Fro

The only guy they had who could replace Ross (and WWE wouldn't use him for various reasons) was Cornette. He'd probably blow a gasket and get in an argument with Vince screaming in his headset to do something stupid. Fat Tony has less credibility than Ross (although I wouldn't mind hearing him a couple weeks for nostalgia's sake, same with Bischoff and Vince McMahon). I can't see Joey Styles replacing him. Heyman is gone at the end of the year. Josh Matthews is the best in-house option they've got. I can't seriously believe some people want to see Coach or Todd Grisham be the lead PBP guy as they are terrible. As for the commentator spot, they're ridiclously deep on who they could drag out to do it. Maybe they'll do something way out of the box here that'll be interesting, but I doubt it.

Oct 15 is the public sale date.

Good ratings for everyone. Raw's about where I thought it should be but for this much hype it should have been a little higher (but they did switch networks and get a bigger rating than the last Raw so that's a big positive). They had ads all over the place on the net, in Rolling Stone, on NBC, cable inserts. It shows they have a ways to go to get back to where they were in their prime and nostaglia won't get them there alone. The UFC number is great... I was expecting it to be killed by Raw but it seems like they've got a good number of non-WWE fans watching. TUF is about stable with what it was with the Raw lead-in. Spike and TNA were expecting 0.5 for Impact (despite what bonehead Keller says... they may have been hoping for 1.0s but that's not what they expected), so 0.8 is a very strong rating for the first show. Can't wait to see hourly breakdowns and the number the replay of Impact did... with that lead-in it might beat the Saturday night airing.

Spoilers ahoy... The plan right now is for them to do a Raw Team (with Michaels as captain) v.s. Smackdown Team (with JBL as captain) match at Survivor Series, with the losing team's GM getting fired. No more than than. WWE is planning on doing Orton/Batista at WM for the World Title, so there are no plans to recombine the brands (as that would ruin their grand plan to get to 24 PPVs a year).

Meltzer has said quite a few times Spike would be very happy with a 0.5 rating from TNA on their first show (and he actually has some network sources unlike Keller). It's a good sign if Spike TV officials believe in TNA and were very pleased with the first show quality-wise, but they weren't expecting, nor realistically hoping for a 1.0 or greater with the first show.

The last time Velocity drew a 0.8 was April 24, 2004. It's solidly beating what all 3 WWE B-Shows did at the end (even with Heat being a PPV lead-in show a lot of the time).

Considering it was on at 11 pm on Saturday and showed a big improvement from Velocity's rating, it *is* a great number. It's about 3x what they did on FSN. The rating held through at the show (and went up a bit in the last quarter hour), which is a tough thing to do in the 11-12 pm slot. Just to give you an idea on where they're at... this is the rating ECW was falling in for most of 2000. With the replay added in, they'll be reaching an audience similar to WCW Saturday Night at the end.

Angle/Michaels was extremely disappointing. I couldn't believe they could have a match that average. They completely phoned it in, and the segments during the commerical break were even worse (they showed them on WWE.com). Keller may have taken the biggest hit from the ratings bong ever to rate that **** 1/2. I'm a big mark for Angle. I'm a big mark for Michaels. This was lucky if it was *** 1/2. Terrible, terrible ending. No drama. Crowd wasn't into it. No nearfalls. Only a couple neat spots. The entire show had some mark out moments and neat spots, but it was mostly based on nostalgia, and at 3 hours 15 minutes with 5 matches (with one being a bra and panties match and another being Bischoff v.s. Cena in essentially a non-match). Stripped down into 2 hours and with the crap and hotshotting cut out, there was a pretty good Raw in here, but it was very disappointing considering the insane amount of hype it got. That's not even to mention the stupidity of doing the Raw/Smackdown angle at the end of Raw. Hey, Angle and Cena suddenly don't hate each other! Batista is good buddies with JBL and Christian (not to mention Orton)? The ladder match had a real neat spot at the end but it never got going. A real sprint without any drama. Of course, HHH had to put himself over Masters and Carlito before turning on Flair. Flair did bleed buckets and HHH kicked the crap out of him through multiple segments. I liked Foley/Piper and the Ortons, about 10 minutes of the Austin/McMahons stuff (but that was a 25-minute segment!). Conway taking bumps from the legends. Again, there was probably a good 2 hour Raw in here somewhere and I marked out for some stuff on the show, but compared to the hype that made it seem like it was supposed to be WM 23 or something it was quite disappointing.

Very disappointing show... Michaels/Angle was way, way below both their first matches (like *** 1/4 maybe). Terrible, terrible finish. Keller's on crack to put that above ****. Ladder match had some neat spots but never really got going (probably *** 1/2 ish). Smackdown match was a complete bait and switch. Doing Raw v.s. SD at the end makes no sense and just kills kayfabe (why do Angle/Cena, JBL/Batista suddenly turn buddy/buddy?). 5 matches in 3 hrs 15 minutes, one of them being GM v.s. Wrestler and the other being. Austin segment was fun by the end but didn't need to be 25 minutes. I liked the Foley/Piper/Ortons segment at the beginning. HHH puts himself over both Masters/Carlito before doing the turn which was overly telegraphed. The Hogan interview was pointless. It had some markout moments on it but it was very disappointing for all the hype. They could have dragged out this over a few weeks and gotten several great shows out of it.

I thought it was worth watching, particularly the first couple segments (SEAN MOONEY IS ALIVE!) and the Owen one (with the RETURN OF BRET HART). Foley and a couple of the other guys are pretty candid in describing some of the stuff that sucks. Some of the other segments were bad/boring and WWE focused a little too much on some wrestlecrap moments. It didn't just focus on the stuff that you'd expect, and they had guys talking about people you thought they'd never mention again who are no longer with the company and who have burnt bridges.

Meltzer and Tenay said a week ago that TNA and Spike are planning on having Saturday Night being the first-run show for the foreseeable future. This was after someone calling in on the show and asking about Monday night being the first run show. I think that's just a newsz board guy making stuff up. Obviously, if the Midnight Replay does a bigger number than the first-run show consistantly, that could change things. Spike's on crack if they don't run a TNA special one of the weeks Raw is preempted if Impact does decent numbers (which they will).

Very good start... not super amazing but very good. They did what they had to do in a debut. I love how great the production looks and the fast pace of the show. They totally changed the look of the Impact Zone with a few tweaks and made it look like a big arena. Next week's show is better wrestling-wise by all accounts.

Shelly/Williams/Sabin was a great spotfest sprint... just what they needed on the first show. Crowd is turned up loud... I like it.

Presentation is awesome... arguably rivals WWE. Not amazing wrestling so far, but the show is very fastpaced.

Final Segment is the big stars entering through the entryways, which was the standoff in the tapings. Just showing Rhino, Daniels, Jarrett, Team Canada, AMW, Jeff hardy, and Tito Ortiz coming out. They didn't show the standoff.

Next segment: Tenay and West are in the ring and introduce Jeff Hardy as Hardy's music plays. Rhino runs down and security holds him back as Tenay/West hype the main event over the roar of the crowd.

In front of a "Live Crowd" now, nice crane shot, Tenay/West throw it to... Jarrett and AMW in the ring. Impact Zone looks awesome, production looks 10x better than the FSN show. Jarrett has the belt and says watch Impact and see the title controversy in Canada. AMW is sort of dressed like the "Southern Justice" gimmick WWE did with the Godwinns. "TNA" chants from the crowd as we go off. BTW, the reason Spikes pimps UFC is because it's a real sport and thusly advertisers are more willing to sponsor it. It's got some prestiage to it. Even though UFC may do less of a rating than TNA will eventually, Spike will make more money off UFC.

Mike Tenay and Don West in front of the Impact Entrance plugging the show tonight. Tito Ortiz walks into the shot West; "HOLY @#$% IT'S THE HUNINGTON BEACH BAD BOY TITO ORTIZ" Tenay: "and he's on Impact tonight!"

There was just a really good one from Abyss and James Mitchell. And a very good promo from Rhino banging a locker, talking about how TNA is extreme and saying someone will get GORED tonight. Another one from Chris Daniels. These are getting better as the night goes on (they're about about 10 after and 15 til every hour). It's too bad they didn't do these during Raw .

So far these are all just different TNA wrestlers plugging Impact later tonight (and Ultimate Fight Night live in some of them). Some spots are 30-seconds and some are a minute. There have been some with Tenay/West/Traci, Monty Brown, Tenay/West/AJ (on a box), 3LK, Team Canada so far.

You can probably make the argument that they are #2 in the number of people their show reaches (Eurosport and Spike alone is around 200 million homes). Money-wise and as far as drawing crowds, they're behind quite a few promotions in Japan and Mexico.

Wait until you actually watch the show to proclaim it crap. All detailed reports are that it was a pretty good show.

Considering they didn't have the TV time to give Joe a good length match to establish him, this is the right move. They'll play the video package for him and get people all hyped up to see him in week 3. The full spoilers seem much better that the actual show. I suspect some of the stuff taped at the beginning will be cut into the 2nd week's show. Anyone who was expecting TNA to put on a PPV-calibur Impact was expecting too much. Anyone who was expecting a 4 1/2-star match for free on the first show was expecting too much (they simply don't have enough TV time). Anyone who was expecting a hotshot of a PPV main event was expecting too much. The show is airing at 11 pm and midnight, not opposite Raw. There's good wrestling, interesting angles, and some surprises for people who don't read stuff online all day long. I mean, if you're a mark watching this show instead of Velocity, you're probably going to be pretty damn blown away by the Dudleys and Nash coming out one after the other.

They're never going to end the brand split because that means they can't continue their march towards 24 PPVs a year. Their stock would tank. You won't see an end to the brand split unless Smackdown gets cancelled and nobody picks it up.

Styles/Daniels just because they won't have to work around a bunch of commerical breaks. They also aren't crippled and can do big highspots (and won't have to worry about upstaging HHH). If Michaels/Angle was on PPV also, it'd be awfully close.