The big story this past week was WWE’s Bad Blood PPV. It would be a middling show if it wasn’t for the opening match, CM Punk vs. Drew McIntyre in one of the best Hell in a Cell matches I’ve ever seen. I’m legitimately not sure whether I liked this or Cody vs. Roman more in terms of WWE matches this year. The rest of the matches weren’t terrible in any way, they were just only good. The only match I’d call a dud was Rhea Ripley vs. Liv Morgan and I was actually enjoying it until it fell apart at the end.
Other stories:
-Tony D’Angelo defeated Oba Femi to become the new NXT North-American Champion in a great match. D’Angelo is one of the more entertaining wrestlers in NXT, he and the rest of The Family have taken what should be a one note gimmick and turned it into an entertaining stable that you want to root for (also, it’s hilarious how much it annoys Bryan Alveraz that they’re faces).
-Stephanie Vacquer appeared in person on NXT this week, backing up Giulia in her feud with Roxanne Perez and Cora Jade. She’s set to make her in-ring TV debut next week against Wren Sinclair, which should be a good match.
-AEW Dynamite moved to Tuesday this past week and it got utterly smoked in the ratings, only drawing 329,000. Moving days and times always hurts but the biggest killer was NXT being at the same time. Dave Meltzer made a great point on Twitter (seen second hand because I try not to go to that shithole) about how it’s clear that most AEW fans watch both that and WWE and are preferring WWE at the moment.
-It’s not hard to see why they’re preferring WWE when shit like the Kris Statlander situation happened. For AEW fans who thought they were missing something (after being a straight up heel for months, Statlander suddenly dropped Stokely Hathaway as a manager and turned face), you didn’t. This all happened off-screen. Wrestlers turning face by dumping their slimy managers is one of the easiest things to write in wrestling, how did they fuck this up?
-There was some discontent in WWE over the ten women match on Monday. Most of the women have not been liking the storyline and feeling like they’re low priority. They’re not wrong in either case.
-Triple H was asked about the lack of black male wrestlers on recent PPVs and gave a hilariously awful “I don’t see color” answer. He’s doing well with showcasing black female wrestlers but not with the men. We’re probably going to be seeing Carmelo Hayes vs. Andrade again on a future PPV or another tag team epic with The Street Profits against The Bloodline and DIY.
-NWA was kicked off of CW’s streaming app and is now posting episodes on Twitter. Never ceases to amaze me how terribly this company is doing.
-This isn’t new or important but I just learned this and it’s absolutely fascinating to me. I knew that WWF and AAA had a small collaboration in the ’90s. I didn’t know that two of the wrestlers that sent over were the fake Razor and Diesel!
