon because they weren't Vince McMahon. Now WWE has that period because hey Vince is gone.

LMAO That's a pretty abhorrent oversimplication. Yes, AEW has fallen off pretty hard because they've gotten lazy and complacent due to always believing they'd have fans just because they weren't WWE, but they have had incredibly hot stretches based solely on their own merits and actually having guys that understood how to draw running their own shit.

And no, WWE isn't hot currently because Vince is gone. He's been more or less out of power since 2022 with a short return to facilitate the sale to Endeavor. They're hot because they've earned it with some really damn good booking and Kevin Dunn finally ****ing off and being replaced with Lee Fitting. It's actually insane just how massive an improvement the changes in production have been for WWE. Combined with the announcers actually being able to do their jobs without someone screaming at them constantly how to behave down to the minute detail and it may as well be an entirely new presentation.

AEW does have some highlights. Christian is doing some of the best heel work going. Hangman when he is motivated can do some real compelling storylines. Joe has been solid in his role.

The problem is that you have 3 vanilla midgets and a clearly going through the motions Okada trying to be the nWo but they don't have the charisma or cultural touchstones of Nash and Hall.

But they have Will Ospreay who looks like the guy..

Yeah..... Young Bucks and Perry have the wrong type of heat. I don't want to see them get their asses beaten, I just don't want to see any of them, ever. I'll gladly take more Okada provided he puts forth a bit more effort and gets into a program with some of the other top guys.

Bryan Alvarez on the WON board.

"Tony switched the script on yesterday's PPV multiple times during the afternoon. Most people, not just the wrestlers, have no idea what they're doing until the day of the show, and sometimes not until an hour or so before the show. People are flown to towns and given nothing to do, others are begged the day before the show to please get to the town so they can do something last-minute. He knows what he wants to do for PPVs (although this often changes), but as far as week-to-week TV, everything is booked show-to-show. For most people he's incredibly difficult to get hold of. In some ways, it legitimately is more like 2019 WWE than it is 2019 AEW, where he was much easier to get hold of, he had very complex long-term storytelling, many people had a good idea of what they were doing and where things were going, and often most of the following week's entire Dynamite card was booked and announced before the previous week's Dynamite had even ended (remember when Excalibur would run down two dozen matches in 30 seconds for the following week?). It's night and day the changes, and people who work for the company, in all roles from the wrestlers to the office, talk about it ALL THE TIME."



The dude needs help, badly. And no, not just a couple self serving veteran wrestlers chiming in now and then with ideas. Try and hire some folks that actually know what they're doing full time with booking being their primary responsibility. Seemingly has an endless budget to bring in on air talent, it's time to do it with off air talent as well.

Tony should of jumped on Scott D'amour when he was fired from TNA. He booked a good product on a shoe string budget and was well respected by the workers.

Here is where the problem lies, who is he supposed to hire?

You're either hiring someone old and out of touch that hasn't booked in forever...or likely someone from the world of WWE and their TV writer formula.

Because of what American wrestling has been for the last couple of decades the options aren't there. So they're going to be in the boat of promoting a wrestler to do it or literally hiring someone with little to no experience.

I get he probably does need some help but his options aren't exactly on the tree for picking.

My idea is this the wrestlers that are unused put them in house shows call the shows aew deep cover have talent study the young wrestlers and see who can sink or swim with a live audience then in late August announce that the main guys are taking a break and we are going to have male female and tag tournaments and only have the young guns there the older wrestlers get rest unless to do a promo on a wrestler they like and show people the talent aew have. The winners of the men woman and tag tournaments will compete for the tnt tbd and tag title and have the tbs and tnt if they defend for 7 matches they can cash in and compete for the world title. If they lose they would have first right to regain the tnt title.

That was one long ass sentence

Hunter Johnston and Scott D'Amore right off the top of my head, not to mention the old heads that you don't necessarily need to give a job but can consult with once in a while.

Also think he'd be very well served to poach some of that NBA production talent that's going to be out of work here in about a year.

Finally, he REALLY needs to start cutting back in places. Even when he started out it was a lot of work with 2 hours of television, 4 PPVs a year and a reasonably sized roster. Now it's up to 5 hours of television, 8 PPVs a year, and an incredibly bloated roster.

They're letting people go as contracts expire, Ethan Page and Jake Hager were let go in the user few weeks.

Yet more proof that he's too nice for his own good. He's unwilling/unable to handle the tough conversations when it's time for someone to go so instead he just ghosts them until their contract is up.

Blank check to Paulie

He wouldn't do it. Remember TNA came knocking long ago and he demanded ownership in the company so they balked. He'll find some similar ask that's impossible for Tony to meet if it ever came down to it.

Ricochet final appearance on RAW tonight. Assumedly headed for AEW. Bron Breaker is going to murder him tonight LMAO

I don't blame the guy, AEW is probably a better fit for him.

AEW would be better off to stop signing all the debris from WWE.

Eh. At least in this case, Ricochet actually would be a possible main event talent there, especially given the history with Ospreay.

go to AEW if you dont want to wrestle much....so much talent there with minimal usage

They have a massively bloated roster they are already mismanaging. They need to be signing nobody at this point.

They're not going to not sign someone they want because of that, they're actually starting to walk away from some guys.

And they're still start stopping on a bunch of talent because there's not enough time for them all. It's a reeruned business model.

Gillberg

Ricochet sounded like he had a bad time stomping grapes

Poor Damien Priest. They maybe should've changed the finish on the fly and had Drew win. Dude might be gone for a while.

Really nice camera work on CM Punk coming in.

If you’re a bit more of a casual fan then it probably wasn’t super obvious who that was.

Smart fans probably all knew right away.

Bunch of spooky shit about to go down.

LMAO About as good as you can expect with how corny it's inevitably going to be I guess.

Really funny how a bunch of people were murdered and everyone cheers.

Neat logo.

https://images.footballfanatics.com/...pg?_hv=2&w=900

Sorry...that Ubcle Howdy stuff is just nonsense and will hopefully will burn itself out very quickly.

Yeah. It was never all that good even with Bray, outside of when it was way dialed back and he was just a creepy preacher from the swamp with two heavies.

I mean, look at this list of talent.

Bo Dallas
Erick Rowan
Dexter Lumis
Joe Gacy
Nikki Cross

I'm sure they're all nice people, but there's only so much you can do with that.

I think if they go back to the Wyatt Family type stuff it will be much better than the Fiend world.

Except for Kane/Undertaker on the build to WM14, the spooky/supernatural stuff never works all that well in wrestling.

Lucha Underground pulled it off pretty well but then it was much more fantastical in its story telling. The in universe story telling still had a regular human as the most feared wrestler in the ring though: the complete sadist Pentagon Dark.

I liked The Wyatt Family stuff, but I think more in theory than in actuality.

Super cool vibe. Super cool intro.

But Bray would cut these extremely long promos where it felt like he was just uttering nonsense.

Probably a good decision to send Punk/McIntyre to Smackdown. Recently RAW has had almost all the compelling angles.

Bron Breaker destroying everyone
Chad Gable going full heel
Liv Morgan ****ing with Rhea

Smackdown had **** all by comparison. Cody and friends vs the Bloodline was already stale as **** before The Rock got involved and now it seems to be in a perpetual holding pattern until Reigns and Rock come back. Only thing I'd find interesting is Jacob Fatu debuting.

The early Wyatt Family stuff in developmental and even in the beginning of their run on the main roster was awesome...

It was more the deranged Texas Chainsaw Massacre family style mixed with cultish stuff with a tinge of supernatural and it was great.

I do think stuff like that can still work.

Agree. I think it worked because it had a sense of reality to it.

Crazy deranged cult. Never know what they’re capable of.

I think the real issue is finding opponents for them or just the idea that they’re competing in wrestling at all.

If they can just murder Chad Gable, then why do they care about getting DQ-ed for using a chair?

It just never works, the minute they sell they lose the aura, if they don't sell they just murk people so anyone they work with comes out looking worse...it's a no win situation.

It worked so well with Kane, because he was working with Undertaker.

Neither character needed to compete for a title to be taken seriously.

I don’t see an obvious opponent for them that makes sense.

They almost needs to just have cinematic matches exclusively or something by like that.

Otherwise, we’ll get Nia Jax just sitting on Nikki Cross and killing her.

So is Chad Gable dead now? Or will he start feuding with Otis next week?

Gunther too lol.

That was always the problem with Fiend Wyatt in particular. No one ever got over after working with him (except LA Knight ironically) and a few top stars outright refused programs with him.

The Hell in the Cell with Rollins was bad. Why did the ref stop the match to protect a monster?

Goldberg beating the Fiend was jumping the shark.

LMAO Goldberg having the audacity to outright bury that character is never not funny.

They should bring Goldberg back to destroy this group like he did Raven’s Flock in 1998.

That would be hilarious.

Kevin Sullivan built an entire career on the spooky/supernatural. No, it never got super-huge, but he didn't work for the WWE, it was just his shtick in the NWA/WCW for years.

We'll see how this pans out. I'm skeptically optimistic.

The Dungeon of Doom stuff in the early Hogan WCW days was pretty terrible.

His stuff from the territory days was great though. His possession or whatever of Luna was good stuff. She became almost unrecognizable from her early days.

Hard to compare the territory days to now though.

I’m curious to see where it goes. Could be great for all I know.

I haven't kept up with this shit since the attitude era. So someone is trying to recapture the ol' Undertaker magic, eh?

It's slightly more complicated than that.
But yeah. Mostly.