WWE: New Rosters, New "Season", Same Problems

[Baby Shoes]

There were at least things I liked about 09 RAW or 00 WCW, @King Kamala

Smackdown isn’t great but it is fine. RAW is pretty unwatchable. I fast forward lots of the show most weeks. They’ve killed the mystique ona lot of talent I like and it is mostly just painful to get through.

 

[King Kamala]

I just saw that Miz got back his Money in the Bank briefcase last night on technicality that since John Morrison handed the ref the briefcase at TLC,it wasn't a valid cash in----and yeah, there goes my minimal interest in seeing what's going on on RAW!

 

[The Amazing Rando]

I hope it happens again, but like, really close to the MITB PPV and he wins, then has to give the belt back but loses out on the contract because they've already given it to someone else.

 

[Hawk 34]

Have they done the scenario where the champion is the MITB holders tag team partner and they tease it? I feel like it has to have happened before, probably with the women’s MITB.

 

[Brocklock]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1343784006874058752

...is RAW reaching '09 RAW or '00 WCW territory where I should start watching to see how crappy it is?

I would rather watch nothing but WCW 2000 for the rest of my life than watch anything involving The Fiend from the last 14 or 15 months. It lacks the sincerity of something like The Dungeon of Doom and it's too annoying and cynical to enjoy on a bad level. Bray Wyatt needs to go away and make terrible z grade horror films for The Asylum.

Also I'm at the point where I despise the MITB gimmick and I never want to see that again either.

 

[Epic Springs]

Some of the boys who were recently in WWE are voicing displeasure with the way all that went down. Curt Hawkins chiefly among them.

WWE-HUBER TRIBUTE UPDATE | PWInsider.com

www.pwinsider.com

Don't know when this will air but they supposedly have more stuff planned.

 

[Tino Standard]

The thing that is frustrating is that Raw has talent. That’s a good roster, and you could have a perfectly watchable wrestling show on Mondays if only the writing wasn’t a complete disaster.

 

[King Kamala]

On paper, the RAW roster is good if not great. But then again, the '00 WCW roster and '09 RAW roster on paper were fairly strong.

 

[Epic Springs]

When was the WWE roster ever weak, really? I feel like every era had their fair share of stars just saddled with horrible gimmicks or bad booking.

 

[King Kamala]

Not counting the pre Hogan days (when even then they were usually one of the stronger territories roster wise), I think last time WWF's roster was weak on paper was 1995-98. Obviously, they had strong main eventers throughout but those undercards were weak. Vince Russo's booking, for all of the criticism its gotten over the years, really did a good job of making chicken salad out of chicken shit in the Attitude Era. Look at how many midcard guys' careers were never quite the same after he left for WCW.

 

[Epic Springs]

Let's see, after the Outsiders left for WCW, in 1996 we had: Bret Hart who left for 8 months after WM, Shawn Michaels who politicked like a motherfucker, an injured/stiff Vader, Ahmed Johnson who kept getting injured, Sid who kept leaving for softball, Ultimate Warrior who left after a 3 months run, Owen, Bulldog, LOD, Yokozuna who got taken off TV for his weight, Steve Austin who was past the Ringmaster but not quite Stone Cold yet, HHH who is still a Blue Blood, and others. I in hindsight I can see this being a fairly weak roster but several guys were on the verge of breaking out.

 

[King Kamala]

I would actually argue early '98 was maybe weakest roster on paper ever. You had a few undeniably strong main eventers, a few future main eventers, and a lot of crap.

 

[Brocklock]

A lot of those 00's WWE rosters would be so much better if they didn't have their 6'3 and 250 pounds and up restrictions. I thought the WWE main roster was pretty dire around the first half of 2012 before The Shield and Cesaro came in and then starting with 2013 the roster has been fantastic. Like a lot of the PPV cards were to the point where they had to have multiple jobber squashes and comedy matches to fill out the shows. The Royal Rumble in 2012 was also one of the thinnest since like 98. It was especially noticable when they would have a Money In The Bank or Elimination Chamber where they had more than 1 multiman match leading to PPV cards like this

2	CM Punk (c) defeated The Miz, Chris Jericho, Kofi Kingston, Dolph Ziggler (with Vickie Guerrero), and R-Truth[17]	Elimination Chamber match for the WWE Championship	32:39​
3	Beth Phoenix (c) defeated Tamina Snuka[18]	Singles match for the WWE Divas Championship	07:19​
4	Daniel Bryan (c) defeated Santino Marella, Wade Barrett, Cody Rhodes, Big Show, and The Great Khali[19][20]	Elimination Chamber match for the World Heavyweight Championship	34:04​
5	Jack Swagger (c) (with Vickie Guerrero) defeated Justin Gabriel (with Hornswoggle) by submission[21]	Singles match for the WWE United States Championship	3:48​
6	John Cena defeated Kane[13]	Ambulance match	21:21​

and this

2	Sheamus (c) defeated Dolph Ziggler (with Vickie Guerrero)	Singles match for the World Heavyweight Championship	15:10[9]​
3	Santino Marella defeated Ricardo Rodriguez	Tuxedo match	04:25[9]​
4	Christian (c) defeated Cody Rhodes	Singles match for the WWE Intercontinental Championship	11:30[9]​
5	The Prime Time Players (Darren Young and Titus O'Neil) (with A.W.) defeated Justin Gabriel and Tyson Kidd, Primo and Epico (with Rosa Mendes) and The Usos (Jey Uso and Jimmy Uso),	Fatal-four way tag team match to determine #1 contenders to the WWE Tag Team Championship[11]	09:30[9]​
6	Layla (c) defeated Beth Phoenix	Singles match for the WWE Divas Championship	06:57[9]​
7	Sin Cara defeated Hunico	Singles match	05:48[9]​
8	CM Punk (c) defeated Daniel Bryan and Kane	Triple threat match for the WWE Championship[12]	18:17[9]​
9	Ryback defeated Dan Delaney and Rob Grymes	Handicap match	01:38[9]​
10	John Cena (with Mr. McMahon) defeated Big Show (with John Laurinaitis) by escaping the cage	Steel cage match Since Cena won, Laurinaitis was fired. Had Big Show won, Cena would have been fired.[13]

Then again I thought the WCW roster around 00 after they did their mass cuts was pretty thin as well.

 

[King Kamala]

Yeah, WCW roster after their massive cuts in Fall of '00 was fairly thin but ironically, that is when they started turning things around.

And yeah x2 on some late '00s WWE rosters being pretty weak. Although tbh, I think Elimination Chamber 2012 is a pretty weak example of a weak roster as there at least a half dozen or so guys on that show I would consider main event level guys and another half dozen that are borderline.

 

[Brocklock]

Maybe now, but at that time a lot of those guys were just dead in the water. The Miz and Kofi were not relevant and were coming up to some of the biggest periods in their career where they were floundering. R-Truth was a babyface again and in the weak point of his WWE career before he became a pure comedy guy. Cody had some potential then, but losing to Big Show kind of hurt him and he never got far as a singles act again in WWE as he was in 2010/2011. Barrett and Swagger were floundering. Big Show and Kane are Big Show and Kane. I mean I get including them as stars, but this is when I feel the fatigue of them really started to be apparent with crowds.

There just wasn't a lot of depth is what I'm saying. You could really tell in the Rumble the month before where a 1/3 of the entrants were announcers, legends, and comedy guys like Ricardo Rodriguez to fill it out. I count only about 4 of 5 people tops in the match I would say were big stars at that point in Orton, Sheamus, Ziggler, Jericho, and Big Show.

Cena, Bryan, Jericho, Punk, Dolph, Sheamus all were pretty big deals at the time, but the roster even in 2009 was so much better than that.

I just remember the consensus around that time on message boards was that the roster was really weak and that they should hire more indie guys. And then they did after that.

 

[King Kamala]

I guess our main takeaway and how to tie it back to the current WWE canon is that since 2014, even the most minor PPV has had at least 4 to 6 people that could and should be big time main eventers and maybe has had 4 to 6 good PPVs during that period.

 

[Brocklock]

I've been going through some of these shows in this excruciating WWF/WWE/WCW PPV watch project I've been doing for a few years and forgot just how dead in the water the crop of midcarders were in early 2012. I could see reading the names and thinking it's a decent roster, but Barrett, Kofi, Miz, Swagger, Truth, Cody, etc were doing nothing or in a holding pattern. The crowds just weren't into those guys as much as a year or two prior in the beginning of 2012.

One of the reasons I got back into WWE around November 2012 when The Shield debuted until the Fall when they were actively trying to piss off the fans with their booking of Bryan, was the amount of exciting new faces they had mixed in with bringing back guys like RVD. The Rock doing 3 PPV matches in a row in the beginning of 2013 also made everything seem bigger to me.

 

[Gary]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1343784006874058752

...is RAW reaching '09 RAW or '00 WCW territory where I should start watching to see how crappy it is?

Dontcha love how they split up the lovable team of Alexa and Nikki so they can have the former fall under the spell of a psychopath who attacked her and have the latter be just sorta there? Also, how am I supposed to believe in The Fiend as a face?

 

[Dandy]

We have beaten this horse, but I just cannot fathom that WWE fails to see the Hollywood writers and scripting promos has led to disastrous results while allowing their wrestlers, employees, independent contractors to show their own personalities and grow their own characters resulted in the biggest boom period ever, and they think the way to correct this is to double down on the scripting and bad writing.

 

[King Kamala]

Dontcha love how they split up the lovable team of Alexa and Nikki so they can have the former fall under the spell of a psychopath who attacked her and have the latter be just sorta there? Also, how am I supposed to believe in The Fiend as a face?

I don't want to channel @BruiserBrody or Jim Cornette but seriously, who is supposed to be the babyface in the Orton Vs Fiend feud?

 

[Dandy]

COVID-19 or a torn quad.

 

[Baby Shoes]

I don't want to channel @BruiserBrody or Jim Cornette but seriously, who is supposed to be the babyface in the Orton Vs Fiend feud?

They have been trying to make the Fiend a tweener leaning face since Roman “stole the title” from him.

While people like the quirk and the character and it sells merch, there is nowhere to make that character sympathetic. It’s felt like they’ve been spinning him as a miscast face while also you know, brainwashing one of the top female talents. Then again, that probably makes him a bigger face with a segment of the crowd.

 

[Brocklock]

One more thing because I'm terrible at letting things go and obsessing over minuite details even in a friendly debate, I was looking at that 2012 roster in the exact moment. If you are looking at what they did in the past or future, you can make any roster sound good. Like the wwf roster from early 98 had Vader, Barry Windham, The Road Warriors, JBL, The Rock N Roll Express, Ahmed Johnson, Jeff Jarrett, 2 Cold Scorpio, Mark Henry, Puerto Rican Megastar TNT and so on.

 

[King Kamala]

I feel like you can make any roster sound horrible as well. It is not about the level of talent, it is about what you do with it. If rosters were judged purely on paper than ‘98 WCW would be greatest roster of all time!

 

[JHawk]

Not sure who actually watches Raw Talk, but it opened with Charly Caruso and R-Truth IN THE ARENA saying they don't know what happened because the arena went completely dark as Raw went off the air.

So people sitting in the arena a couple of hundred feet away are saying they wouldn't have been able to see a fucking fire in a dark arena.

Stupidity of the angle aside, if Alexa was on fire, at a minimum Tom Phillips, Byron Saxton and Samoa Joe would have seen it.

WWE logic FTW or something.

 

[King Kamala]

I can't imagine R-Truth's response to that angle not being accidentally incredibly racist like a Little Rascals short from the '40s.

 

[Gary]

They have been trying to make the Fiend a tweener leaning face since Roman “stole the title” from him.

While people like the quirk and the character and it sells merch, there is nowhere to make that character sympathetic. It’s felt like they’ve been spinning him as a miscast face while also you know, brainwashing one of the top female talents. Then again, that probably makes him a bigger face with a segment of the crowd.

Either way, who is this feud for? Orton has had a good to decent year post Mania, and if live audiences still existed they'd be booing The Fiend for being lame. I can't think of anybody outside of maybe Vince who would look at this and say to themselves "Yes, that's what we need to close Raw!" Oh, and again, applying the mandible claw on one of your top female stars and brainwashing her isn't even tweener shit. That's just repulsive.

 

[Baby Shoes]

I agree. While the The Fiend is very visually striking, I felt the character to be a problem since inception.

However, I think you are giving crowds way too much credit saying they would boo Fiend. Most of the normal people who pay to see WWE regardless of quality still eat him up. He was one of the main things I saw fans wearing and talking about when I went to a Smackdown in February. People are still consuming his merch in the existing fan base. A lot of his stuff was the stuff that was selling out on their site during the holidays. It is his antics that are probably not helping with the people who aren’t currently interested in watching.

But I think it goes to show how the character has killed the momentum of almost everyone he’s feuded with should be realized by the company but LOL WWE and self-awareness.

 

[Brocklock]

I do think Bray Wyatt deserves as much blame for this as Vince and the WWE writing. He's supposedly very hands on with it and from everything I've read about him, his ideas are really bad and belong in some of the lowest budget horror movie trash out there. He doesn't have shit on Florida Kevin Sullivan. Shit Dungeon Of Doom Taskmaster Sullivan had some cooler horror inspired ideas.

Also, yeah The Fiend would still be massively over. Fans eventually got sick of Kane and Big Show but they were over for years. Internet pariahs like Triple H and Orton have almost always been over with live crowds. He's gonna be a big part of the WWE for years to come, but it's leading to less people wanting to watch WWE than ever before.

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

Dontcha love how they split up the lovable team of Alexa and Nikki so they can have the former fall under the spell of a psychopath who attacked her and have the latter be just sorta there? Also, how am I supposed to believe in The Fiend as a face?

I was never a fan of that team, since I've never been a fan of tag teams that look like they were put together just so that they can break up and feud (also, I've never seen the appeal of Alexa Bliss). But, at least it gave Nikki something to do.