Tag: blets

I will never understand the repeated 50/50 booking of Bron Breakker

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was chatting with some of my bros about Jey Uso’s long-awaited singles championship when he won the Intercontinental blet from Bron Breakker, and my first remark was along the lines of, well I hope they don’t give the blet right back to him in 3-4 weeks, because this has basically been the exact recipe that the WWE has been doing with Bron Breakker since he debuted back in 2021.

For whatever reason, Bron Breakker always has two matches with a guy when there’s a title involved, and by the time the second match is over, Breakker is the one coming out with the title.  50/50 booking in professional wrestling is when two sides trade wins, with the goal of each party getting an opportunity to look like the stronger side once, but in the end the benefit is minimal if at all, because both parties will have taken an L.  It is often criticized by the fan community and I can’t say that I disagree with the notion, and I’d rather a guy be used sparingly and sell a feud on character work and promos as opposed to there being a series of matches where both guys come out no better than which they started.

Like, here’s a list of Bron Breakker’s championship 50/50s since emerging in the WWE ecosystem:

  • Tommaso Ciampa: Loses on 10/26/21. Wins NXT Championship on 01/04/22
  • Dolph Ziggler: Loses NXT Championship on 03/08/22. Wins NXT Championship on 04/02/22
  • Sami Zayn: Loses on 07/06/24. Wins Intercontinental Championship on 08/03/24
  • Jey Uso: Loses Intercontinental Championship on 09/23/24. Wins Intercontinental Championship on 10/21/24

Like, I’m not pulling this pattern out of my ass, since Bron Breakker has emerged onto the scene, this has been precisely how he’s been booked, and I don’t know why.  After three years, he’s proven himself to be a tremendous talent, very much the genetic heir to his family lineage from his dad Rick Steiner and uncle Scotty.  He’s demonstrated the ability to work with all sorts of styles of workers, from all-around talents like Ciampa and Ziggler, small technicians like Carmelo Hayes, to bruisers like Gunther. 

50/50 booking should be reserved for guys greener than Breakker, but I feel like they’re doing it anyways, because of his general age.  Pro-wrestling has this archaic philosophy that everyone should pay their dues and apparently for a very long time.  Furthermore, a guy like Breakker has to always be weary of being accused of succeeding on account of nepotism, so I have to assume that all this 50/50 booking is being done to help him pay his dues, despite the fact that I think it’s doing more harm than it is good to have him eat so many losses, when he’s clearly set up to be one of the torch bearers for the company in future years.

So I guess writing things out, I kind of answered my own question to why Bron Breakker is being 50/50 booked so much.  I don’t necessarily agree with it, but as long as some old philosophies remain, even the most talented of guys will have to learn to eat some shit sandwiches because all their predecessors did too.

That being said, the tease of Bron Breakker vs. Jacob Fatu will be interesting.  I would’ve said that the new Bloodline would be beginning an amassing of titles with Jacob getting his first taste of singles gold, but that would be problematic when it would come time for Solo to try and nab one of the World titles, and I think we all know nobody’s dethroning Cody or Gunther.  But let’s not pretend like the ol’ E won’t 50/50 Bron against Jacob Fatu as well for a fairly meaningless title change just to help advance the Bloodline storyline which is in my opinion starting to border on becoming dragged out too long and with too many players in place.

But hopefully, the E will just stop booking him like this inexperienced rookie, and just let him have a monster run with the gold, because I genuinely believe he’s the future, and it’s important for him to be established as such, when the time comes for him to start being the man.

Even if when he is in performance mode, he’s the color of Hulk Hogan mixed with a Costco rotisserie chicken.

Stop trying to make Saudi Arabia happen

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the best parts about the largely mid Bad Blood PPV PLE was when Triple H came out to make an announcement, which turned out to be about one of the Saudi Arabia shows that pretty much nobody in the Western Hemisphere gives two shits about let alone recognizes as being remotely canonical in the WWE storyline ecosystem, and there were noticeable boos coming from the crowd.

Atlanta, it’s times like these in which I am proud to be one of us.

Seriously though, to top it all off, they unveiled a brand new blet, dubbed the Crown Jewel Championship, that would be awarded to the winners of the respective champion vs. champion matches between the men’s champions and the inferior gender Arabs hate but pretend to tolerate and give rights to in order to futilely gain acceptance from the rest of the world women’s champions.

And of course, I fucking hate them, as much as I fucking hate the Saudi Arabian shows that the WWE continuously forces down the throats of its viewers like they have the ability to single-handedly erase centuries of primitive cultural behavior.  Notice that unveiled was only a men’s variant of the Crown Jewel blet, contrary to the week prior where they unveiled a men’s and women’s rebranded NXT championships.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there were no actual women’s Crown Jewel blet created, but Hunter going on live television and proclaiming that there would be one, forces the Royal Family to shell out a small mint to create a women’s variant of it, lest the almighty accusations of false advertising and poor optics ding their already-fragile reputation to places outside of the Middle East.

On paper, Cody Rhodes vs. Gunther should be a pretty good match, but as is often the case at these Saudi shows, it’s like the talent knows they don’t have to push the gas all the way down, not to mention that they’ll probably be in like Jeddah or Riyadh where it’ll be 104F outside, so they’ll err on the side of caution, and the match will feel neutered and nowhere near as good as people know it could be, if it were at like Wrestlemania or SummerSlam.

But Liv Morgan vs. Nia Jax for the women’s Crown Jewel blet?  I enjoy Liv, appreciate her love for the business not to mention the snack she is to eyes like mine, but there’s no way she’s going to defeat Nia Jax, without a tremendous amount of monkey business from maybe the recently returned Raquel Rodriguez.  Even if Tiffany Stratton cashes in and steals the title away from Nia before the event, Liv vs. Tiffy doesn’t sound as good to me either, because as high as I am on Stratton, she’s still green and I’d rather her first championship reign come when she’s a little bit more ready for it than I think she is now.

So once again, Nia will probably come out on top at a Saudi show, but in a different perspective, I guess it’s good that the E utilizes Crown Jewel to be the place to burn a stinker of a program, so that it doesn’t have to be run in a place that might actually appreciate it.

I’d really love to see both Liv and Nia come out in boring, sterile putty patrol-gray outfits with no personalities, as sort of a protest for the gross second-rate Sharia law bullshit they have to adhere to.  And also, after Nia defeats Liv, she gets blind-sided by Raquel and then Tiffy comes out, cashes in, and basically walks out with two blets, with the Women’s championship as well as the bullshit Crown Jewel blet.

No matter though, I don’t really care who wins what at this bullshit show, because I’m long past over the E tryna make Saudi Arabia a thing.  There’s no way in hell I’ll be able to watch it live, even if I wanted to, in my dad schedule, and if I’m not watching something live, I’m inevitably going to skip through 80% of the show when I watch the replay later, because ain’t nobody got time to watch every single minute when the finishes are just a few clicks away.

Also, what does this new blet mean for Braun Strowman’s ugly-ass Saudi blet he won at the “Greatest” Royal Rumble?  Does this replace it?  Is it a separate title?  Does it matter?  Does anyone actually care?  Nah.

NXT’s new blets are a let down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In case you missed it, as part of the show’s official launching on theCW Network, NXT has rebranded and as a part of the rebranding, have unveiled new and updated championship blets.

In one hand, this should’ve been predictable if I were to even think of the possibility of redesign, seeing as how for the last few years, through NXT 2.0, and whatever the gold logo’d variant after it was called, the title blets had remained almost entirely the same from their last versions from the Triple H black and gold branded NXT; most identifiable by the giant X’s in the middle of the logo on all titles in circulation.

But on the other hand, I’m very unimpressed by the new blet designs for their top men’s and women’s titles, and I can only imagine how vanilla and boring the tag team blets are going to be, and possibly the North American blets if they choose to redesign considering how little the NXT logos were on those.

Renderings of the blets outside of the shiny television lights don’t do them any favors, and you can see how generally lacking in thought and design there is behind the new blets.  They’re regurgitating the straps from the black and gold era which is clearly dictating the design of the plates as a whole, and there’s really not a whole lot of innovation with these updated designs.

NXT grew to a point where NXT championship reigns were being widely accepted as world title reigns for superstars fortunate enough to get to that level, but with the blets looking like this, I’m thinking that they’re reverting back to looking like developmental champions rather than actual world title caliber.

Art nerd philosophy [one] is that fewer things are indicative of mediocrity than constantly rebranding and changing the aesthetics, because changes are only being made at a superficial level, and not necessarily to the more important functional and systemic ones.  NXT 2.0 was a pretty comprehensive rebrand from top to bottom, all the way to execution, but it really wasn’t when 2.0 ended, and other than moving networks, I can’t really imagine what functional and systemic changes they have in store for theCW-NXT (CWNXT?).

But as observed above, they’d been operating NXT 2.0 with even older NXT title blets for so long, that by now a full comprehensive rebranding isn’t necessarily a bad idea either, it’s just that I don’t care much for the “design” of the identity or the blets themselves because of:

Art nerd philosophy [two] is that on a long enough timeline, everyone’s logo and identity seems to inevitably turn into one of being in Arial/Helvetica, specifically a variant of Helvetica Neue.  There are countless examples out there of notable companies and corporations that have rebranded for almost no justifiable reasons, but always tend to take a timeless classic logo, and make an updated version where any script or character is stripped and is usually replaced by some boring, soulless, vanilla sans-serif font, usually wrapped in some rhombus.

NXT is no exception to this rule, with the new logomark being literally the letters in Helvetica Neue 95 Black with a little bit of manual kerning to have the characters butt into each other, but is otherwise another example of a boring, vanilla and soulless rebranding.

Why companies are so hell bent to not go back to logos that worked is beyond me, Burger King has reverted back to an old iteration of their older logos, why can’t NXT go back in time and revert back to the Hunter-era of NXT’s branding?  Then the blets wouldn’t have had to have been re-designed and recreated, but typing that out I’m reminded of the fact that the goal is to push and sell merchandise, so I supposed going back in time is kind of counterproductive to that objective.

Either way, even if I had the fluid disposable income to get more blets for the collection I can’t display, I have zero interest or desire to pick up a replica of this new CWNXT championship blet.  My NXT collection is already well-represented with a Hunter-era NXT championship and North American championship, and I don’t see any need to add to it from a mediocre pool.

I can’t wait for Xavier Woods’ heel turn

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lots of long-time wrestling fans are smarter than people like to give them credit for.  The wrestling industry is at its best when they treat the fans with a modicum of respect for their intelligence and don’t go out of their way to dumb things down that questions it instead.

At this point, I can confidently believe that Xavier Woods’ heel turn isn’t so much just being hinted or teased, it’s definitely something that’s going to happen with the only question really being is just, when?

As much as I was a fan of the group, let’s not deny the fact that The New Day has been dead for the better part of the last few years.  One member of the squad has always been injured at various points throughout this span, and as much yeoman’s work the other two have done in their absence, the fact of the matter is that The New Day has always been a three-man group, and whenever it’s unable to be such, it means that The New Day isn’t really there.

With the unfortunate neck injury that has basically retired Big E at this point was really the nail in the coffin for the group, and it’s like Xavier Woods and Kofi Kingston have just been chugging along under The New Day banner, mostly out of a general lack of ideas of what to do with them in the meantime.  They’re both trustworthy hands, their brand is still popular and easy to stay over, but the reality remains that them and the group have just been a dead idea walking.

And then they just plucked Odyssey Jones out of NXT and went boom, you’re The New Day member #3, and I’m just like, nah dog, I’m fuckin out.  No disrespect to Odyssey, but it’s kind of low-hanging fruit and insulting that they just take a big black wrestler and throw him into The New Day with the express purpose of replacing Big E’s spot.

However, the best thing to emerge from this is that it appears that The New Day are back in the general plans of Creative™, and the wheels are in motion for the ultimate dissolution of the group together, culminating with what appears to be a heel turn for Xavier Woods, who has been the one member of the group to have been overlooked and not given a genuine chance at singles success for over a decade now.

They’ve teased Woods’ seeming lack of satisfaction of the inclusion of Odyssey Jones, there’s been remarks on live television about how Woods is the only member of the original squad to never have won a singles championship, and Woods himself has been doing an excellent job of facial expressions, body language and subtle, non-verbal performing that’s adding to the fuel that something is about to catch fire.

The only problem is that when the match is lit, and heel-Woods is initiated, I have this sneaking suspicion that the result isn’t necessarily going to be what the WWE is going to hope is going to happen, and the fans are going to pop like motherfuckers when it happens.

Kind of like when Becky finally snapped and decked Charlotte Flair during the pre-The Man days, the crowd went bonkers in support of Becky’s heel turn, because Becky Lynch was a performer that the fans had gotten to know, earned their respect, and drew empathy from the notion that they’d been held down and been a bridesmaid far too many times.

I feel like Xavier Woods is in a similar boat, and regardless of how he’s portrayed on television, he’s been building his personal brand for the better part of the last 10+ years on the internet, utilizing Up Up Down Down for people to get glimpses of Austin Creed, and there’s probably a notable amount of overlap between fans of Austin Creed and fans of Xavier Woods, and I predict that when Xavier Woods finally, goes heel and beats the fuck out of Odyssey Jones with a chair, and then plasters Kofi Kingston with a shot to effectively close the book on The New Day, people are going to pop, because the spotlight will suddenly be on Austin Creed, a guy that’s never really had the opportunity to have it, and they will all be excited to see how he handles being given the ball.

Just the thought of singles feuds for Xavier Woods, with inevitably Kofi, Sami Zayn and Jey Uso definitely seem like the types of programs that would get me to actually put effort into keep up to date with the product, but the question really is when they’re going to happen.  All the same, I can’t wait for it when it does, and let’s hope Creative pulls the trigger at the appropriate time, and doesn’t wait too long like they used to do so often throughout the early 2000’s.

I am not a fan of MJF’s short reign as American Champion

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This post could’ve just as easily been called WTF is AEW doing #413, but we’ve gone too far now, and the wheels of writing are already in motion.  But after maybe what, four or five weeks after MJF defeated Will Ospreay for the re-christened American Championship in an absolute banger of a match on Dynamite #250, he gives it right back to Ospreay at All In.

It’s funny because the WWE gets a tremendous amount of flack when they do 50/50 booking, when feuding competitors trade wins back and forth, because “it devalues” both of them having to take losses, but this is a prime example of a zero-sum gain of 50/50 booking between two guys that are expected to be torch bearers for AEW, in MJF and Will Ospreay.

Ospreay takes a loss at Dynamite #250, loses his blet to MJF, and MJF does some really, really outstanding work in the span of him turning it into the American Championship, cashing in on all sorts of cheap heat by taking the title to Mexico and Europe and going ballistic on foreign countries, drawing nuclear amounts of heat in the process.

But instead of continuing to run with this ball that had a tremendous amount of mileage still left in the tank, AEW books MJF to drop the title right back to Will Ospreay, so that MJF can go feud with Daniel Garcia, whom I like, but at the same time, now there’s nobody next in line for Will Ospreay, although I think it’s evidently clear that it’s going to be Ricochet, because Tony Khan doesn’t waste any time at caving to what he and the fans want, which is an inevitable Ospreay vs. Ricochet match.

And just like that, a mega-program between two of the company’s most mega stars is over as quick as it started, all because a notable program needed to be lit and burned for All In just because it was in London and Will Ospreay of course needs to go over in his home country.

Frankly, this is all just extremely short-sighted booking that just occurred, because MJF is probably the most protected man on the entire roster, and he had to take an L, primarily because Tony Khan waited until the last minute to start his science project, panicked and forced two of his top workers to put together a hackneyed program that resulted in both of them taking losses and swapping a belt in rapid succession.  These two guys should be built up for at least six months for a program at Revolution, or Double or Nothing, or whatever one of AEW’s show is supposed to be their grand daddy of them all.

Honestly, I have no doubt in my mind that MJF being the obnoxious asshole American could have gone several more months of him showing up in other countries to wrestle their hot stars, or show up on AEW programming and defeat non-American after non-American for the title.  Frankly, he could have carried this program on as long as he felt like carrying it, because there’s really nobody better than MJF at taking the low-hanging fruit and running with it.

I like Daniel Garcia, but there’s no chance that he could compare with Will Ospreay in carrying his end of a feud.  Ordinarily, I’d say that MJF dropping a mid-card title is really a sign of an impending promotion, but Tony Khan doesn’t seem to follow any logical rules as much as he’s always trying to swerve the audience for really no other reason than because he’s deliberately trying to swerve them for the sake of doing such.

It’s just a shame that it’s going to come at the expense of a rare MJF loss.

I don’t think AEW knows what Unified means

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I was doom scrolling before going to sleep, I came across a video clip of Dustin Rhodes and what appeared to be two members of the Von Erich family, winning the Ring of Honor Six-Man Tag championships at some Ring of Honor show.  I wouldn’t know which one, because ever since Tony Khan bought the entire promotion, it hasn’t held my interest beyond the one Final Battle show I went to a few years ago, and fuck if I’m going to pay actual money to see a TK production.

The thing is, up until seeing this title change, I had no idea that the ROH Six-Man championship was still in existence.  I was under the impression that in an attempt to reduce the sheer volume of blets in AEW/ROH, that when the Bang Bang Gang* defeated The Acclaimed and “unified” the ROH Six-Man blets with the AEW Trios blets, six blets would be reduced to three.

*The amount of turrible that this name is, is unprecedented, and even in a carny, smarky bubble that AEW and their fans exist in, this stands out as that bad

Naturally, instead they ended up with nine total blets to cart around, as Jay White, Colten and Austin Gunn would lug around each an ROH Six-Man blet, the gaudy pink-strapped Acclaimed-version Trios blet, as well as the OG black, blue and gold AEW Trios blet.  There exists enough physical blets in AEW and ROH combined for every single talent that appears on screen to have one.

Anyway though, the whole point of a unified championship is the consolidate the number of titles, to increase the prestige of a singular championship, and despite the fact that there were at one point nine blets to signify the Unified Trios championship, the reality is that the Acclaimed-pink blets and the ROH Six-Man blets should have been taken off television.

Recently, whether it was legitimate or kayfabe, Jay White was injured, and taken off television; I’m hoping it was the latter, and that an injury angle is what was needed in order to break Jay White away from the Gunns and Juice Robinson, so that a guy that hasn’t been even a full year removed from being the IWGP World Champion can actually reset his trajectory in AEW, instead of being like Kazuchika Okada and being used at a fraction of his true capabilities and instead stashed with C-tier talents and meaningless television segments.

As a result of White being out, the Bang Bang Gang was stripped of the Unified Trios championship, and forced to fight The Patriarchy for the right to win them back.  And with their top worker out, Christian and his cronies would pick up the win, the titles, and hopefully he will elevate the Trios blets as well as he had elevated the TNT championship.

The thing is, what everyone failed to mention, and/or I was never made aware of because I don’t pay that much attention to AEW/ROH, is that the ROH Six-Man championship was un-unified just like that, and it wasn’t until I saw Dustin Rhodes and the Von Erichs winning them did I even learn that they were even active championships again.

Look, I’m fine with championships being resurrected when the need arises, but the thing with this convoluted journey of Six-Man/Trios championships is that it all happened within the span of a calendar year and basically ended up in the same place in which it started:

  • August 2023: The Acclaimed win the AEW Trios Championship
  • January 2024: Jay White and the Gunns win the ROH Six-Man Championship
  • April 2024: Bang Bang Gang defeats The Acclaimed, becomes the Unified Trios Champions
  • July 2024: On account of Jay White’s injury, Bang Bang Gang are stripped of the Unified Trios Championship; unmentioned, the unification is severed, and both sets of championships are rendered vacant
  • July 20, 2024: Christian and the Patriarchy win the AEW Trios Championship
  • July 27, 2024: Dustin Rhodes and the Von Erichs win the ROH Six-Man Championship

AEW/ROH doesn’t need 35 championship blets floating around, and yet they had the opportunity to pare down for the sake of the others, but instead they added more, and when they had a second chance to consolidate again, they only reduced out the custom-variants of the Acclaimed, and ended up with two different six-man titles in the end.

What all this amounts to is the sheer frivolity and unimportance of six-man tag team wrestling, if their championships are going to be monkeyed around with and passed around like a blunt at a rap concert. 

It’s funny, because the WWE often got flack for their dismissive attitude towards tag team wrestling, to the point where when AEW came into existence, they made it a high priority point to emphasize tag team wrestling, because of the Young Bucks and FTR.  But whereas the WWE shit on tag team wrestling, AEW apparently has decided to basically create a six-man tag division, so that they could have something to shit on as well.

MJF and the new AEW American Championship

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A week ago, I tuned into AEW Dynamite #250, because I bit the bait at the idea of MJF vs. Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland vs. Kazuchika Okada.  Now the Swerve and Okada match was a stinker and a schmozz, giving credence to Arn Anderson’s adage that two talented workers don’t mean they’ll have any chemistry.

But the MJF and Will Ospreay match was definitely an instant classic, and if Dave Meltzer and the Wrestling Observer had any credibility anymore, I’m sure the match probably got like some convoluted number of like 6.69 stars in his meaningless rating rubric, but the fact of the matter was that it was a great match, resulting in a surprising title change of Ospreay dropping the AEW Intercontinental International Championship to MJF, which I kind of wasn’t expecting.

I intended on watching this week’s Dynamite, I mean BLOOD AND GUTS, because it was something I could do while I ate my dinner, but the TBS app appears to have been developed by RealPlayer and I ended up missing the first 15 minutes of the show because it simply would not stop spinning and ultimately required me to restart the app and re-login in order for it to get working again.

It turns out that I missed the only good thing about the show, which was the opening segment where MJF tossed the International Championship blet into the trash, and unveiled a ridiculous, gaudy new championship blet, aptly called the AEW American Championship, hilariously with no AEW logo on it anywhere.

The man truly continuously grasps at low-hanging fruit storylines and plot devices, but repeatedly knocks them out of the park with his above-average mic, promo and character work, and it’s hilarious that he’s always opening, because you know he’s bouncing from the arena as soon as his work is done for the night.

The strap has the stars and stripes of the United States flag, and the side plates read Better Than You (And the UK) And You Know It on one side and Only Country That Matters on the other side.

It’s an abomination of a championship blet.

So naturally I want it.

Regardless of what it’s called officially, it’s still basically another United States championship, and I don’t know why, call it patriotism or whatever, I’ve always been drawn to US Championships, and I have one from most promotions where there’s been one; WCW’s, WWE’s and even New Japan’s.  I also have the NXT North American blet, and it seems appropriate that MJF’s American Championship blet would be a good addition to the collection.

However, AEW’s replicas, at the low end is $599, and I’m sure a replica would be of high quality, but that price point is just a real bitter pill to swallow.  The most I’ve ever gone on a blet is $550, and even that came from pool of house money when I was doing internet surveys obsessively for two years.

It’s not even available yet, so we’ll see what happens in the future to whether or not I’ll manage to get my hands on one of these things, but despite my self-anointed status as a premiere blet collector, I still don’t have any AEW replicas, mostly on account of their egregious pricing, but if I were ever to start with any, the MJF American Championship seems like the most likely to be my first.