iggymcfly

The "Cranky Old Men" came back really strong in Week 2 after a 3-9 start, beating the previously 11-0-1 Pawtucket Patriots 9-3. I don't want to say anything to jinx them, but with Soriano filling a gaping hole at second, and with plenty of solid pitching to replace Pettite, I think they could be a hell of a squad the rest of the way.

I really disagree strongly with that statement. Dallas has been right there for years, and with Duncan getting older and hobbled, this could really be their chance to break through. They've actually held the nucleus together for a couple seasons without making any big additions, and I think they've got at least a 30-40% chance to win the conference. The way I see it, there's four legit contenders to win the NBA title right now (Detroit, Miami, SA, and Dallas), and they all have a pretty equal chance to take it. Phoenix would be a contender if Amare was healthy, but there's no way they take that next big step without him.

Umm, the third option was "who the hell is UTSU". Isn't that pretty much the same damn thing? Try reading all three choices before making your smarmy little witticism.

I now expect iggy to be banned at any moment. LOL. I threw that in there on purpose. I only saw him a couple times, but from what I saw he's dreadfully dull. He just does punch-kick 1999 WWF main event style at its worst. Well, mixed in with boring kayfabe heel style from the 80s. I really can't understand why all the fanboys are cumming all over themselves watching his matches.

I'm not saying he can't take a loss here and there. I'm just saying that if he gets jerked around any more when it really matters, the fans are going to give up on him. He was red hot in 2001. They gave him a loss in the Triple Threat at No Mercy, and then teased a program with Jericho for RR before shunting him back into the midcard. After that, he never had the nuclear level heat again, but was still very over with the fans. Then in the summer of 2002, they let the fans think he won the title in the Dusty finish match, and they erupted, but it turned out to be all for naught. They made it look like they were building to a title win at Unforgiven, which also turned out to be a loss, and then gave him a loss in the EC before sending him back to the tag ranks. After this, he lost a ton of overness. The fans got sick of caring, and he basically lost the ability to be a true main eventer. Anyway, he got injured, and now he's coming back with a fresh start and a strong push. The fans are ready to get behind him one more time, and the ECW PPV is the perfect venue for him to win the title. He'll be back on his home turf against the hated WWE loyalist, and he really can't get a better opportunity than this. If he loses this though, the fans are going to give up on him for good. They'll just never care about him the same way if he loses at ONS. This is where the Goldberg comparison comes in. In the elimination chamber, Goldberg absolutely destroyed the main event roster inside the best gimmick match the WWE had, totally regained all of his monster aura, got a monster pop and then............................. lost to HHH. After that, it didn't matter what he did, he could never top that moment, and the fans never felt the same about him again. When he won the title at Unforgiven, it was completely anticlimactic, and his reign was doomed to failure. If RVD jobs at ONS, they might as well release him, because he'll never be a top face in the WWE again, and he won't draw a dime the rest of his days.

For the record, RVD also lost a WWE Title match to the Undertaker via Dusty finish, and had an undisputed title match with Jericho finish in a no-contest when face referee Ric Flair decided that putting the figure four on Vince McMahon was more important than RVD winning the World title. Oh, and as for the thought that ECW fans will cause a riot; to Vince, that would be a great argument for having Cena/HHH retain. If you don't think he's that publicity hungry, then look at the desperate church skit he ran this Monday during Holy Week. Still, since RVD's the most over face on their roster and they're spending months building him up, I'm thinking that he'll get a title win where he'll get a maximum pop (at the ECW PPV). If they learned anything from Goldberg, it's that a face can't have a big hyped PPV loss precede their first title win.

I like Randy Orton. The problem is that outside of him and Angle, I don't like anything else on Smackdown, and it's on Fridays, so I just don't see him any more. I tried watching a little but Booker, Boogeyman, Finlay, and the mole girl were just awful, so after a couple attempts I gave up. If I'd seen more than one of Randy's matches in the last six months, I'd probably go get myself banned by defending him.

I think it's unwarranted just because most of his posts contributed to the forum, and said something reasonably interesting. The anti-Bret stuff he said wasn't any worse than the anti-Shawn stuff that most of the forum spews. As for Rrrsh though, I'm on board. A good 90% of his posts were of the one-line variety, and I really didn't see anything that would make the forum better if he stayed around. Oh, and here's an amusing bit of irony from a month ago: Consider the douchebags banned.

I haven't read through this thread yet or anything, but I just looked through UTSU's last 20 posts, and saw almost no flaming, obnoxious circular logic, or really anything that should come close to getting someone banned. I did see some clever funny comments though. Basically, it just looks like he pissed off the Bret fanboys because he was talking shit about their revered hero.

Yeah, fuck that. Bring back UTSU.

Some of us Clipper fans are having fun with this "tanking" situation. We are losing games, Maggette has "back spasms" that don't even allow him to drive to the arena, Cassell now has "flu like symptoms", and Radmanovic has "an injured groin". However I'm sure those are all true especially considering that we still haven't locked up the 6th seed and might fall to 7th or 8th if some crazy stuff happens and they want to have homecourt against the Nuggets who are 1/2 game back. God, I totally forgot about that part. Not only does the team that slips to #6 get an easier matchup, they have the opportunity for home advantage as well. Who the hell came up with that idea anyway?

I've got to agree with EHME here. When someone posts 100 times in the same thread, and repeatedly asks questions like "why do you think I have no life", it's pretty safe to assume that he doesn't. The fact that intensifier's bothered to post about the subject 15 times without defending himself shows he's not exactly busy.

I might have to be different here and say yes. I mean if Eddie was the champion for the last few months, Angle would have never come over, and we'd still have tweenerish champ looking for a face to lose the belt to. Since Orton wouldn't be getting the title either way, and they wouldn't have both Eddie and Cena retain at WM, I think Rey still probably would have got the belt. I think that title reign was ultimately about lack of options more than at was capitalizing on Eddie's death.

I doubt it's intentional given their schedule, but the Clippers certainly picked the right time to lose three in a row. They've now slipped into a juicy 3/6 matchup against Denver, whereas if they were a 5 seed, they'd likely get swept by Dallas or San Antonio. Let me go on record as saying that I hate this three division crap in the NBA. There's no way that Dallas deserves a 4 seed with what could be a 63 win ball club. It's different in baseball with the tradition of hot pennant races, but when everyone makes the playoffs anyway, there's no need to punish the Mavs every year for being stuck with San Antonio.

Wow, there's been so many of these that I'm going to have to break them down into categories. Recent comedies: Wedding Crashers, 40 Year Old Virgin, Napoleon Dynamite: The first two at least had potential, although they hammered the same jokes into the ground, and went too long. (In the case of Crashers, way too long.) But Napoleon Dynamite was just awful. The only remotely funny scene was the little dance at the end. Otherwise, I don't think I laughed once the entire movie. Recent oscar winners Crash, Brokeback Mountain: I saw Crash back in October, and I thought it was a mildly entertaining, star-driven niche film. Nothing more. When I saw that it was nominated for Best Picture, I was legitimately shocked and said to myself, "wow, they must have been really desperate for candidates this year". When it actually won, I couldn't believe it. It slammed you over the head with "RACISM RACISM RACISM", but it didn't even really hold a plot together. Although, to be fair, Brokeback was even worse. As a love story, I think Heath Ledger had it beat with his work in A Knight's Tale. The relationship was built terribly, as they went from hardly talking to fucking in the span of about three seconds. Then they leave and we're supposed to be instantly enthralled with how passionately in love they are. After that, the movie pretty much falls off a cliff. We see the two of them randomly meeting up at times between 5 and 25 years in the future, although we never get any clues at all as to how much time has passed. Then, after about an hour and a half of this, we find out Jack's dead and we're all supposed to feel bad about that too. Honestly, I was surprised that the gay community even liked this portrayal as Heath Ledger's character is basically a straight man that gets "turned gay" by creepy horndog Jack. I thought it set back homosexuals 10 to 20 years. Not quite-so recent oscar winners Gladiator, Return of the King: Gladiator is maybe one of two movies I've seen in my life that actually put me to sleep while I was in the theater. Not sitting on the couch chugging a beer, but in the movie theater. Honestly, they couldn't have made this more dull. We get these long boring war scenes that deal with successions that no one cares about at all. Then we have a few all-too short scenes where Crowe's actually a gladiator, and pretty soon, they're all arguing about who's going to be king again. Somehow, it lasted for three hours. Even longer and more boring was Return of the King. I think this might be the most overrated movie of all time. I really don't see one redeeming thing about it. The plot is that Frodo's going to throw the ring in the volcano which will magically end all the war. We all know exactly what's going to happen. But instead we have to watch the war that doesn't matter for two and a half hours in scenes that everyone seems to think are the coolest thing in history, but which seemed pretty dull to me. Then, he predictably throws the ring in the fire, and the movie goes on for another hour with celebrations so gay that they'd make Ang Lee blush. It's basically just Frodo and his gay hobbit friends professing their everlasting love to each other for an hour. I really wanted to walk out, but I just couldn't resist the train wreck factor of seeing how long that awful movie would last. Movies that only worked on novelty/shock value and are now completely outdated Scarface, The Godfather: Scarface told the bare-bones story of the fall of a drug dealer, but did nothing to make him likeable or to make us care whether he lived or died, and then made his fall just downright ridiculous. (Didn't he basically make up a reason to kill his sister's boyfriend? I mean it wasn't even sensible.) "Blow" copied the general idea, but it did the story about 100 times better. Likewise, the Godfather doesn't really do much to get us in-depth with the characters either. Marlon Brando's the aging good don, and Pacino's the good son that gets sucked into the business, but that's about it. The side plot with Michael's wife in Italy is completely pointless and unnecessary, and the antics of the rest of the family seem somewhat circumstancial as well. The movie worked a lot on the cool shock value of seeing what the mob can do, but after you watch Paulie Walnuts beat somebody to death with a baseball bat on The Sopranos, seeing a horse's head in someone's bed just doesn't have much impact. OK, I could probably find more, but I already wrote about ten times as much as I planned to so I guess I'll leave it at that, as those are the peak offenders among movies that get overrated like crazy.

I didn't even know what a spruce bug was before seeing this poll, so I'm going to have to vote for hornets.

HHH/RVD would certainly "work", but I think I like Cena/RVD better. Triple H has already jobbed to the "face of the future" three times now, (Benoit, Batista, Cena), and I think it's kind of lost its novelty. I think even the most dedicated anti-Trips smark would be expecting him to job if he faced RVD at ONS. Cena/RVD on the other hand, that's a whole different animal. By the time of ONS, Cena would have held the title for 14 of the last 15 months including three instances when everyone thought he "had" to lose (EC, WM, and Backlash). There would be that lingering doubt of "will Vince really let his top merchandise seller get humiliated and beaten by an ECW product?". And finally, the dedicated fans of good wrestling have sat through an endless, boring Cena reign. For all intents and purposes, he's been a heel champion since Summerslam. I think at this point, we deserve the satisfacion of seeing him job to an over face at a major event.

Yeah, that last idea's way too close to what happened with Rey after the Royal Rumble. They really don't need to go down that road again. The only way that it works at all to have RVD put the shot on the line is if he knows deep down that Shelton can't beat him anyway, and then he goes out and proves it at Backlash. Someone that loses to Shelton with his most prized possession on the line isn't going to do well as a face world champ. As for the idea that it leaves the door open for them to job RVD at ONS, I can't believe they'd be stupid enough to do that (although I've been wrong before). I was actually thinking that would be one good reason to keep the IC title on Rob up until ONS, since it would make the fans think there's actually a reasonable chance that Cena/HHH would retain.

Oh, that works. I was thinking I was going to have to emphasize that more if the other stuff wasn't working out.

I'm thinking I'm established at this point. I've got over 3000 posts and I'm in 2 sigs at the moment (one for a misplaced cockiness about the quality of Duke basketball and one for a clever wrestling observation). However, I'm thinking that the lack of a colorful sig may be holding me back. I've got the Bill Fillmaff avatar, but I don't know if "anti-smark who thinks they know everything about college sports and loves italics" is a strong enough gimmick to get me "over". Thoughts?

Shit, that was an April Fool's day joke? They put it on at the casino, and it was so funny that we were all talking about how we'd have to remember to watch it every Saturday morning.

The promo was hard as hell to hear, but the gist of it was that RVD agreed to put the MITB shot on the line at Backlash if Shelton would put the IC title on the line. Meanwhile, Shelton has a week to think about whether he's willing to risk the "prestigious" IC Title to get a MITB shot. At this point, they're going one of two routes with the match: 1) RVD wins the IC Title at Backlash, but HHH/Cena ends up costing him the belt before ONS. 2) RVD continues to hold the IC Title going into ONS and becomes a double champion to make his win look more prestigious. The positives of this move: -RVD does better with some sort of belt to defend. He's not good at cutting promos, so if he has a good reason to wrestle week in and week out, it will help him get over with the crowds. -There's a semi-logically built important looking match for Backlash that will generate a couple extra buys. The negatives: -RVD looks dumb for risking the MITB shot (which is huge in WWE-land) for an IC title shot (which is a complete joke). Nowhere near as dumb as Rey, but dumb nevertheless. -The IC belt is going to look like even more of a joke when RVD either loses it just to get it out of the way or surrenders it upon winning the world title.

I couldn't agree more with this notion. The fact is that in this day and age, people don't watch matches to see one guy get their ass kicked. The day kayfabe ended, heels that act like assholes and cheat to win all their matches became obsolete and unnecessary. When the program's been at it's best, it's been about a clash between two interesting characters with larger than life personas. The idea that heels need to insult the troops or assault women or dishonor the dead for their matches to get over on a show that's admittedly staged is downright ridiculous. When Orton says something about Eddie, people don't think "wow, Randy Orton's an asshole. I'd like to see Rey kick his ass". They think "wow, the WWE's one classless organization". The heat just doesn't transfer the same way any more. There are exceptions of course. A heel champion that cheats to keep his belt still has a place, as the payoff when he gets beat by a popular wreslter is worth it. Likewise, occasionally, there will be a storyline good enough to give a character legit heat for a single feud. (I think HHH has legit heat when he first feuded with HBK, and so did Edge when the Matt Hardy thing came out.) But for the most part, the WWE needs to focus on telling stories of the clashes between two interesting personas. If Angle gets cheered over Cena, big deal, let them cheer. Don't insult thte fans' intelligence by having him come out and completely deny his character by insulting the troops. If they're afraid people aren't into an Orton/Rey match, they're not going to magically get interested if you do a classless angle about Eddie's real-life death. If people want to cheer for Jericho over HBK in Canada, just go with it. Don't kill the while reaction by having Jericho insult his hometown fans. Don't insult the fans' intelligence by running an "8-man tournament" which magically consists of seven face/heel matches, and spoils the results of other matches before they happen. I mean obviously, some wrestlers are going to be more popular than others. That's healthy and it's a crucial factor in PPV buys and merchandising. But when they spend so much futile effort into trying to get someone "heel heat" that they turn off much of their audience, it really ruins the program. There's going to be one or two guys on the show tops that have a character that's well-defined enough for the fanbase to actually pay to see them lose. The rest of the time, they just need to make us interested in what's happening in the ring.

Um, the dude is 6'3", 260 lbs. He's FU'd the Big Show. You make it sound like he's built like Brian Kendrick. Are buyrates, house show attendance, ratings down appreciably with Cena as champ? No. He's pushing merchandise, he's garnering the biggest reactions of anyone on the roster, so what if he's getting boo's as a face? It's not really affecting business. Until it starts making a noticeable dent in business, I see no need to job the guy out & bury him in the midcard and/or take the belt off him. Vince et al need to figure out a way to use this to their advantage without messing up the dynamic at work. I was exaggerating a little bit, but the point is that he's not big enough for it to believable for him to physically dominate the roster, and so they shouldn't try to book him like he's superhuman. No one who's under 7'0 and 300 lbs. should ever wrestle main event level competition in handicap matches. Angle's strong and athletic enough that it looks at least somewhat believable, but it just looks silly when Cena does it. It's not that he's too small to be a credible main eventer; it's just that he's too small to be booked as this superhuman monster that can destroy five heels at the same time.

People don't resent Cena because he's handsome or something stupid like that. They resent him because he's been getting a ridiculous superface push for the last 14 months that he in no way merits. When his character sucks (which it has since last year's WM), he's small, and he's terrible in the ring, people are going to get annoyed seeing him put over the entire roster. When someone like Brock Lesnar or Batista beats everybody in sight, people can get into the "monster" character, and they can buy it. When Austin and Rock did it, people were so into the character that they didn't care. Even when HHH does it, he at least does it by cheating liberally and as a device to get more boos as the most hated heel in the company. But watching 200 lb., bland, babyface "my favourite wrestler of all time John Cena" dominate the roster is going to turn off the core fanbase pretty quick. When you have this upstart punk holding his own against established wrestlers that people care about (like Angle and Jericho) in handicap matches and then pinning them repeatedly in singles matches, it pisses people off. When you go over a year without giving him a clean loss, it pisses people off. Think about it. When did the boos start subsiding for Cena? When he lost the title to Edge. People thought, "finally, we can have competitive matches at the top of the card instead of watching this vanilla midget dominate the roster". So what did they do? They gave the title right back to him, and like clockwork, the boos started raining down just as loud as before. The fans are clearly trying to send a message that they're sick of seeing Cena on top and they want someone else to carry the banner for Raw for a while. If this were 1998 when Vince actually gave a shit about what his fans thought and listened to them, Cena would have lost the title and turned heel about six months ago. As it is, he's sticking rigidly to his ineffective plan that was written out last year, and it's basically killing the show.