OldStingberg

This is how their matches went: -Orton pinned Rhodes clean in a champion vs. champion match. -Rhodes won after Mark Henry distracted the ref and Orton allowing Rhodes to use his mask as a weapon. -Orton got DQ'd in their next match after hitting Rhodes with the mask. Orton then proceeded to destroy Rhodes. -Orton pinned Rhodes clean in a tag match. -Orton pinned Rhodes clean at the PPV. So only once can you even half-consider Rhodes going over Orton. Meanwhile Orton won clean three times, even kicking out of Rhodes' finisher. Great feud for Rhodes.

1) Nash and Trips have been feuding for like two months now. They've already had physical confrontations and Trips fired him. 2) I doubt either Sheamus or Orton are done with Christian or Rhodes. I'd like to be wrong, but I bet we see Sheamus/Christian and Orton/Rhodes probably another 2-3 times over the next month or two. 3) Miz and Truth have already been interfering in main events. They did it at the last PPV. That's what I mean. Nothing new happened at the PPV. It was the same stuff that's been happening. Nash interfered with Punk and/or HHH for the third time in four PPVs. Miz and Truth ambushed the main event for the second straight PPV. And with how redundant the WWE's matchmaking has been on their weekly shows, it's highly doubtful we saw any blow off matches at the PPV. Vengeance was always going to just sort of get in the way of the build for this year's Survivor Series, but I still hoped they'd do something to justify the PPV. Collapsing the ring isn't enough. But ultimately, I guess it probably doesn't matter. Survivor Series is what was always going to determine whether these last couple months of crap were remotely near worth it. Let's hope for something good. At the very least, I imagine Punk will get to pin someone.

And as if the pointlessness of the PPV wasn't enough, Zack Ryder lost to a guy who ate two finishers from the tag champs in a match five minutes earlier, CM Punk got pinned for a fourth straight PPV, and Cody Rhodes lost a non-title match where his finisher couldn't put his opponent away. Why put Rhodes into a feud with Orton if they're not even going to let Rhodes pick up one win? (Other than the obvious, that it was total and complete filler.) It's not even that the WWE is struggling to create new things that are working, it's that they seem to be actively sabotaging the few things that have fallen into their laps.

What a pointless PPV. No titles changed hands and no storylines were started, furthered, or ended. I feel bad for the people that paid $50 to watch a longer episode of Smackdown.

There was less than seven minutes of wrestling tonight. Seven minutes! On a show that was approximately 85 minutes long. That is literally almost unbelievable.

After reading the spoilers for next week's Impact, I'm much, much less excited about watching tonight. Overall, I think they stumbled backwards onto a good idea, but they're already showing they don't have the ability to pull it off well.

It's hard to submit anyone nowadays off your back, but doing it to someone as good as Penn? If Penn took Diaz down, it'd be 100 times easier for Penn to cruise on points than it would be for Diaz to catch him with something.

Lagana has nothing to do with Impact, though. He's going to be working on a separate TNA project that will air in India. After reading the full spoilers for Impact, I'm much less excited. There's literally three matches on the show, and none of them sound long. I just don't want to see that much talking.

I don't watch much TNA, I only kind of know what's going on, but I'll definitely be watching Thursday night. There's a lot of potential in that story.

I mentioned interceptions as kind of a nod to the way you cherry-picked Palmer's total yardage stat. The more relevant stats are those that measure overall performance, which is why I mentioned stats like QB rating and the two used by Football Outsiders. There's literally no case to be made that Carson Palmer has been a great QB since maybe 2007. And don't count on one of those QBs falling in the draft. Unless one falls to the fifth round, the Raiders aren't drafting him. That's when their first pick is. They've used this year's first-, third-, and fourth-round picks and next year's second-round pick on QBs and they still aren't even close to having a QB of the future (or present, really). And yes, Palmer is better than Terrelle Pryor or Kyle Boller, but that's not a high bar to clear, and it's silly to give up so much just to barely clear that bar.

He's really not a great quarterback. He threw for a lot of yards last year, but he also threw the third most picks. His QB rating was 19th in the league. If you look at the more advanced stats at Football Outsiders, he was ranked 10th and 18th there. And that was his best season since 2007. At this point. he's probably a slightly above average QB, he's about to turn 32 and he hasn't practiced with a team in almost a year, let alone played in an actual game, and the Raiders are giving up at least a 1st and 2nd for him? That's crazy. Totally I-can't-believe-it crazy.

Has anyone been watching Homeland? That's easily been my favorite new show so far this season.

ESPN is reporting the Raiders are close to acquiring Carson Palmer for two first-round picks. They are not reporting, however, whether or not the Raiders are aware this is no longer 2006.

I just caught Ziggler's segments on YouTube. His match against Mason Ryan is exactly what I imagine him to be like as a face. He would be great playing that undersized guy who gets battered around the ring before finding a way to win, much to the crowd's delight. But he's also a great heel, and it's nice to see him finally getting a chance to talk more and develop his character beyond being Vickie's lackey. With how much I'm liking what Ziggler is doing and hating the rut that Punk is currently stuck in, Ziggler might be #1 on my top five now. Punk's match yesterday certainly didn't help his cause. It was a five-minute match with the pace of an iron-man match. I don't know if him and the Miz were worn out from the Mexico tour or they just didn't give a damn about the match, but that was really disappointing.

Oh, and am I late to the party in realizing how they're pumping in CM Punk chants? I've been a bit suspicious at times these past couple months, but tonight was the tipping point. I find it hard to believe fans in Mexico City spontaneously started and perfectly synchronized a loud CM Punk chant within seconds (with no one visible to the camera actually chanting), that chant dying out seconds later, and there being absolutely no hint of the Spanish pronunciations of some of those letters, which are notably different. The 'u', especially, is a pretty dead give-away. Obviously a lot of pro wrestling is smoke and mirrors, but pumping in crowd chants, at least to me, just seems dishonest.

He was never disfigured, though. We know this because he wore a clear mask. And the idea that he's keeping up the schtick to keep the mask to use as a weapon makes no sense, either. We can all see he's not disfigured, we all know that he doesn't need the mask, what person in control is seriously letting him keep it? And why would he want it as a weapon? It's plastic. Like a lot of stuff on Raw these days, I think Rhodes gimmick works as long as you don't think about it. If you kind of fill in the blanks yourself or re-work some of the stuff, it can make some amount of sense. But if you think about how they're actually presenting it, it quickly unravels.

I'm not a big fan of Rhodes right now. I think his promos are hit-and-miss, and I hate his character. I just can't suspend my disbelief enough to listen to a handsome guy complain about how disfigured he is/has been when he's wearing a clear mask that shows he is still as handsome as he ever was. I'm a huge mark for Dolph Ziggler, though. I think his body language is top-notch, his promos are more than good enough, and his selling is maybe the best in the WWE. He's shows great heel mannerisms, and with his ability to sell, I imagine he'd make a great undersized babyface that struggles to take down the bigger heels.

Nope, any illegal drug counts, as well as a plethora of other stuff. Here's the list: http://corporate.wwe.com/company/abuse_policy.jsp

1) CM Punk 2) Dolph Ziggler 3) Kofi Kingston 4) Christian 5) John Morrison I watched Smackdown while doing my cardio tonight. I was happy with the show. Simple feuds that make sense and a lot of solid wrestling is usually a winning formula.

I didn't quite say that. I said Shogun does relatively well. By that I mean he's more popular than his UFC resume would otherwise suggest because he seems to care about the fans. Conversely, Anderson is less popular than his UFC resume would suggest because he treats the fans as a nuisance. Anderson might be more popular than Shogun overall, but that would be because of the difference in their UFC resumes. That I definitely said, or implied, and I don't think it's all that controversial. I'm not sure Anderson's all that shy. When he's in his comfort zone, which seems to be any time he's not dealing with American media or fans, he seems pretty gregarious. Shogun is definitely a bit shy, but he still makes an effort, and fans have taken notice.

Anderson was a notoriously bad draw for a while. It all sort of culminated when his title defense against Cote at UFC 90, Anderson's eighth fight in the UFC, got something like 300,000 buys, which is pretty much the rock bottom number of buys any UFC PPV can get. Since then, Anderson's been the most protected fighter in terms of draw in probably the UFC's history. -UFC 97 was co-mained by Liddell/Shogun. -UFC 101 saw Anderson in the co-main with the Penn/Florian title fight in the main event. -UFC 112 had the Penn/Edgar title fight in the co-main. -UFC 117 had Fitch/Alves, JDS/Roy Nelson, and Hughes and Guida on the card. -UFC 126 had Forrest/Franklin in the co-main and Bones/Bader. -UFC 134 had Forrest/Shogun and Big Nog/Schaub. Every single one of Anderson's last six fights have had either a second title fight on the card or at least one of the UFC's most popular fighters on the card as well. You won't see an Anderson card co-mained by Struve/McCorkle or even Mir/Carwin.

Being Brazilian certainly doesn't help, but a guy like Shogun does relatively well because he actually seems to care about the fans. Anderson, on the other hand, won't speak English in public despite reportedly being quite good at it, he takes entire fights off at times, and he refuses to apologize for wasting people's money when he takes fights off. He acts like fans are a nuisance that he just has to deal with, and not surprisingly, that hasn't won him a ton of fans. And I'm not saying he should kowtow to fans or anything. If he wants to be the way he is, fine. But no one should be surprised if people don't want to get behind him and pay money for each of his fights.

I don't think that's true at all. Before Shields half-blinded GSP and stole a round from him, GSP hadn't lost a single round in something like four years. GSP's opponents have consistently faced longer odds in Vegas than Silva's opponents. Maybe you're saying that the UFC sells GSP's fight as ones he could lose, which is true, but they literally do that with every champion, including Silva. Hendo and Sonnen could out-wrestle him, Vitor had the hands to go toe-to-toe with him, Maia and Leites could submit him, etc. The reason Silva isn't as much of a draw as he should be is because he doesn't care at all about connecting with the fans.

Well, the ratings for Raw are a classic case of good news/holycrapthat'sterrible news. Overall, the show was up with a 3.24 rating, which is notably above the 3.0-3.1 Raw has been averaging. That was because people were very interested in seeing the fallout from the walkout. The first 30 minutes got a 3.62 rating. That's the good news. The holycrapthat'sterrible news is that once people saw what they were doing with the walkout, a lot of viewers tuned out. All told, by the time they got to the PPV-caliber main event involving two of the last three WWE champions, Raw had lost 25% of its viewers, dropping the eighth quarter-hour all the way to a 2.77. It'll be interesting to see what the WWE does with this. A lot of stuff kind of came to a head Monday, and the ratings (and critical reception) show that people were turned off by it. I'm not sure there's a graceful way for them to work themselves out of this one.

Somehow, I don't think the change Punk wanted was Triple H returning to the spotlight. But that's all I'll say about that. We're dangerously close, if we haven't already flown by this point, of just discussing this in circles.