iggymcfly

Disregard my last post. Took Montana against Princeton (D+ against D-), and I quit up 41-0 at the half. Now I'm worried that All-American might be too easy if I take a good team. (Louisville probably wouldn't work there for instance and I was thinking about doing a dynasty with them.)

Am I really going to have to start this game on Varsity? I tried a game with UTEP against UCLA last night (on All-American) just to get the hang of it before I started a dynasty, and I quit down 45-0 in the 3rd quarter. I haven't had the game for a couple years now (decided to get Madden instead last year for god knows what reason), but trying the old one a few weeks ago, I still managed to pick up a win on Heisman. I can't believe that the series has really gotten that much more difficult in such a short time. I guess I'll try one more practice game where I have a mismatch in my favor, and if I still lose handily, I'll just have to swallow my pride and play a season on Varsity.

Back in first after a huge week. Other than saves (which I only accumulate by accident, as I never signed a closer), I either won or tied every category. Feels much sweeter to be back on top after a little struggle, as I was kind of taking it for granted before.

Good episode of Entourage tonight. Ari's awesome when he gets a little bit of power, and I thought E's subplot was a pretty good one to carry an episode. The first couple episodes of the season had me worried that the show was in a decline, but it's picked up considerably since then. Right now, Entourage is really the only show on TV where I actually look forward to new episodes and watch consistently.

Whew. Glad Bored covered it. I didn't want to be an asshole, but I was going to protest it if no one else did. We really can't have I-AA schools mucking up our pristine I-A football simulation here. Maybe if we had 119 people signed up already, it would be easier to make that consideration.

I think the Emmy thing sounds pretty fair. The first season of Lost was the best season of television I ever saw in my life. The second season was so bad, it actually started to tarnish my memory of the first. Not that it was actually bad as a stand-alone effort, but it was sooo far below the quality of the first that it was really off-putting. And no it's not that I just like action and don't appreciate character development either. Locke's character was completely ruined in Season 2 and Sawyer's took a huge leap backward for no ostensible reason. Charlie was also much less compelling. Even worse, the tailie subplot was terrible and served basically to kill time as the only character's remaining are Bernard and Eko. Actually, I would have been pissed off if the second season of Lost was nominated for an Emmy.

There's a difficulty setting, you know. I don't have this year's game yet, but I really doubt that it was just unbelievably easy for you on Heisman. To be fair though, there's a pretty big gap between levels, so maybe you don't want to switch. Going from 12-1 national champions at All-American to 2-10 the following year at Heisman used to kind of piss me off.

Wow, I'm really surprised by the response to this. All the "it's wrong, it's bad", etc. WTF? This is TSM. What, am I the only pedophile left on the board? Maybe, we collectively climbed into the closet and I missed the memo. Anyway, I'm totally seeing this movie.

Well, I just watched the show. I forgot about it initially, but it's set to record every week on my DVR. I tried to watch it last night, but I fell asleep halfway through, and then I finally finished it tonight. One thing I want to know is why people weren't more pissed about Sandman jobbing to two low blows from MIKE KNOX. Come on that's fucking pathetic. One of two people they brought in for ECW that they have any build at all, and his first match back, he jobs to two low blows. That's just awful. That was basically the point where I decided this project was dead. When they talked about phasing out the ECW wrestlers and style, I thought they meant over maybe a year and a half, not a month and a half. This is just ridiculous. Take away Sabu and a few jobbers, and this is just WWE Tuesday night. Oh, also Heyman's character has gotten completely ridiculous overnight. Why would he want to give Tommy Dreamer the "kiss of death". Why would he be allying himself with Test of all people. If they had Heyman protecting Show (understandable), giving an interview about how he was a more stable champion, and then Dreamer came out, screamed at Heyman for selling out, and caned him, you'd have a reasonable feud. This is just ridiculous. Oh, and I thought Dreamer taking the kiss was a sign that he's done being a serious wrestler and is now the same "sideshow that will take anything" that used to drink Undertaker's tobacco spit. Finally, the main event was just awful. Why would ECW fans want to see Taker/Show. Why is an obvious promo for an undercard match at GAB main eventing ECW. This has gotten way worse than I thought it would way faster than I thought it could. I was trying to be optimistic, even after RVD got jobbed out and suspended, but this is indefensible. If they hype another main event next week with a WWE face against an ECW heel, I'm not watching period.

DX is definitely really over right now. They had more heat last night than any babyface has in the last 12 months. A little bit of it was probably because they were in Shawn's hometown, but still, the fans are really into them. Cena's a different story. He was getting booed three days ago at SNME, and in order to facilitate his pop, they had to trick the fans into thinking they were getting a boring Striker segment before he came out. He still gets a superstar pop a lot of the time, especially on his entrance, but there are also a lot of fans that are sick to death of him. If they want both characters to continue to succeed, they really need to switch places as soon as possible, so that DX gets into the title picture while they're still fresh, and Cena gets out of it to keep the fans from completely turning on him again. All they need is for Edge to go over Cena clean at SS, give a 15 minute promo to the point that it's getting boring the last night, and then get interrupted by DX. They can go from there, and they really let everybody go, the promos could really be tremendous.

I think they had a 30 second segment about a month ago where Candice got pissed off and disbanded the team.

The Cena/Edge program has basically been going on since January at this point, and I think Summerslam is about as far as they can possibly stretch it out. My question is what program would you like to see main event Raw going into Unforgiven. The main event roster on Raw is pretty thin right now, as you've got Cena, Edge, DX, Orton, and that's about it. I suppose Kane's a possibility, but when you're character's so screwed up that they take you off the air for weeks at a time, you're probably not ready for a world title shot. Anyway, the one program that really stands out to me as interesting right now is Edge/Shawn Michaels. I can't remember seeing them have a one-on-one PPV match ever, and it seems like their styles would compliment each other well. Edge is pretty good at varying his offense, and working over body parts, and Shawn's selling has always been one of his strong points. Also, the promos woud be terrific with Edge the actual young "degenerate" type facing Shawn, who might be a little cooler, but is quite a bit too old to play the part. Also, Edge has been doing awesome heel work for the past few months, but most of it's been going for naught as he hasn't had a strong face to work off of. Cena just isn't over with the majority of the male fans, and too many of them are cheering Edge for any of his nefarious tactics to really get to anyone. Take the screwjob at SNME for instance. The Dusty finish didn't even seem relevant because most of the fans didn't care if Cena won. Meanwhile, DX has been getting huge pops since their return, and I'm sure that if HBK was challenging, the heat would be a lot stronger. Of course, this plan is impractical for a number of reasons: 1. HHH can't play the second banana. Both due to internal power, and for character reasons as well. I mean, he turned on Shawn before because he was jealous of him, he's talked hundreds of times about he was obsessed with the title, and he turned face when he was fighting Vince about getting a title shot. Somehow, it would just seem weird for him to hang out backstage and pull pranks with someone who was carrying the championship belt. 2. Shawn Michaels is supposedly taking time off after Summerslam. He can't be starting a big main event program if he's not even on the show. 3. Vince is just too high on Cena. Despite the fact that he turns off a number of viewers, and ruins main events when he doesn't have a counter-culture tweener like RVD to work off, he's still booked to win almost every match he's in, and I can't see him losing to Edge at Summerslam. So what does that leave us with? Face Cena who half the crowd hates against heel Orton who gets little reaction either way, and will be coming off a loss to a 60 year old man? Cena/Edge part XXVIII? Cena/HHH that we've already seen multiple times, still waiting for the double turn? What do you think the WWE should do with the Raw main event scene after Summerslam?

It's always funny hearing people like him insist that Cena turns people off, even though his segments regularly draw a high increase in viewership and often manage to get Raw's peak rating. God, this isn't rocket science. I'll explain it one more time slowly. I'm not saying Cena isn't popular. I'm not saying he doesn't have a lot of fans, and I'm not saying that people stop watching when he comes on. I'm sure that more people watch when the title feud's on then watch a run-of-the-mill Umaga squash. I'm saying that the majority of the Raw audience is bored with seeing Cena as the top face and is bored with seeing him in the title feud for the last 20 months in a row. If they would have just turned him heel 8 months ago, or moved him down to the upper midcard, this wouldn't have been a problem. Vince is so stubborn with trying to keep a couple extra bucks of merchandising, that he's completely ignored the vocal response of the fans who don't want to cheer Cena, and the main event feuds have suffered as a result. The HHH/Cena and HHH/Edge/Cena stuff was all really awkward, and now this Edge/Cena feud has hardly any heat at all. Look at the small number for Backlash if you want to see how well a title feud with no face draws. Whereas Edge is really over as a heel right now, and would probably draw well in a title feud with just about any main event face right now if they booked him strong at all, Vince is passing on this completely, in the misguided notion that he's going to make Cena into "the next Austin" if he just protects him enough. The fact is that most of the audience isn't that into Cena right now, and he just doesn't work in that role.

Yeah, that was bullshit. I was sure that I'd move back into first this week since I reached the minimum innings requirement and my opponent didn't. Alas, they let him keep his pitching wins anyway, so what should have been a 10-1 shellacking turned into a run-of-the-mill 7-3 victory. Shenanigans I say! Oh, and for the record, almost everyone in the league made 28 innings. It really wasn't all that unreasonable of a requirement.

This is not true, and HTQ already proved why. Proved? That's a little bit of a bold statement. I read the little summary where he went over like three or four Raws, and pointed out how Cena's segments were higher rated than the others, but that certainly doesn't prove anything. I mean sure the segments with the title feud will be higher rated than the IC crap or stuff with the Spirit Squad, but I bet if they tried a main event feud without Cena right now, it would draw a hell of a lot better than having him start his third long title reign in the past year and a half. I guarantee you that if you switched DX and Cena right now so that HHH or HBK was feuding with Edge for the title, and Cena was screwing around with the McMahons and JOB squad '06, the DX segments would be rated a hell of a lot higher. Hell, they're probably rated higher right now. And if Batista, Undertaker, RVD, or Sabu came to Raw to feud with Edge, I bet they'd get higher ratings than what Cena's getting too. Cena's dull as crap, and while he was at least getting legit heel heat from the male fans for a while, after jobbing to RVD and Edge, they're just starting to get bored with him, and he's starting to get X-Pac heat. That match at SNME was the first time I've ever seen that uninterested response to a Dusty finish in a title match. A good IC challenger should get a better response than that when he's screwed out of the title.

In business terms, it is stupid to end DX any time soon. But, it's really painful for me to watch. Embarassing. They wouldn't be that bad if they had a little direction. A real wrestling feud with some dueling promos with Edge or something, and I think they'd be fine. It's only when they're put in a multi-month feud with Vince and the Spirit Squad that they wear thin. Oh, and if those dueling promos contained the words "mid-life crisis", Edge would gain 15 overness points.

Define "religious figures". If you mean the people that controlled the religions, sure. I'm talking about the peasantry that blindly followed the crap that was being spewed. Oh, and as far as I can see, the only common link between true conservatism in government and religion is that they're both popular in rural America. I think that's where the Republicans are coming from at this point.

Bowen's way past his prime now. He was getting lit up in that Dallas series, and he's not the same shooter he used to be either. By 2008, he'll be lucky if he can crack an NBA lineup, let alone an Olympic one.

I hate to be the one who's different who actually tries to take the thread seriously, but I'm pretty sure that people started focusing less on religion as they got more educated and more comfortable financially. If you have knowledge about the world, and you are reasonably happy with your life, there's no reason to pretend that a man in the sky is going to solve all your problems. If on the other hand, you have substandard living conditions in the middle of a war-torn desert? Well, you might as well strap a bomb to your chest just in case there's a man in the sky, because that's about all the hope you have left.

You can talk about the face side being bad, but I'm pretty sure that the heel side's even worse right now. After Edge and Orton, the #3 heel is probably Johnny Nitro, and he's currently playing second fiddle to the #4 diva in Melina. If Edge was carrying the belt for a while, it wouldn't be as noticeable, but with a face champion, I think it would look pretty bad. Then, when you have a face champion who's not very over like Cena, it makes it even worse because you can't put him in a face/face match. I actually liked the idea of Shawn challenging and ultimately losing and getting injured, leading to another HHH title shot. That would give them a chance to build up the HHH/Edge feud in a fresh manner when it came along instead of feeling like a rehash of what happened in April.

The real problem is that with the focus on a "specialty" match every week, no storylines are allowed to develop. We can't get someone like Sabu or Sandman to be a serious challenger to Big Show because he's defending the ECW title against random WWE guys every week. I didn't even mind having Raw guys when it was Cena and Edge who actually had a reason to be there, since they were consistently feuding with RVD, but this "dream match" crap every week will wear thin very fast.

I could give a fuck about what the Iraqi government wants. I don't live in Iraq. What I do know is that American soldiers are dying every day in order to work toward some distant ill-defined objective that may not even be possible to accomplish. As far as American interests go, this war has been wantonly destructive and has accomplished nothing except for increasing the profit margin of a few multi-national corporations, most of which are "coincidentally" led by close associates of the Bush administration.

On the bright side, I got over being pissed about bumped threads about two months ago, so now I'm just happy to see something I posted at the top of the page again. Hooray me.

Yeah, that would solve everything. Since Raw has all of....... two credible heels on the show. I'm pretty sure the distribution isn't their problem.

Oh please, if Ashley was the one that Edge cheated with on Matt Hardy, or hell, any other girl BUT Trish pretty well, it'd have the same effect. Lita isn't doing anything no one else couldn't do. She's a terrible actress who dresses slutty. Ooooh, such a tough role. Tell me one thing Lita has going for her that any other female doesn't have. I think her speaking segments are really good. She manages to get heel heat on the mic without being overboard and making herself the focus of the segment. Like when she and Edge were on commentary, she still made Edge the focus but added something every 30 seconds or so that helped get the character over more. Also, the little sneer she has whenever she comes out with Edge is a classic heel touch that most of the workers in the WWE (male or female) don't bother with. If you want to see an example of how to completely killl this kind of character, look at Sharmell. She's always shrieking and making big exaggerated facial expressions that distract from Booker and in the long run lead to him getting X-Pac heat instead of good heel heat. Melina also tends to overshadow Nitro rather than build him up as a character.