The Wrestling Thread's got...needs - Part 216

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I think they should have Roman eliminated and lose the belt and then have him chase it all the way til Mania. Having him go over 29 guys to retain the title makes it very hard to book one on one title defenses for him afterwards, especially for Mania (and especially with Cena injured).
 
Some of the guys the wwe sign want to change there name as they want to reinvent themselves. Also some of them pick their own names. They submit a list to the wwe and the wwe approve their new name. Devitt, steen and others have picked their new names themselves.

This only pertains to Indy guys. If the WWE went on another signing spree and the target this time is former UFC fighters who want to go into the squared circle, the WWE would not change their names in WWE because the WWE will want to take advantage of the fact that they fought in the UFC. We'll see what happens when they sign a former UFC Fighter named Matt Riddle, who had a tryout with them last year.

I honestly think that former UFC Fighters who are long time WWE fans (and there are a lot of UFC fighters, current and former who are either fans of the WWE or pro wrestling) and who have dabbled in pro wrestling will be the next target of talent for the WWE. It's starting to become a trend recently. Last year we saw Ronda Rousey appear at WrestleMania 31 and if she ever does show up in the WWE for a run, she'll be the female Brock Lesnar under the name of Ronda Rousey. Also last year, Ronda's Four Horsewoman pal, Shayna "Queen of Spades" Baszler accompanied ReDragon to the ring and has recently begun competing in the Indies. As I have said, Matt Riddle is a former UFC Fighter and actually had success in the UFC but was released by the UFC due to a positive test for pot. He's been wrestling in Evolve. Last year there were rumors that the WWE has an interest in another one of Ronda Rousey's friends Jessamyn Duke for their upcoming Diva Search if she was ever released by the UFC. There was some talk of Chael Sonnen in WWE last year, but those talks never amounted to anything.

They also recently hired Mauro Ranallo, who has done Strikeforce. They also hired Seth Petruzelli to be a striking coach at the WWE Performance Center and he's best known for knocking out the overhyped Kimbo Slice in EliteXC. The moment Rousey leaves the UFC, the WWE will be interested and if that becomes the case, there will then be rumors that the WWE will offer her roles in WWE Studios films of her choosing as part of her WWE contract. Now the question is, does the WWE actually go and hire former UFC Fighters as their next pipeline of talent? I think they hire Riddle. Will they give Shayna Baszler a try-out? Is there still going to be interest in Duke when she is released by UFC?
 
Also, Sasha Banks has denied she is injured.
 
I don't consider ROH to be minor league -- I think they're one of the only true major league wrestling promotions. WWE isn't a wrestling promotion anymore, it's a TV/movie production studio that still happens to put on a wrestling (or, as they unfortunately insist upon calling it, sports entertainment) show. And I'm not passing a value judgment on that; just saying that ROH and WWE set out to accomplish very different things. WWE is major league at what it does, ROH is major league at what it does. ROH is pure pro wrestling, WWE is a TV show.

If WWE was as much a TV show as he thinks then McMahon would drop the live sporting event format and focus on serialized storytelling along with the in-ring stuff be he ain't. The truth is WWE is a wrestling show but WWE and some fans won't admit it because a) sports entertainment sounds more mainstream and b) it allows more pure in-ring focused products to pander to us hardcores.
 
I don't consider ROH to be minor league -- I think they're one of the only true major league wrestling promotions. WWE isn't a wrestling promotion anymore, it's a TV/movie production studio that still happens to put on a wrestling (or, as they unfortunately insist upon calling it, sports entertainment) show. And I'm not passing a value judgment on that; just saying that ROH and WWE set out to accomplish very different things. WWE is major league at what it does, ROH is major league at what it does. ROH is pure pro wrestling, WWE is a TV show.

call me when they fill up the Staples Center
 
ROH is not a major league....it's an Indy league. To use a football analogy, it's more like the Canadian Football League. It has a niche.

Here is how I see the WWE at this point: It's a lot like the NFL in many ways. First both have had to deal with major concussion issues from current and former talent. Second, the quality of both has rapidly deteriorated (if you are an NFL fan, you will notice how bad the talent level at Quarterback is). Both have leaders who have alienated a lot of people. Both companies have gone through scandals (for WWE the Summer of Hell 2007 and for the NFL, numerous runs in with the law and the deaths of former football players due to CTE).

There are also a lot of differences. NFL ratings are still at an all time high, while WWE ratings are at an all time low. During the NFL Regular season, I always pick Sunday Night Football over any WWE PPV event. The Super Bowl in my view gets more hype than WrestleMania, but that is mainly due to the commercials that air during the Super Bowl. Plus the NFL encourages Fantasy Football, a multi-million dollar business. The closest thing the WWE has to that are the video games.
 
ROH is not even on TV in Dallas, Texas, which is a major media market. To be a major league, you have to have New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.

ROH has three of those markets. ROH has a presence in New York and Chicago and thanks to their working agreement with PWG, now Los Angeles. ROH has never been to Dallas, I don't think.
 
WWE rarely even sells out RAW anymore, and they usually don't even run the 18,000+ seat arenas like Staples these days. If that's your standard for major league, there isn't a major league promotion in existence. According to Dave Meltzer WWE hasn't sold out a RAW event (even though they announce them as sellouts anyway) since late August at Barclays Center. WWE shows hit around 2,500 on the low end and 20,000 on the high end (except Mania, of course), but most shows are between 4,000 and 9,000. And NXT events sell out quickly, but NXT also bleeds money.

ROH gets roughly 1,000 fans per event. That's small potatoes compared to WWE but the majority of their shows are legitimately sold out with very few comps. Nobody else in the US besides WWE gets close to that. Not even TNA or Lucha Underground, let alone the real minor promotions like PWG or Chikara. Not even ECW hit those numbers until late 1998. Most indie promotions average in the low hundreds.

ROH is also on weekly TV (just the Sinclair station ROH broadcasts average 300K-500K viewers, not counting Comet TV, NESN, or ROHwrestling.com viewers), they're on cable PPV and iPPV, they tour most of the country these days, etc. To me, that's the mark of a major league promotion. They're available nationwide and they fill up the arenas they run in.

ROH is the biggest "pure" wrestling promotion in the US right now. That's the reality of it. They're bigger than TNA and they're bigger than Lucha Underground (LU is more of a TV show like WWE anyway). They're the biggest company in the US that offers the kind of product they offer. The market for "pure" wrestling is smaller than it used to be, but ROH is one of the only wrestling companies in the world that is actually growing right now. TNA, LU, and WWE are all contracting.

EDIT:
ROH stopped being an independent promotion when they were bought by a billion dollar broadcasting conglomerate. It's not a question of size, but of who owns them. They were an indie until Sinclair bought them.
 
I think if ROH got a better TV deal, they could be a legit #2
There just aren't that many networks that want wrestling right now. ROH gets more viewers on Sinclair Stations than they got when they were on Destination America, and they also get more on Sinclair Stations than TNA got on DA or Pop; more than LU gets on El Rey; more than NJPW gets on AXS TV.

They're already a legit #2. Their ticket sales, merch sales, and PPV numbers put TNA's to shame. All TNA has is leftover brand recognition from when they were getting ~2,000,000 viewers weekly on Spike. But those days are long gone.
 
ROH is not anywhere in Dallas. Until it is, it's a niche.

UFC is already better than the WWE and they sell out events now with people like Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey. They had an attendance of 53,000 for Rousey's loss to Holly Holm. They also got a near sellout for UFC 194, headlined by McGregor. The WWE even with Cena cannot sell out an NBA arena.
 
and its NESN coverage isn't nationwide, I live in Connecticut and Ive come across it once since May

let me clarify, a national TV deal where it is on at the same time each week, like a WWE or Impact, I may crack jokes about Impact but they have a national tv channel home

Im honestly surprised wrestling hasn't landed on a channel like FXX at this point, it would fit there
 
ROH is not even on TV in Dallas, Texas, which is a major media market. To be a major league, you have to have New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.

ROH has three of those markets. ROH has a presence in New York and Chicago and thanks to their working agreement with PWG, now Los Angeles. ROH has never been to Dallas, I don't think.

ROH airs on KTXD-TV in Dallas. It's availabe on broadcast TV, FiOS, Charter, and Time Warner Cable throughout the Dallas area.
 
ROH airs on KTXD-TV in Dallas. It's availabe on broadcast TV, FiOS, Charter, and Time Warner Cable throughout the Dallas area.

Nobody watches KTXD in Dallas, which is why I said that ROH is not even on TV in Dallas.
 
and its NESN coverage isn't nationwide, I live in Connecticut and Ive come across it once since May

let me clarify, a national TV deal where it is on at the same time each week, like a WWE or Impact, I may crack jokes about Impact but they have a national tv channel home

Im honestly surprised wrestling hasn't landed on a channel like FXX at this point, it would fit there
Nobody watches Paragon, LU, NJPW, or TNA on national TV. More people watch ROH on local TV than watch any of those shows on national TV. TNA got 255,000 viewers for its live Pop debut. A minimum of 300,000 people are watching ROH weekly on Sinclair Broadcast affiliates alone -- again, that doesn't include rohwrestling.com, Comet TV, NESN, etc.Again,

ROH HAD two national TV deals (HDnet and Destination America) but they found that more people tend to watch them on local channels.

And Comet TV DOES air ROH at the same time every week, in every market. It's just that they haven't completed their launch of the network nationwide yet. They have announced a Denver affiliate but it hasn't happened yet.
 
and real talk, having been to a Chikara show and an ROH show, Id sooner go to a Chikara show...crowd is more fun

ROH crowd is basically like going to a comedy show where everyone is too cool to laugh at the jokes, they hate fun

if being a "pure" wrestling promotion means your fans a bunch of snobs who don't know how to have a good time, ill take a 200 person Chikara show that has a woman as its Grand Champion (which is awesome) and Smooth Sailin' Ashley Remington
 
Nobody watches KTXD in Dallas, which is why I said that ROH is not even on TV in Dallas.
You just moved the goalpost. It's on in Dallas on free TV.

Nobody watches TNA anywhere. It doesn't mean they're a major promotion just because most people have Pop TV if nobody actually watches them on Pop TV.
 
and real talk, having been to a Chikara show and an ROH show, Id sooner go to a Chikara show...crowd is more fun

ROH crowd is basically like going to a comedy show where everyone is too cool to laugh at the jokes, they hate fun

if being a "pure" wrestling promotion means your fans a bunch of snobs who don't know how to have a good time, ill take a 200 person Chikara show that has a woman as its Grand Champion (which is awesome) and Smooth Sailin' Ashley Remington
Dalton Castle is a way better character than Ashley Remington. Obviously it's the same guy and he's ridiculously talented, but Castle has been money all year for ROH.

And if we're going to make broad generalizations about a promotion's fanbase, I'll do the same:
-WWE fans are almost exclusively geezers or children (their product targets children but their median viewer is in his mid 50s) that will lap up anything Vince McMahon puts out there
-NXT fans are a bunch of smelly Florida hipsters
 
hipsters don't live in Florida, its wanna be hillbillies and tourists

also transplants who moved to Florida but constantly ***** about missing New York, or Jersey, or Connecticut
 
You just moved the goalpost. It's on in Dallas on free TV.

Nobody watches TNA anywhere. It doesn't mean they're a major promotion just because most people have Pop TV if nobody actually watches them on Pop TV.

The only free TV that the people in Dallas watches are the FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS and (to a lesser degree) CW stations in the area. The Spanish speaking audience will watch Telemundo or Univision in the area.

It's a channel that barely resonates locally. I know because I live here. There is a site called "Uncle Barky" that has the local TV ratings for the channels and KTXD doesn't resonate at all.

If ROH was on a station like KTXA, then I would watch it every week. KTXA resonates more due to its ties to the local CBS station KTVT (it airs CBS programming whenever KTVT has local programming in prime time like Dallas Cowboys pre-season games or simulcasts any Cowboys games on the NFL Network) and also has shows like Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire as well as local high school sports and have aired games of the other three pro sports teams in the area (Rangers, Mavs and Stars).
 
I love legitimate heel vs. heel matches.
Has there ever been a real legitimate big heel vs heel match? I feel like one way or another, someone is going to go over as a face, or at least be cheered by the fans.

Like Brock may be a heel, but fans love him, so he'll have the face treatment.

I'd love to see something where two heels are fighting and being as dirty as possible and neither comes out looking like a face.
 
Dalton Castle is a way better character than Ashley Remington. Obviously it's the same guy and he's ridiculously talented, but Castle has been money all year for ROH.

And if we're going to make broad generalizations about a promotion's fanbase, I'll do the same:
-WWE fans are almost exclusively geezers or children (their product targets children but their median viewer is in his mid 50s) that will lap up anything Vince McMahon puts out there
-NXT fans are a bunch of smelly Florida hipsters

The NFL also has children as fans, as evidenced by the NFL Play 60 and Punt, Pass and Kick. So how is that different than the WWE fans being kids? Disney also has a lot of children as fans, so how is that also different to the WWE having kids as fans?

And what's wrong with having children as fans?
 
The NFL also has children as fans, as evidenced by the NFL Play 60 and Punt, Pass and Kick. So how is that different than the WWE fans being kids? Disney also has a lot of children as fans, so how is that also different to the WWE having kids as fans?

And what's wrong with having children as fans?

because they are stupid little germ machines who don't care about workrate

:oldrazz:
 
The NFL also has children as fans, as evidenced by the NFL Play 60 and Punt, Pass and Kick.
But kids aren't the target market.

WWE's marketing a show almost exclusively to children, but the vast majority of people actually watching it are old people. It's a massive contradiction. More young people were actually watching during the Attitude Era, which was supposedly targeted more at adults.

The NFL does bigger ratings than ANYTHING in the 18-34 and 18-49 demographics. Those are the people who spend money.
 
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