Professional Wrestling Discussion

>Watch NJPW Summer Struggle 2020: Day 5, 6, 7, and 8 on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 5:30am EDT / 10:30am BST in /wooo/tube - http://taima.tv/r/wooo and /wooo/alt - http://taima.tv/r/woooalt

>Day 5 - Thursday

>Day 6 - Friday

>Watch Indie Tube, NXT UK, Championship Wrestling From Hollywood, OVW TV and Reality of Wrestling today starting at 4pm EDT / 9pm BST in /wooo/tube - http://taima.tv/r/wooo

>Card:

>Joshi Tube airs on Saturdays at 4pm EDT / 9pm BST in /wooo/tube - http://taima.tv/r/wooo and is a great way to discover what joshi is all about. People in the chat will be able to answer questions as you ask them, as we do on this thread.
>But if you're ever in the mood to watch joshi outside of Joshi Tube, there is joshi wrestling channel - http://taima.tv/r/joshi. Furthermore, there is also a non-joshi women's wrestling channel - http://taima.tv/r/wooomens

>Useful links:

>Watch AEW Dynamite with /wooo/ in /wooo/tube - http://taima.tv/r/wooo and /wooo/alt - http://taima.tv/r/woooalt at 8pm Eastern//1am London. Dynamite will be be preceeded by a replay of AEW Dark. On tonight show:

• AEW World Championship bout Jon Moxley vs. Darby Allin.
  
• Chris Jericho debates Orange Cassidy. Moderated by ???? Rumoured to be "Eazy E" Eric Bischoff. Hey remember last year when Vince hired Eric to save Smackdown? Time flies
  
• FTR & The Young Bucks & AEW Tag Team Champions Adam Page & Kenny Omega vs. The Dark Order
  
• Cody & Matt Cardona vs. The Dark Order (John Silver & Alex Reynolds)
  
• Big Swole vs. an opponent of Britt Baker's choosing
  
• MJF's campaign to become AEW Champion continues.
  

>Jon Moxley defends the AEW World Championship against Darby Allin

>Chris Jericho and Orange Cassidy will debate with a special guest moderator

>FTR and The Elite face The Dark Order

>Matt Cardona's in-ring debut on AEW Dynamite

>Watch WWE NXT with /wooo/ in /wooo/2 - http:/taima.tv/r/wooo2 and /wooo/alt2 - http://taima.tv/r/woooalt2 at 8pm Eastern//1am London. On tonight's show:

• Non-title bout: NXT Champion Keith Lee versus Cameron Grimes
  
• Pat McAfee talks some shit
  
• WWE NXT North American Championship Qualifying Match: Damian Priest vs. Oney Lorcan vs. Ridge Holland.
  
• WWE NXT Tag Team Championship bout: Imperium vs. Bobby Fish and Kyle O'Reilly.
  
• WWE NXT Women's Championship #1 Contender decider: "The Nightmare" Rhea Ripley vs. "My NXT womens' top heel can't possibly be this cute?!" Dakota Kai
  
• Bronson Reed vs. "Help me, I'm Shitposting" Shane Thorne
  

>Pat McAfee rolls in to NXT tonight
> Time to talk Bay Bay! Pat McAfee is ready to clear the air with Adam Cole and is headed to NXT tonight hoping to do exactly that. The last encounter between McAfee and Adam Cole resulted in a heated exchange and the former NXT Champion shoving one of the radio host’s producers. Triple H joined “The Pat McAfee Show” a couple days later and reiterated Cole’s apology in an attempt to ease tensions between the two. Now, McAfee will take a mid-honeymoon break to try and relieve some of the drama from his professional life and bury the hatchet with Cole. Will the former NFL Pro Bowler be able to mend the relationship, or will another war of words break out with the longest-reigning NXT Champion in history?

>Keith Lee to face Cameron Grimes
> Cameron Grimes had big plans for the most recent episode of NXT. He wanted to take out NXT Champion Keith Lee and end the month of July with the title around his waist. Instead, Lee sent Grimes to the moon with a devastating Spirit Bomb. Grimes suffered a jaw contusion as a result and went off in a WWE Network exclusive. Grimes called Lee a “coward” and promised to teach the champion a lesson about respect. Will Grimes be successful?

>Rhea Ripley faces Dakota Kai for the chance to challenge Io Shirai
> Dakota Kai arrogantly declared herself the No. 1 Contender to Io Shirai’s NXT Women’s Championship, but Rhea Ripley isn’t about to let her to the front of the line without a fight. The two will square off tonight with the winner earning the right to challenge Shirai. Kai’s intentions have been clear for weeks. She kicked down the door with a vicious boot to Shirai’s face after her defense against Tegan Nox last month. The Captain of Team Kick delivered déjà vu last week when she again attacked Shirai, this time before they battled in tag team action. And once again demonstrating her self-interest in transparent fashion, Kai bailed on partner Candice LeRae during a tag team match, leaving her in the lurch for a loss to Shirai and Nox and announcing she was done “jumping through hoops” for a title opportunity. But Ripley, a former NXT Women’s Champion, took issue with Kai crowning herself as No. 1 Contender, defiantly staking her claim to face Shirai. Will Kai finally earn the chance she feels entitled to, or will Ripley come one step closer to becoming a two-time champion?

>Imperium to defend the NXT Tag Team Titles against The Undisputed ERA
> The Undisputed ERA is trying to get its groove back, and they’ll look to do so at Imperium’s expense when Bobby Fish & Kyle O’Reilly challenge Marcel Barthel & Fabian Aichner for the NXT Tag Team Titles tonight. Since bringing the age of Imperium stateside and becoming champions, Barthel & Aichner have remained largely unthreatened — until last week. Before Imperium could address the NXT Universe after defeating Ever-Rise, they were assaulted by Fish, O’Reilly, Adam Cole and Roderick Strong. With no championship gold for the first time in more than a year, The Undisputed ERA channeled their frustration directly at Aichner & Barthel, and now they’ll look to take their titles. And as if that isn’t motivation enough for Fish & O’Reilly, they’ll also be looking for retribution from this past January at WWE Worlds Collide when they fell to Imperium in Eight-Man Tag Team action. The Undisputed ERA have already made history as the only three-time NXT Tag Team Champions. Is a fourth reign imminent, or will the age of Imperium continue on the black-and-gold brand?

>Damian Priest, Oney Lorcan and Ridge Holland battle for TakeOver XXX opportunity
> The third in NXT’s …

>Columbus, Georgia, police told TMZ Wednesday they will be looking into a claim Marty Jannetty made on Facebook Wednesday that he killed a man when he was 13 years old.

>In the now-deleted Facebook post, Jannetty claimed that as a 13-year-old, he was working at a bowling alley buying marijuana from a man who took him out to the back of the building to sexually assault him.

>"That was the first time I made a man disappear," he said. "They shoulda looked in the Chattahoochee River..." before continuing to ramble about a Jamaican woman he was in love with. Jannetty is 60 so the alleged incident would have happened at some point in 1973.

>The department told TMZ they have some current active homicide investigations as a priority, but "the first step will be seeing if we have any missing persons or unidentified remains cases that match the limited information in the post."

>Jannetty has been known to make outlandish claims on Facebook frequently including a 2017 post where he had to later clarify he didn't want to have sex with a woman he once considered his daughter.

>The former WWF star was part of The Rockers tag team with Shawn Michaels and over three separate runs in the company, he held the tag team titles once with Sean Waltman and won the Intercontinental belt.

> For a number of reasons, as it turns out, the pandemic was the greatest thing for WWE’s business as they posted the most profitable quarter in their history. It’s not that they overcome the pain of the pandemic. They outright benefitted from it, with more consumer product sales, higher network numbers and the real difference maker, far lower costs to produce television.

> Profits quadrupled in the quarter, blowing away all estimates, due to saving $51.6 million in media costs. The vast majority of those savings was the lower cost of producing television the way they do it now in the Performance Center, no longer running live, and taping multiple shows on successive days as opposed to live Monday, Wednesday and Friday in different parts of the country with far more wrestlers, production people and costs.

> For one, taping two weeks had a time for each show, and taping shows on successive days, saved travel costs greatly. Producing a show in a small building greatly cut down on the production budget, not to mention the fewer production people and costs that were already lower were cut almost in half from there by generally taping two shows at a time. Plus there was savings on uplinks by no longer doing any shows actually live, as even when taped the same day, they never actually went live. The second positive was a huge increase in subscribers to the WWE Network. The number was 195,000 above what would have been normally expected as of 6/30.

> There are a number of factors involved here. One is that WrestleMania had so many people subscribing for free as compared to the past few years, that many of them didn’t cancel and stayed on as paying subscribers. Another reason, arguably the most important because ESPN’s PPV numbers for UFC were so much higher than previously, and AEW also set records in PPV, is that with sports bars are closed, and people are no longer getting together in large numbers for PPV parties. Thus, if you have let’s say five people watching a WWE show together, now maybe you’d have one or two, and if the others wanted to watch, they’d buy the WWE Network when they wouldn’t have needed to in the past.

> In addition, the WWE Network changed with two other factors. The free month gimmick where you could watch the PPV, and then cancel, has been dropped. There are no more free months. While they now have a free tier, the PPV shows and a lot of the programming is not available on that free tier. Plus with that free tier, that you don’t even have to sign up for, more people are exposed to an aspect of the WWE Network. The free tier constantly promotes the paid tier, where the most attractive content resides, like the PPVs, Undertaker’s Last Ride, and other new and old footage.

> All of this has led to more people becoming new subscribers, at least short-term. Total views of at least one minute of different programming on the network were up 55 percent from last year even though the subscriber average number for the quarter was down 1.6 percent due to the gains coming late in the quarter.

> For what it’s worth, when Vince McMahon was asked about the increase, he passed to Jayar Donland, who had none of those answers aside from the new free tier. “There are a few things going on,” he said. “I am not going to touch of anything specific on the free version. But obviously, launching that is a contributor. But I just think, in general, our promotion across our platforms. We are doing new things across the digital and social ecosystem, as well as with our TV partners. You would have been able to sample content on ESPN or FS 1 driving back to the network.”

> It should be noted that the ESPN shows were before WrestleMania, and WrestleMania paid was the lowest for any WrestleMania in several years, so that has to be largely ruled out as a key factor.

> “We talked about some of the compelling content we have had, everything from Undertaker’s Last Ride, and we are an attraction business,” said Donlan. “ I think we have had some really fanta…