I watched the National Championship on Monday. I don’t even watch College Football. I barely watch Professional Football!
Anything Worth Watching?
Promos: Street Profits on the Tag Titles (SmackDown 1/15/21)
Angles: No
Wrestlers: MSK (Wes Lee & Nash Carter), WALTER, Roman Reigns, Daniel Bryan, Adam Pearce
Key Trends: MSK Debuts, Roman Reigns Makes Everybody Matter
RAW (1/11/21)
Keith Lee is getting one of those half-pushes, where WWE will featured a guy a lot but every time they show up it just gets worse.
The Royal Rumble is coming up, but I’m more taken by all the confusion: Flair Family, Jeff Hardy/Elias, Retribution, Drew Gulak, Mandy & Dana – all of this sucks. Evil Alexa Bliss is somehow more embarrassing than all of it too.
Common sense says have a foundation, then build on it. RAW rotted the foundation and for some reason is just kind of drilling further into it? What a weird show. Yowie wowie!
NXT (1/13/21)
It gave us three fine, just OK, rock solid first round matches this week. One saw MSK, F/K/A The Rascalz, make their debut with an impressive showing against Jake Atlas & Isaiah “Swerve” Scott, who now appears to be playing a weirdo.
The NXT Title scene with Finn Balor, Kyle O’Reilly and Pete Dunne is getting somewhere, but it’s not there yet – and I’m worried Karrion Kross is just waiting at the end anyways.
Timothy Thatcher‘s cadence reads a little Bobby Axelrod.
Xia Li rules.
MAIN EVENT (1/13/21)
NXT UK (1/14/21)
He defended the NXT UK Title against A-Kid this week in another great match that had all the ass-kicking WALTER promises and all the cool submissions A-Kid promises, but with the added dynamic of WALTER being enormous and A-Kid being just the tiniest guy. It had a few great bits of WALTER just destroying poor Kid, but they also played with the idea of Kid wearing WALTER’s legs down in a smart, understated way. WALTER should just book WWE.
Sha Samuels debuted under the name “Ed Harvey” before he revealed his real name then lost to Joe Coffey, which is a real strange way to debut. Tyler Bate/Sam Gradwell and the Kay Lee Ray/Jinny face-to-face were both fine, but as with a lot of NXT UK stuff it felt like acts that are ready for something else playing paint-by-numbers developmental.
SMACKDOWN (1/15/21)
Shinsuke Nakamura went babyface last week and looked like a big deal this week beating Jey Uso, while Cesaro (who used to be a Paul Heyman Guy…) beat Daniel Bryan clean in a great match where they locked knuckles and kept grappling bell-to-bell. The monkey flip into the ropes and Bryan’s woozy Knee+ getting caught with the toss-up uppercut were highlights.
Liv Morgan/Natalya had a pretty good match with Billie Kay‘s fake punk rocker act getting me to pay attention. Also getting me to pay attention: serious Street Profits. Awesome promo. I too would be absolutely irate if I lost to Dolph Ziggler.
Ding Dong, Hello! Bayley‘s got a talk show.
The Apollo Crews/Sami Zayn main event was more about Big E looking cool as hell in a Ghostbusters cardigan on a couch at ringside (yes), but how Apollo will act on the advice of both Roman and Heyman is suddenly intriguing.
