Friday Night Wrestling Megathread
 

I thought that tag match was happening at the PPV.....

You "thought" too much, homeboy you never stop thinking.

Why not both? -WWE

While I doubt it would ever happen, it would be awesome if one day someone called him LA Knight in a promo and he just paused for a moment and said "Who the hell is LA Knight? I'm Eli Drake, dummy. YEAAAAAAH." And then just walks off.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Smackdown got Vinced tonight. A lot of changes.</p>&mdash; Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful.com (@SeanRossSapp) <a href="https://twitter.com/SeanRossSapp/status/1672394582149984256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 24, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The only match that actually happened from the graphics you posted was the women's tag match, fucking Vinced tonight for sure.

Wow! Looks like they've retired the NXT Women's Tag Titles.

Damb @ Bowens


<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Anthony Bowens has some news to break to Harley Cameron.<br><br>WATCH <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AEWRampage?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#AEWRampage</a> on TNT!<a href="https://twitter.com/PlatinumMax?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@platinummax</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/Bowens_Official?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@bowens_official</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/RealBillyGunn?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realbillygunn</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/itsdanni_ellexo?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@itsdanni_ellexo</a> <a href="https://t.co/z59Ble3c9Z">pic.twitter.com/z59Ble3c9Z</a></p>&mdash; All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) <a href="https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1672431066982887424?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 24, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Would it?

LA Knight is a terrible name. This is not up for debate.

LA Knight sounds like someone who belongs in a sequel to Blankman.

I mean, I don’t love LA Knight as a name, but I don’t really care for him just magically becoming Eli Drake either.

I found a concise way to consume Smackdown every week but I feel like it's a bit too long for Noid

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LA night is so over

oooooh I'm already feeling ucey baby.

Confirmed: The Rock returning tonight to set up a match with Roman for SummerSlam.

How dare you :mad:

wow 1st segment bloodline

Bloodline is the best!

Did Kross just lose in about 2 minutes? :lol:

I feel like SmackDown doesn’t feature enough variety in talent.

The Usos
Solo
Reigns
Edge
Waller
Styles
Kross
Charlotte
Asuka
Belair
IYO
Theory
Sheamus

Plus Pretty Deadly/Brawling Brutes, I gues.

Ah, reading that the opening segment went long which is why the rest of the show felt like a sprint.

LA Knight blowing roofs off arenas again, YEAH!

good opening match LA the crowd fav

Was not expecting Knight to lose.

Should've had Sami come out with Jay in the ring and hype up the match with Roman. Would've added more emotion/meaning to the match.

big red is there did wwe get him back

Nice video tribute to Bray

Jimmy Uso's got new entrance music.

Rumors going around the one Dwayne The Rock Johnson is going to be at Smackdown tonight! Not sure if Roman is there but Solo and Paul abojt to be getting Rock Bottomed!

MCAFEE!!!

Rock on Smackdown R.I.P. Rampage :rofl:

Don’t scroll through SRS’ Twitter page right before a show starts. Got the McAfee and Rock spoiler moments before it happened.

Fox censors working overtime during this segment muting the crowd

They’ll probably get a massive number from the trickle down. And a whole bunch of people will see what a joke AEW is.

Yes. That’s the first thing I thought when I heard The Rock’s music play :roll:

It’s a good thing Austin Theory listened to Bryan Alvarez for that career advice.

Not following SRS and Noid has greatly improved my enjoyment of professional wrestling.

I doubt Rock works a match, but am I the only one who doesn’t care THAT much about Rock vs. Roman. Rock was never the dominant champion Roman is. I think I would rather see Rock get into it with another guy on the roster and work magic with them.

Rock, LA Knight, Pat McAfee & Alpha Academy vs. The Judgment Day & Austin Theory could be cool as shit, for example.

Rock and Roman only works if Roman destroys Rock. And I dunno if Dwayne is coming back to do the job.

I kind of felt like Solo saying "I know what to do" is going to be him attacking The Rock, then Rock goes after him and Roman.

TKO proving there are levels to this.

Watched SmackDown. Pretty good show overall. The Grayson Waller shtick isn’t very good, is it?

Not especially. I'm remaining hopeful that whatever Triple H sees in him will eventuate.

I liked the match I saw between him and Johnny Gargano. The whole “talk show host” thing is just so played out though. That’s the biggest problem him and Austin Theory have, in my opinion — they’re doing this thing that countless other guys have done before them. Theory comes to life when he is being goofy. Waller’s scrolls along the bottom of the screen aren’t even funny. At least make this shit memorable and have them talk shit about guys.

The show is very well structured. Basically everything flowed into something else you can care about. You see stars several times across the show. The storylines seem deeper than what you’d get elsewhere too. The Judgment Day/Jimmy Uso/Jey Uso stuff is actually somewhat interesting. Pushing AJ Styles is cool. LA Knight is fucking over.

It does have that WWE veneer over the top of everything. Could definitely use the feeling of being more organic. A lot of their “great talkers” aren’t really great. Waller, in particular.

i am an unabashed mark for LA knight and wish the very best of things for him because i think he is great and genuinely a very entertaining all-rounder but man it feels like he is barely in control of his move set sometimes. feel like i am constantly stressed out he is going to botch and i can't really put my finger on why

feud with the miz has been a quality exercise for both of them though, good stuff

wheeling out the rock to try to stoke cheap heat for austin theory certainly was a choice

You seriously need to stop giving yourself bukkake, Nerfect....it's a bad look. ;)

He’s won me over. I thought he was the shits a few years ago. I know what you mean though. There was the one really notable botch this match. I get “worried” for him. Like he’s going to lose control and everything will disappear.

Austin Theory is kinda bad... dunno why he keeps getting such a big push.... I guess he's better than Baron Corbin, but pretty much the exact same interest (zero) in them as a legit "top heel".

Theory’s good. He just needs to put it all together. There’s a reason he keeps getting put in these spots. Austin, Rock, McAfee, Vince and Cena aren’t working with just anyone.

SRS blocked me in a thread he wasnt tagged in that was talking about him doing blow on camera.

Forgive the guy. He was coked out of his mind.

On Theory: The material he’s handed is a little weak and his delivery isn’t the greatest. He comes alive when he’s reacting to others. He reminds me of Orton pre-Viper.

100%. it just feels more on a knife edge than it should for someone this far into their career

like at payback when he did the jump up onto the barricade to do the dive onto miz, his one foot clipped the wall and i thought he was going to faceplant. it just wasn't clean/confident

and then occasionally with the "innovative" way (commentator's words) he does things like DDTs... like it looks like the miz is genuinely taken by surprise and doesn't really know how he is supposed to execute the move, idk

BFT looked the best it has looked this past week though. was on the fence about it as a finisher bc it has historically looked not great but i came around to it in this last match

notable absence of his people's elbow knock-off with rock in the building though lmao

i know this sounds like i am ragging on the guy, which i am not. he is v much over with me and i really want to see him go all the way

probably because he seems like such an underdog and it's been such a hard and long road for him to get here, and he has succeeded *despite* WWE, not because of them

i love a wrestler that gets themselves over and forces the company's hand. and it's also doubtlessly because of the undeniable attitude era of it all

but man, those edges

i think the issue is they're trying so hard to make him this big-deal heel but he still only seems to generate x-pac heat

i get trying to make him seem genuinely unlikeable by "it doesn't matter"ing the rock and whatever but all that segment did was make him look worse than a 50-year-old part-timer and also pat mcafee, idk

That's the biggest problem with him. I guess I didn't see any of his initial run really... just from his match with Steve Austin onward.... I hear tell that he was "less serious" back then... which would be great.

The big problem is they try to present him as "serious" and "legit", but then he had a never-ending US Title reign where I don't think he actually "earned" any victories, but just cheated or squeaked out a win or whatever.

Which is all fine and good if you play that up, but instead everyone, including the commentators, kept trying to push how legit he was... and rather than being like a smarmy coward type even Theory tries to present himself as bigtime legit....

And it just doesn't work because there is a huge disconnect in what we actually see from his character.

precisely this--compare with someone like dom mysterio, for example, who very much *is* leaning into the dirty-win, smarmy coward archetype (who nonetheless throws himself in harm's way to protect his stablemates, which is a cool little element of his character)

dom just seems like a far more believable/entertaining heel. the crowd not letting him talk is hilarious. still has a bit of work to do in-ring but i think everyone sees the potential there. he has real heat and has made himself enjoyably unlikeable

theory has dom's passive aura but tries to carry himself, presumably at the company's behest, like game-era triple h. it's just a total disconnect, absolutely

I prob'ly should have just left the whole quote and bolded these, but I wanted to address these two things in particular:

Wasn't the talk show thing in his case initially in place to cover for some injury? I thought this case in particular was similar to the whole Randy Orton/RNN/shoulder injury "update inturruption" vignettes around his debut. But, you are right, there is an overutilization of guys having a "talk show" with set dressing on a show that already features a lot of talking as opposed to what it is supposed to be featuring.

But that kind of goes into that second bit I cropped about the "WWE veneer over the top of everything". And with all that formula often comes detriment. You can't explicitly judge how well a "great talker" is or isn't until they get an opportunity to actually show it. Sometimes, you'll have a situation like Big Show, who, for the longest time, had the knock on him that he "lacked charisma". All that lasted for YEARS until he got the chance to be funny on an SNL appearance alongside HHH and Mick Foley for one of The Rock's earler guest spots there. If he hadn't been there, Show's whole persona would have prob'ly been consistently distilled to "giant smash" until he was done with the company, and nobody would have had any idea how much "charisma" the man had. More recently, we can go to their current cash cow in Roman Reigns.

There was a lot of hay made about how absolutely gawdawful he was on the mic. Even by myself, as I like to point out his fucking abysmal "I'm the man" speil. However, at the same time he was the silent heavy for The Shield or given gems like "suffering succotash", a lot of folks on social media - both fans and other wrestlers - thought he came off as a really cool guy in person at fan events and such, and wondered why he sounded like such a hokey dork on TV when he was so chill and quick witted in person.

It's not always a failing of the talent, even though that is WWE's - and in particular, Vince's - go-to excuse when sometimes, they're being hamstrung by the very machine behind them being OVERLY formulaic with how things supposedly should work. Drew McIntyre's initial run was pretty sucky thanks to WWE creative, and then he basically made the most of his time there with the 3MB stuff before getting housecleaned. After being allowed to show what he could work and how he could talk on the indies, the same company that saw no value because of how shitty his setup was wanted him back. He was going to fire Kane because both of his initial gimmicks were ass. He had to be talked into keeping John Cena because he "didn't see it" in him.

Meanwhile, when things ARE WORKING that aren't in the plans - like LA Knight, or Daniel Bryan (even if you ignore them ignoring him, the whole Wyatt Family heel turn was a naked attempt to kill that push), or even the initial rise of Austin 3:16 (folks forget, Austin was just "a good hand" destined in Vince's eyes to be a perpetual midcarder at best, and capitalizing on the trend while eliminating what was clearly hot bootleg merchandise was what reluctantly changed his mind) usually get ignored, pushed aside, treated like a fad when it isn't or distilled down to a fad and getting in on it too late (Fandango's music - the tried to kill the crowd doing it at first, then after pigeonholing him as insignificant, decides that's the time to tell everyone "the crowd is Fandangoing!"

They set up a guy like a Baron Corbin to be this immediate big deal waaaaaayyyy before he was ready for it, exposed him as being green and totally not ready, then tried to push him anyway forever and let him flail for years in a lot of unimpressive roles. Now that he's way more comfortable in his own skin and could prob'ly get away with what they tried to groom him for like a decade ago, they aren't even considering it. On the flip side, you get a guy like Bron Breakker who is basically still in NXT for no reason. He was pretty much ready for prime time as he walked in the door, but he gets to waste time in his career for no other real reason than it appears he just isn't in the cards for the main roster right now. And yes, I know those two are in a program with one another right now, but one should be on the way up, and the other had to fall from a great height that he needed to recover from but shouldn't have had to.

Overall, the TL;DR of it is that there are a lot of times WWE is WWE's biggest problem with a talent. They could feisably be sitting on a wealth of above average talkers, but you'd never know, because they're either tragically mute or get shitty scripts and catchphrases.

Not sure about the injury. If so, then they should still be doing a better job. The Twitter scrawl at the bottom of his segment on SmackDown was just embarrassing. The whole thing was a mess and his delivery was awful.

Maybe the guy can talk in a more organic setting? Whatever. He doesn’t seem gun-shy. It just seemed like high school theater.

I am pretty sure the whole thing with Waller being injured is accurate. He actually broke his fibula at some point during his last NXT match against Carmelo Hayes and kept going and finished it out anyways. He was supposed to be called up immediately but obviously that didn't work out with the injury. Took him several months to rehab it enough to where he could even walk around and start returning to normal mobility, which is when they had him start doing the "talk" appearances to remind people about him even though he wasn't quite ready to go in ring yet.

There are other things you can do besides a horrible talk show. The execution of it is bad.

No LA Knight?

Who tags with Cena? Rock?

Is LA Knight going to be out for Fastlane? They could do an AJ Styles return, but Cody Rhodes and Jey Uso both make sense. There’s also always Chad Gable.

SmackDown was really good. Lots of depth to their stories. More than you’re used to in wrestling anyway. Weird there were only 3 matches and 1 of them was impromptu. I feel that damages the illusion of the show being about, you know, wrestling. Street Profits vs. lWo was boring at the start. Dawkins is taller than Bobby Lashley. That’s weird. Lashley is good in his role.

I was actually really impressed by Ridge the Fridge. He does some cool stuff. Not sure how safe he is overall lol. Austin Theory & Grayson Waller make a good tag team.

Should have read the casual forum thread first, which seems backwards.

Knight pulled from the show due to COVID. Planned to team with Cena vs Bloodline.

He was planned to do an angle on the show, but Fastlane is a couple of weeks away isn’t it?

It's only fair to do so when the wrestling forum is riddled with nonsensical takes from old geezers with mental health problems.

Yeah. I imagine he’ll be back to setup the match next week.

If they want to keep Knight out for a bit and have someone else step in, I’m cool with that too.

They should have Paul London step in

Fucking legend! Reminds of that old wrestling forum poster, Alienoid06


https://cdn4.whatculture.com/images/...f6-600x338.jpg

The window has closed on the youngster from Austin, sadly. They missed their opportunity by not having him behind the limo explosion or having him help Shawn Michaels against Vince McMahon in his rivalry against Shawn and God.

The building blocks were all there. Paul’s first match in the WWE was signed by Mr. McMahon. He was put in the ring with WWE Champion, Brock Lesnar. It all comes around as London looks for revenge for being overlooked.

L.A. Knight is so over, it is outstanding.

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Speaking from experience, are we? ;)

That is the pop Tiny WISHES he could get when he enters the arena. HHH Rules All!

Dominik Mysterio is incredible lol

Smackdown is big time. Epic staredown between Cody and Roman! Finish the story!

he is so good, seriously. just a tremendously punchable heel

also cena is doing so much to help put LA knight even further over and i kind of love him for it

although going straight for the universal title feels weird; like there's no way knight beats roman when they're so clearly working up to reigns v cody at WM40... don't want knight to be thrown under the bus to kill time

put the US title on him or trade him to raw so he can end gunther's reign

straight to universal title just feels like a bit of a leap

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">a shot.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SmackDown?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#SmackDown</a> <a href="https://t.co/OZHsjsvsr4">pic.twitter.com/OZHsjsvsr4</a></p>&mdash; Wrestle Ops (@WrestleOps) <a href="https://twitter.com/WrestleOps/status/1712985812239786445?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 14, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

this was a sick shot tho

also KO traded to smackdown was a choice i guess

That’s actually artistic.

Big mistake if Roman beats LA Knight, I feel. Knight should win the belt or they need something to spin him off and put it on him at Mania.

This is actually a great idea. It'd be fresh in addition to having one of those "will he lose" champs who seem "beatable" by most of the roster.

They'll play it safe and keep it boring tho :(

They’ve just done Roman screwing over the babyface so many times that I don’t think you can be surprised by it. It’s another straw on the camel’s back.

LA Knight wins with Jey, Cody, Owens, and Sami interfering. The number games catch up to Roman as he loses the same way he has defended the title.

That’s not a bad idea. I don’t think you want too many faces getting involved. Makes LA Knight look a bit weak. Solo can take out Cena earlier in their match (if that happens). Cody can just not show up. Story drama. Owens can do something with Jimmy that can take them both out. That leaves Zayn and Jey to cancel out Jimmy and Solo in the main event. Maybe Cena cancels out a super-desperate Heyman so he can get in on it?

I’ll go ahead and say it. I don’t “get” Louisiana (that’s intentional, deal with it...YEAH) Knight or why he’s so popular.

I used to hate Eli Drake. HATE Eli Drake. Warmed up to him because of his NWA work and realized he “got it.” Sometimes his work is a little glossy and performative, but underneath it is the drive of a guy who actually works like he’s a logical entity.

He does what is studied to have worked and what suits him. He doesn’t do “too much.” Everything ties into who he is supposed to be, even if that personality is an affectation. It’s why I started to notice Rusev in WWE too and stopped seeing him as a foreign heel pushed too hard.

It helps that Knight was put into a program with Bray Wyatt. RIP and all, but the guy absolutely sucked. He’s been riding that momentum. But that’s also why they can’t count on him being over forever even if they hit him with Mack truck after Mack truck.

El-Ay-Nite!

USA Network commented on photo of LA Knight with Roman in his glasses posted by WWE with "look in my eyes, what do you see?"

Oh my goodness.

yeah this smack down is good

time for a cena match uhoh solo

WWE doesn’t want him back tho. You’ve got to memba that.

:lol::lol:

Can't wait for Survivor Series. Wrestling is back!