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Lance Storm asked an interesting question recently: what if it was Lance vs. Booker instead of Buff vs. Booker in WCW's first televised match on WWE programming? How much was riding on that one Booker vs. Buff match, and would things have been different if we got a great match from Booker and Storm instead? Or was WCW in WWE doomed to fail regardless based on Vince McMahon never booking WCW to succeed?
With all due respect to Lance, and he was a great worker in his day, I don’t think Vince was looking for a five star match. That is not his thing. He looks for guys he sees as potential stars and that means he wants a guy who can work and be a character. Lance would have had a much better match but unless he could convey a ton of personality doing it, I don’t see it as being much different in the long run. In my opinion, Vince didn’t buy WCW to make it work. He bought it to prove it was secondary to WWE. If he really wanted it to work, he would have done what he could to get the top names like Nash, Sting, Hall, etc to come in when he bought the assets.
Ever since Trump recovered from COVID, he has been falsely claiming that he is now immune to the virus. But we know for a fact that you can get the virus twice, just ask Kayla Braxton. I realize that individuals like Kayla have the right to retain their privacy, but when you have the president himself spreading such a dangerously misleading and false claim to the country, should a public figure like her be more outspoken about the truth that you are not immune after recovering from COVID and that you absolutely can catch the virus twice?
I would never tell anyone that they should be the voice of any cause. That is a personal decision that they have to make for themselves.
How does Retribution recover from here? Is there anything left at this point in keeping them together on the main roster, or is the best thing to disband the group and return everyone (except Ali) to NXT in their original characters? I would much, MUCH rather watch Dijakovic or Mia Yim wrestle than T-Bar and Reckoning.
They have been booked sooooo badly I don’t think they can ever be more than just there. Luckily, they have had their identities mostly hidden so they can go back to being who they were and act like this never happened once it runs its course. The only one that will have permanent stink on him is Ali. I feel bad for him.
Uhh.... "Riddle"?
For a company that claims to be so big on branding, that doesn't seem like they put much thought into it, well unless the idea is to do all that they can to make him fail.
We all know that the bad creative direction and new superstar making woes of WWE are a definite factor in their ratings erosion, but other non-wrestling specific factors must be at play. For example, the NBA Finals ratings -with the biggest star in basketball and a fresh matchup between two big media markets - were disastrously down 45% from 2019. During the height of the lockdowns, I remember the ratings expectations for all of the major pro sports leagues were very high for their eventual returns, as many fans were craving new content due to Covid viewing deprivation. With the shocking ratings plummet for all the major sports leagues, can wrestling's rating decline be attributed to a larger trend of streaming, the rise of social media, and cable cord cutting? Or, is there a big entertainment industry downturn due to an undiscovered/unnamed viewing trend that is so new, we won't know why ratings for wrestling and pro sports are in such decline for a long time?
There are a lot of factors in play, no doubt. Sure, people are cutting the cord but I have YouTubeTV and have opted in to being tracked by Nielsen. so I count in the ratings. The NBA and NHL finals were not in their usual time of year, and had to compete with baseball and football. That played into their numbers as well as they usually don’t have that competition. With that said, I look back to a little over a year ago. The first Smackdown on FOX did 4 million viewers. Now, they do about half of that. That tells me people are out there willing to come back, but WWE needs to give them a reason to do so. That is where Creative comes in. Right now, they don’t have a lot of must see storylines and to the fans that care about that above the actual matches, that makes it easy for them to tune out.
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