2013 Pro Wrestling Thread

Sure... Because once TNA goes out of business, he'll probably buy their library for something like $500,000 Heck, he probably has enough footage of Sting in WCW that he could probably do it now if he wanted to, just to be a dick.

 

I will always love the fact that long before he started to wrestle, Abyss (Chris Parks) earned a master's degree in sports administration from Ohio University.

 

Ummmm ... the early 90s Michigan group that went to two NCAA championship games as freshmen and then sophomores (they lost both), then broke up as the best of them turned pro. They were highly recruited, all played together as freshman and had tremendous college success before becoming little more than solid role players as pros. They're generally credited with bringing more of a modern, hip-hop mentality, for good and bad, to basketball.

Wade Barrett would be Chris Webber in the analogy. Both guys who were solid mid-carders, got close to the big-time, but never quite achieved their full potential.
I guess Daniel Bryan would be Juwan Howard, since Howard's actually won a championship.
The Jalen Rose role is up for grabs between Skip Sheffield, McGillicutty and Husky Harris. All of them have had success, but might be better in their second incarnations.
Tarver and Darren Young would be Jimmy King and Ray Jackson -- the jobbers.

 

In an all-time Survivor Series, Nexus would certainly beat the Spirit Squad, that's for sure.

What really doomed Nexus was that the writers had no long-term plan for them. That was from the era of the anonymous GM. I would like to see notes for all the various ideas on how those storylines were supposed to resolve before they just fizzled out.

 

That sounds about right, except I'd replace Daniel Bryan with David Otunga because Bryan was only in Nexus for a couple of days, and Otunga is a guy people were high on, didn't exactly live up to expectations but hung around a really long time (Otunga isn't doing anything right now, but so long as he's dating/married to Jennifer Hudson and can talk well, he'll get his opportunities).

 

I know he's been doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff, especially with Be a Star campaigns.

But yeah, talk about someone who Vince was high on and didn't live up to expectations.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if Otunga eventually segues into a different role with the company, since they seem to like him. They've tried pushing him a couple different times now though and the audience hasn't bit.

 

It would have been interesting to see how the Nexus storyline would have developed differently had a couple of things happened differently.

For one thing, if you'll recall, they had interrupted a match between Cena and Punk, when Punk was in the SES. Originally, they had it as a fans online vote between Punk and Mysterio (I don't recall if there was a third candidate), and supposedly, the E had planned for the fans to vote for Mysterio, which would have led to a babyface match with Cena. The Nexus comes out, destroys both faces, and they're big heels.

But instead, Punk won the vote, got destroyed with Cena, which created more of a tweener role for the Nexus, instead of a total heel faction, and would lead to the entire locker room chasing the Nexus around the building within a couple of weeks. Had they remained total heels, they could have done a slower build in which Nexus keeps destroying faces as the regular heels look innocent, announcers say "Can anyone stop them?", then, only by necessity, do we get the heels getting upset and joining forces with the faces. They kinda had to accelerate the storyline to get the heels involved.

The second thing would have been what would have happened if Bryan hadn't been fired. I'm thinking they would have put Bryan with Cena, because of the spitting incident and the "I'm better than you!" line. This would have given them two guys for main-event slots, given Bryan more heat for his eventual babyface turn, not put as much pressure on Barrett for being the one top guy, instead of having "The Corre", do an NWO-type split where fans could actually care.

 

I wouldn't categorize Nexus as tweener at any point. They were clearly heels to the point that it drove other heels closer to the face line, even if only for a show or a segment (Jericho, Edge, Punk).

I think the idea was exactly as you have it -- Bryan and Barrett getting big pushes out of the gate, eventually they butt heads for control of the group and they either fracture or someone (probably Bryan) gets turfed.

Another complicating factor was that the third guy they really thought was going to be big quickly was Skip Sheffield. But he broke his ankle pretty soon after the angle started, and it turned out to nearly be a career-ending injury. With Bryan fired, Sheffield out, Darren Young getting the boot for not being good and Barrett having that visa scare, that took the wind out of their sails even before Cena went and Cena'd all over the joint.

 

Heh.

To Cena [v]: To shit all over something; To do something in five moves or less; To not be able to see something.

 

To which a snarky heel opponent can reply "You can't Cena me!"

 

The other thing, now that I think of it, is that with the NWO, they relied upon the faces and heels continuing to squabble with one another and would take advantage of that dissension to attack one group or another. With the Nexus, although the E tried to have continued squabbles, they unified up pretty quickly.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go Cena.