Wow. My eyes are watering after that knee by Rollins

LOL

Are you ****ing serious?

Lmao why is Rollins even champion?

oh **** Cena got jacked up

Rollins suplex combo off the top rope was nice

Dat nose

That looked bad good job seth. Obv Cena would win tho

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He forgot the face of his father. He did not hit with his hand, he hit with his taped fist.

Just watched the episode over the course of about 30 minutes of DVR fast forwarding. Seemed like the perfect example of why to never actually watch this show and to just tune in for PPVs. Every time they say "divas revolution" I want to beat the **** out of something.

Also, when they tell someone that they have to earn their title shot, they then earn it literally 100% of the time. Even the biggest mouthbreather in the viewing audience can figure that out by now. WHAT A CLEVER PLOT DEVICE you ****ing ****wits.

Kind of ironic that I was thinking of making a thread before about who's going to beat Cena for the US title and of course the answer is....John Cena by taking the world championship at SS while he goes on to unify every other belt as well. Go John Boy!!!

There's a lot of hyperbole thrown around but I literally just don't get it anymore. All because of merchandise sales? What gives?

This is what we get for asking them to elevate the U.S. Title

And ratings. Ratings are as low as they've ever been.

Bringing back Taker, putting Cena in a title program... all desperate short term ratings ploys. And it'll work, but what about next year? Eventually you're going to run out of old guys to use to fatten your wallet.

I mean...at this point, there's no clear path back to a quality weekly TV program. If they hit on something good, they'll overexpose it and then abandon it. They refuse to stick with teams or factions for any reasonable length of time, owing in part to the fact that they have to fill so damn much TV time. Nothing but the old stand-bys will last. And when new, good stuff gets abandoned, it's back to searching for more new good stuff in a vast field of completely broken booking.

Until Vince is dead, the weekly TV isn't going to be anywhere close to consistently great again. It would be stunning if it ever returned to top form under his watch.

Agree with all of this

I've made this point before, but with WWE having signed a new long term TV contract in the last 18 months, now is exactly the time to *not* spaz over ratings and, in an effort to briefly prop them up, throw all sorts of spaghetti at the wall that wrecks any semblance of coherent long run story lines, feuds, and character development.

Writing Raw like NXT would probably result in additional short term ratings drops, but the product would improve immeasurably and the ratings would eventually follow. Vince screaming into announcer headsets, however, isn't conducive to this kind of critical long run mindset.

FWIW I dropped cable this summer for $20/month Sling TV and I hardly miss Raw at all. I just re subscribed to the Network and that has been more than plenty to get my wrestling fix.

I think it's pretty difficult to write the main product like NXT when there's three hours of A-show to fill, two hours of B-show, then I think another two hours of C-show to fill (I don't even know what happens on the C-show).

I realize that my proposal of slowly reintroducing squash matches until they become a majority of the show isn't going to happen. The only alternative I could offer - having wrestling matches exist not to advance a storyline, but because guys are trying to work their way up the ladder and wins are good and losses are bad - also won't be considered, because Vince is repulsed by the thought of his company being seen as a wrestling company.

So I know that the alternatives that I would propose would be absolute non-starters if I was invited to a creative meeting in Stamford. A person can either suffer through this model or not, but unfortunately the model is probably not going to substantially change in the next 15-20 years.

Hmm Neville squashed fandango last night and the stardust came on with a promo right after so that kinda is what you are mentioning.

A shame though because I think fandango can be really good in the ring. He's really fluid in there and has great size

lol that was not even close to a squash match. Fandango got way too much offense off for that to be true.

They use occasional squashes, but they're used sporadically and their usage is never ramped up.

(I didn't actually watch that match.)

The thing is that overloading on superstar vs. superstar matches would be fine if the booking model was different, but they make it overwhelmingly clear that (1) it doesn't matter at all who wins the matches on Raw anyway, and/or (2) the ending is going to fall into the usual narrow range that they lazily build to the next PPV match with.