General

Yah, as corroborated by a bunch of folks, Vince was indeed running TV last night. I saw one report that suggested the new call sheets the production crew and wrestlers received during the show cut out 2 women's matches to allow more time for Triple H's promo and Omos vs. Elias. It apparently impacted roster morale in a big bad way.

It also looks like Bayley's on her way out of WWE, if she's not out already. There were apparently a few wrestlers who said they'd "walk" if they saw Vince in control again, and it seems she may be one of them. After Mania, she tweeted that "even the most romantic love stories come to an end. Bye" (or something along those lines), and when Kai/Sky had their tag match last night, there was virtually no mention of Bayley by commentary or anywhere else on the show. Obv that may just be a "for the time being" thing, but the red flags are there.

Rough stuff. I don't understand his insistence to run creative... the dude had to have seen how well WWE was doing the past year or so and the good will they were finally starting to rebuild with the audience. Not that this is breaking news or anything, but there's definitely something wrong with that guy's brain.

There’s also a video circulating of Rollins in the ring last night, leaning on the ropes as producers are explaining something to him. His segment was cut from the show after he already made his entrance. This explains that whole awkward segment where he comes out, has the crowd do the whole music shtick, and then just… nothing happened.

Yeah, RAW was pretty terrible last night.. There was what, 2 matches in the first hour and they were terrible matches. I hope McMahon isn't sticking around, he hasn't been a decent booker for YEARS... I'm probably gonna watch Smackdown this week but if nothing really comes to some sort of next phase, I'll just read up on the recaps each week.

Typically, RAW after Wrestlemania has had some AWESOME moments in the past: Awesome debuts, championship changes, and the crowds were just awesome... (remember when the crowd kept singing Fandango's theme throughout the whole night?)

Last night, no crowd interaction except in the beginning (Reigns sucks... really?? that's the best you got?), NO debuts and a returning Matt Riddle?? Bleh, such a let down after a pretty great Wrestlemania 39.

I bet over the next few weeks we will see a lot of people not shown on TV and ultimately either granted their release or just let go do to 'budget cuts'..

Yeah that just did not feel like a typical post-Mania crowd. We go from "Fudge you Roman" chants two months ago to half-assed "Roman sucks" chants.

No NXT debuts either (though I think last year they were saved for the post-Mania SmackDown).

Riddle is back, but who knows for how long? He has been told one more screw up and he's gone.

Grizzled Young Veterans asked for their release, allegedly because they know WWE does a Spring cleaning of the roster after every WrestleMania and they didn't want to be lost in the shuffle where suddenly there's a bunch of free agents available on the same day when non-compete clauses are up. But Meltzer says he hasn't confirmed they were granted their release yet while others say they have.

The crappy part of this merger thing with Endeavor is the guy in charge doesn't want Vince to leave. He is clearly looking at it from an outside that thinks Vince still has a lot of name value and not paying attention to the numbers they were doing without Vince.

On top of that, even if they looked deeper into Vince’s role, Endeavor/Ari Emanuel let Dana White remain with UFC after literal video footage of him beating his wife surfaced, so Vince is safe from all the awful bullcrap he carried out. He’s back in full, and WWE’s quality is gonna suffer in a big bad way.

Ari Emanuel doesn’t know crap about wrestling. He sees a guy who brought WWE to record business and wants that guy in charge. He doesn’t care about scandals, as PizzaTheHutt said with Dana White slapping his wife being on tape.

As fans, we’re fudgeed. We’re gonna get a crapty WWE again.

I'd never pay to go to a RAW or Smackdown taping ever again as long as vince is running it.. in the 3 hours of 'TV" yesterday, there was less than 1 hour of ACTUAL wrestling, and half the matches were garbage (Omos/ELias, even the main event was trash).
I'd demand a refund..

Love to see it.
https://twitter.com/WrestleOps/status/164367202568...

Lool you truly do

They gotta keep that momentum going at SmackDown on Friday, because Vince don't give a crap about NXT or The Bump and I doubt anyone will have even brought that to his attention. Gotta do it at the shows he will actually be at.

Eh he’s not gonna care either way. Dude has a sociopathic way of just accepting that people hate him and reveling in it. He literally got outed as a sex offender and then grew a sex offender mustache before appearing in public again, cmahn.

Plus most folks who go to Raw or Smackdown either don’t pay close enough attention to this sort of thing, or they’re the types who do that corny bowing motion whenever he shows up. Real weird.

On a more positive note, Dynamite fudgein ruled tonight.

I only caught bits and pieces of Dynamite. I wonder how they plan to setup Wembley Stadium. It'll be a big crowd I'm sure, but I can't see it being a sellout.

Apparently AEW is more popular than WWE over there, especially after the whole NXT UK talent raid, so who knows? But yah I doubt they’ll get 90k, but I’m certain they’ll draw enough to get most likely their biggest gate to date.

Also Nigel McGuinness is like a legend over there, and he just got his #AllElite graphic along with Jay White last night.

Try to round up Will Ospreay & Mercedes Mone, maybe Okada & Ibushi, see if Punk is willing to do business by then. Drew McIntyre’s contract is up sometime this summer too, and who the heck knows what’s going on with Bayley. They could really go all in (pun intended) and put on a card that’s worth going out to see.

I hope to see the constantly teased Danielson vs ZSJ match, personally.

At one point even TNA was big over there. I don't know how AEW does it, but TNA are on a free channel that was available to anyone with a TV while WWE was on Sky Sports which was behind two separate paywalls.

Went to Smackdown in Portland and it was a good time. They had 3 dark matches with 1 before the show (Tegan Nox vs. Sonya Deville) and 2 after (Austin Theory vs. Dolph Ziegler, Matt Riddle vs. Solo Sikoa).

Dominick got so much heat from the crowd.

Yeah, that was legit heat. At one point you could barely hear him over the crowd. Not many can pull that off these days without resorting to insulting the local sports team or something.

The Triple H announcement was a disappointment. Way to over-hype and under-deliver. It felt like how when Tony Khan is constantly hyping up a big announcement on Dynamite and then it turns out to be nothing special at all.

As far as this week's announcements go, running Wembley Stadium in a country where AEW is more popular than WWE > announcing the inevitable annual WWE draft, in my opinion. I honestly can't remember the last time I was actually disappointed by an AEW announcement tbh, but I know to tempter my expectations with pro wrestling. In most cases, Khan's announcements are objectively big steps for the company (which is usually all he promises), even if they're not necessarily the most surprising announcements for the audience. But I never expect him to announce he signed Brock Lesnar or booked a show on Jupiter or anything, which is what I feel like the majority of the arbitrary AEW-detractors on the net are expecting whenever this situation comes up.

But yah Dom got fudgein wild heat last night, ya love to see it. I don't know if it's 100% legit heat, or a bit of "go away" heat, but it's heat nonetheless. I've been sold on him since his Mania match vs Rey, which is saying something because I was sick of seeing him in any capacity as recently as the Royal Rumble. They finally got him to a spot where he's a believable heel, it'll be interesting to see his career trajectory from this point. All the stuff at Mania this year, + the Bad Bunny/LWO inclusion, has finally made Judgment Day seem worth the watch. Smackdown was overall a far better show than Raw, even if it did still seem to just be treading water. I can't put into words how sick of the Bloodline interference shtick I am. Great wrestlers involved and they put on great performances with what they've got, but this week has done nothing to stifle my opinion that the Bloodline story as a whole has jumped the shark. And randomly placing Riddle into it isn't helping any.

Rampage + Battle of the Belts were solid shows last night, even if nothing really happened to set the world on fire. I do wish AEW would focus a little harder on making Rampage must-see like it was during its first few weeks. It needs to be live every week and they need to carry the stories through Friday night, not just on Dynamite. Though the whole Hook/Ethan Page+The Firm angle is featured a lot, and that seems to be the case with some new Embassy/Swerve stuff this week. So hopefully they're moving back in that direction.

theJaw wrote:


That's an announcement that could have easily been done on Twitter though, same like the Draft announcement. Dynamite obviously isn't airing live in UK, which the announcement was a bigger deal for that market than over here.

Also, AEW is only more popular in that it gets a lot of viewers for being on free TV. That's the key. As Meltzer put it, WWE is still more "popular" in every other metric over there, such as they get 6 times more Google searches over there than AEW does. Not to take anything away from AEW, but it's far from a situation where they reign supreme over there.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:


AEW airs live when it airs live, so they're going to make an announcement of that stature at their earliest live convenience. A tweet just wouldn't make as big a splash as a segment on a live episode of TV would. Either way, it's a huge announcement for the company itself whether the US fans directly benefit from it or not. It was a perfectly fine announcement to make in a 2 minute backstage promo on TV, especially with Wembley being the stadium in question. Far more warranted than Triple H getting a 5 minute entrance and then another 10 minutes to pat himself on the back, all to announce something that fans already knew happened annually.


I'm aware of all that, I guess when I said "popular" I should have said "gets more eyes weekly" than WWE, which will most likely lead to AEW selling the amount of tickets they want to sell in a new live market - which was really my primary point. I wasn't trying to suggest they "reign supreme" or anything like that. Of course WWE will generally have a higher popularity ANYwhere in the world in 2023 due to being a conglomerate that has existed for 70+ years as opposed to AEW that has only been around for 4. That's longevity for ya.

That said, there's a valid reason Sky wasn't willing to outbid BT Sports when the time came to renew their relationship with WWE: the ratings while on free TV at the time of their contract ending didn't warrant the asking price. There were rating declines leading up to the change while still on Sky (which can also be attributed to other shows in other countries, not just WWE). Either way though, the ratings for WWE on BT Sports can't be what either side of that deal were hoping for considering they're not only viewed less than AEW, they're legitimately dwarfed by the number of folks watching AEW weekly. Any way you shake a stick at it, WWE can't be making the money in BT Sports subscriptions that they likely would've been making if there wasn't a legitimate alternative like AEW. So to your point, yeah, the free TV aspect is obviously a reason why so many more people watch AEW weekly, but that just goes to prove that a large number of folks in the UK are perfectly content watching AEW over WWE when push comes to shove. Which is good for AEW, and again, helps justify a two minute announcement for that audience considering so many folks watch it.

In other news, what do yall think will happen with Drew McIntyre? He was apparently planned for Smackdown last night and was supposed to appear at an autograph signing but was pulled from both. I guess he and WWE aren't on the same page, money and creative-wise. I still figured they'd use him until his contract runs out but who knows?

If you were in charge, would you go all out to keep him or do you think it's okay to let him walk? Personally, I'd want to keep him. He's a legitimately great wrestler AND big muscle beef boy, which is what WWE loves. Plus he held the company up as champ in the most trying times during the pandemic, and never got his chance to shine with the belt in front of a live crowd. I'd still like to see him get that chance before he leaves.

theJaw wrote:

I read online he was sick.. don't know how true that is...

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