And if the Shield vs Wyatts thing counts as "history", why would they completely leave Rollins alone?

Good long form storytelling, my foot.

I'm a fan of the Washington State Cougars and never had any choice in the matter. My heart has bound me to a team that by their very nature is going to lose more than they'll win through the course of my life. Sometimes we've been so terrible that I just feel trapped watching this horrible thing. There's just no room for positive rationalizations, but some years I'm going to spent some 13 Saturdays being miserable because I can't avoid the reality of our suck.

Perhaps the thing I've come to love the most about Wrestling is that it is scripted. So I know there's a person pulling the strings, and that that person can write me a happy ending. There's good guys and bad guys, and in the very end, the good guys usually win.

If I'm making the choice to spend this much time watching something, I'm going to do whatever I can to make that a fun time. I'll try and find silver linings and ways to enjoy myself, and part of that is having some faith that things are going to work out and that the WWE knows what they're doing. Wrestling always has that bit of hope that I just can't find watching WSU's secondary right now. I appreciate that so damn much.

I just don't get why some of y'all seem to approach this with an attitude that seems to guarantee you won't enjoy yourself as much as somebody trying to find the brighter side of things. (especially when we do have evidence they do know what they're doing, and things will eventually pay off). If all you can be is miserable, are you really getting anything out of watching (I've developed a policy of snap dropping TV shows once I basically get a hint of not enjoying them, as a result I watch like 3 shows now, but the're all shows that I super enjoy)?

Seeing the negative reactions here, it kinda bums me out for y'all. Come drink the kool-aid with me, it tastes good, it's more fun, and this kind doesn't have poison. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS BO-LIEVE!!

Bray and Dean specifically had the brawl to the back (the one from which Dean never returned) in their tag match. There's enough left unanswered from that moment that I think it can be used to make what they've got coming interesting.

Until I'm proven wrong, I think Bryan's build to Mania was planned longer term than people want to accept. Maybe the exact form of it changed, but they don't have Randy cash in on him like that without eventually giving fans the payoff they want. Making you frustrated and thinking that they're picking on the your favorites is just exactly how this works.

Part of the problem, admittedly, is that I can't give two ****s about Bray Wyatt.

I still look to the booking at the February PPV, when Batista faced ADR. They knew that Batista had been getting bad reactions, so they had ADR jump him before the bell and injure him before the match ever started, just to have Batista heroically rise up and win the match anyway...which the fans booed the hell out of even though they didn't like ADR.

No part of me will ever be able to buy that that was anything but WWE trying to strong-arm the fanbase into accepting Batista as a babyface. I don't think they possibly execute that booking with the thinking that fans were overwhelmingly likely not to accept it, especially in a city with no particular smark history (it was in Minneapolis).

And if they were still trying to push the Batista thing through at that point, it points very much away from any notion of Bryan getting inserted into that main event as a long-term plan. I can buy that they were entertaining Bryan vs. HHH as an idea for a while, because that story had some consistency throughout...but Bryan into the main event was almost certainly WWE caving to the audience's demands after resisting, not of a long-term payoff of an idea that they ever intended to carry through at that point.

Yep yep

Personally I'm more than fine with Ambrose v bray and the match ending as it did. Rollins v Ambrose is THE feud in the wwe right now, and Ambrose needs to have his moment finally beating him at wrestlemania. You can't have this play out consistently for a year or it just gets exhausted. Maybe Rollins v orton or Cena in the interim. Ambrose v wyatt is a pretty compelling feud possibility I'm interested to see happen as a break til Ambrose/Rollins concludes

also props to WWE for letting ziggler win 2-0. i cant remember ever seeing a sweep before.

The 2-0 was definitely great. Puts the IC champ over strongly, and maybe more importantly it makes the second fall of 2-of-3 matches a lot more dramatic in the future because we can finally really buy that the winner of the first fall might go over again.

I see the wwe have successfully deleted Chris Benoit and his WM exploits from your memory then LKJ.

he got 2 n 0'd from MVP

That's probably from a Mania that I haven't seen yet.

apparently i made that up. he lost 2 out of 3 falls at judgement day (2-0) to MVP in the same feud. But won the singles match at WM

I am getting so sick of outside interference determining the outcomes of matches. For instance, why couldn't the rollins/ambrose match ended with rollins pinning ambrose cleanly. Right after the pinfall, the lights could of went out and then Bray shows up and sister abigails ambrose.

It would of had the same effect and made for a better ending.

They need someone for Cena to feud with. Bray vs Ambrose is an obvious feud at some point, and they decided to do it now, likely so Cena can go against Rollins now. This makes some sense to me (although I'm not looking forward to more Bray mic work; the vignettes were better), but history suggests it is far more likely both feuds will be mediocre or worse than both end up being good.

Back in the late 90s I could say "yeah, the writing isn't great, but Jericho/Flair/Austin/Rock/Foley/Vince/HBK/Hall etc. are going to be good anyway". I suppose Flair and Jericho are still lingering around in a sense, but now Jericho is a middle aged dad trying to act like a cool young guy and Flair is a grandpa who isn't even allowed to tell good stories from his prime. The talent (and announcing) today isn't good enough, or isn't allowed to, carry bad or even mediocre writing.

nope. Ambrose is way weaker in that scenario. The point of constant interference is no1 lost, so no1 "loses momentum".

Not that i liked the ending either, but it is not the same as someone losing clean.

Because they didn't want "an ending" at all.

Yeah- the WWE does this way too much, especially on RAW leading up to feuds. The problem isn't doing that here though, it's making that stale by being super lazy on RAW.

Who says it HAS to END if one of them cleanly pins the other? I think it could be a decade long story (obviously taking a back seat to other stories over that time span) that goes back and forth with who wins each match.

Well it doesn't have to, but those are the conventions under which the WWE tends to work and what they've taught fans to expect. Somebody taking a pin here would at least be an implicit statement about the end of this chapter, and they clearly don't want to end it yet.

It becomes somewhat unreasonable to expect a ton of nuance from a company that's still targeting kids and whatever non insulting term you can come up with for the broader parts of the fan base.

Somebody took a pin here.

Wrestlers lose matches all the time. I think fans quickly forget who wins and loses a specific match ( unless its a historic match like brock v taker at wrestlemania) and wouldn't think of a wrestler any "less" if he were to lose by a clean pin fall. I think what stands out and sticks with a fans mind is how the wrestler performed within the match and not who wins and loses.

what about the dozen IC Champ vs. Contender matches on raw, smackdown, main event, etc end in pins yet the feud lives to the ppv?

IF ONLY the #1 contender for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship had someone to feud with.

Here's a novel idea, how about you have him feud with the guy that holds the WWE World Heavyweight Championship?

There's even a built in story hook, they could feud over the, wait for it, WWE World Heavyweight Championship!

Of course, that would require the guy that holds the WWE World Heavyweight Championship (let's call him the WWE World Heavyweight champion) to be someone that was an active part of the company and to defend the WWE World Heavyweight Championship from people who wanted to win the WWE World Heavyweight Championship from the WWE World Heavyweight Champion.

Starting to see the problem?

(Random aside: they have to change the ****ing name, like, now.)

This is where you're wrong, or at least where the WWE conventions need to change. There's nothing at all wrong with a "these two are both really good at what they do and either of them could win on any given night" story line, and if done right it can really elevate BOTH of them -- and one of them winning on a given night doesn't mean the story's over by any means. If you want to say it ends a chapter, fine, whatever -- just write a longer book then.

For instance, they're doing this very thing (or have been, at least) with AJ and Paige for the last six months, and there's no reason to think either of them have been diminished because of it.

(Note that this is completely distinct from having Kofi-Ziggler MDCCLXVIV because guys need a paycheck.)

If Brock wasn't the champ and Cena was feuding with the champ, Cena probably would still be feuding with Seth Rollins. Or Ambrose.

I do think in a way it is stupid for an extreme part timer to have the world title, and stupid for him to have defeated the Undertaker. It's the WWE telling the entire crowd what long time hardcore wrestling fans already know: that the full time roster isn't as good as it used to be. And it makes it more difficult to write, indeed.

Bingo, the lack of top tier talent is the bigger problem. For the past 1-2 months, the last 25 minutes of Raw has been the same **** just re-packaged differently. The main event has consisted of the same 5 wrestlers (rollins, ambrose, cena, orton, kane) in someway shape, or form. Im so over Kane. If he isnt in a boiler room match with Mankind or Undertaker, I want him no where near what is going on. Bray coming back will help break up the monotonous dynamic that has taken over raw the past 2 months.

People can hate on Cena all they want. But besides Daniel Bryan and Dean Ambrose (both I think due to them being fairly new to the scene) no one gets a bigger reaction one way or another from the crowd then Cena. I think currently there is a huge lacking of wrestlers that have mic skills. When the powers who be allow him to do so, I feel Cena has the best mic skills of any of the top guys (and that includes ambrose).