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The Highest Level of Stupid


Grimmas

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Signing Brock after he left UFC. I've actually enjoyed the majority of his run. Business wise however, he's pretty much been a massive failure.

 

Then subsequently having Roman Reigns beat Bryan at the next PPV clean.

Hindsight being 20/20, it's probably for the best that happened. They probably should have done a Luger/Bret deal where they fall over the top simultaneously and have their match at the next PPV be the deciding factor in who goes on to main event WM. Reigns winning clean was the best choice though.

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The WWF immediately pulling the trigger on Flair vs Hogan and Road Warriors vs Demolition feuds when both acts joined the company

 

no way do i agree with the latter, especially. demolition were already on the way down the card - jobbing the tag titles clean was a big sign. had to get whatever value left from them at that point.

 

 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure around when the Warriors had entered the WWF, Ax was already on his way out anyway, and Smash and Crush as Demolition never really interested anyone all that much. I just remember the six man Demolition matches where Ax was barely involved. And then he was eliminated like two minutes in at Survivor Series '90.

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WWE deciding to air the Muhammad Hassan al Qaeda angle immediately following the 2005 attacks in London.

to be fair, they taped it on July 4th, and they aired the angle on the same day as 7/7. I forget if anybody ever settled the question about if they could have removed the footage with under 24hrs notice

 

So, doing that angle in the first place is a bad idea. I don't know if you could say that the timing was the worst part of it since the WWE obviously didn't have notice of possible terrorist threats.

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They could have pulled the episode, London is 5 hours ahead of the east coast of the US. That surely has to be enough time for someone in Stanford to think "maybe today's not the best day to have this angle shown on TV". I still wonder if it was a lack of sensitivity issue or an "too deep in the bubble to be aware of world events" kind of deal.

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Having Bryan eliminated so early in the Royal Rumble this year, and then having Roman Reigns win. Then subsequently having Roman Reigns beat Bryan at the next PPV clean.

 

There's multiple layers of stupid here. There's Bryan coming back from an injury too soon, if he even should have come back at all. Then, instead of booking their feud as a rivalry between two top faces, (i.e. Hogan vs. Warrior) they book it as a feud between two unlikable jerks. Finally, the fact that they invested so much time in pushing Reigns only to bail on him right after what should have been performance that put him over the top.

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One little discussed aspect of that whole thing was that it exposed their complete lack of long-term planning to put the title on a guy whose contract they would intentionally breach about six weeks later. And yeah, Bret probably would have been happy to drop the belt back to Undertaker at One Night Only, then Shawn could have beaten Undertaker for it at HIAC.

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One little discussed aspect of that whole thing was that it exposed their complete lack of long-term planning to put the title on a guy whose contract they would intentionally breach about six weeks later. And yeah, Bret probably would have been happy to drop the belt back to Undertaker at One Night Only, then Shawn could have beaten Undertaker for it at HIAC.

Wait, wouldn't it be a case of sticking to their long term plans too much? Vince was insistent on having Bret drop the title to Shawn.

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One little discussed aspect of that whole thing was that it exposed their complete lack of long-term planning to put the title on a guy whose contract they would intentionally breach about six weeks later. And yeah, Bret probably would have been happy to drop the belt back to Undertaker at One Night Only, then Shawn could have beaten Undertaker for it at HIAC.

Who says? What if they did plan on Bret being the champion that long? Six weeks is a long time for the WWF and Vince in specific to change his mind based on different reasons. Heck they changed their mind six weeks later in 2014 when they realized the fans weren't having none of Batista and wanted Bryan in there instead. But they likely had a long term plan dating back to Summerslam where the main event was going to feature Randy Orton against Batista.

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One little discussed aspect of that whole thing was that it exposed their complete lack of long-term planning to put the title on a guy whose contract they would intentionally breach about six weeks later. And yeah, Bret probably would have been happy to drop the belt back to Undertaker at One Night Only, then Shawn could have beaten Undertaker for it at HIAC.

Wait, wouldn't it be a case of sticking to their long term plans too much? Vince was insistent on having Bret drop the title to Shawn.

 

 

What I mean is that if Vince had known he wanted to get rid of Bret in August, he wouldn't have put the title on him. Then comes September and he wants him out of the company.

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One little discussed aspect of that whole thing was that it exposed their complete lack of long-term planning to put the title on a guy whose contract they would intentionally breach about six weeks later. And yeah, Bret probably would have been happy to drop the belt back to Undertaker at One Night Only, then Shawn could have beaten Undertaker for it at HIAC.

Who says? What if they did plan on Bret being the champion that long? Six weeks is a long time for the WWF and Vince in specific to change his mind based on different reasons. Heck they changed their mind six weeks later in 2014 when they realized the fans weren't having none of Batista and wanted Bryan in there instead. But they likely had a long term plan dating back to Summerslam where the main event was going to feature Randy Orton against Batista.

 

 

It was not a point about booking. It was a point about how mismanaged the company was to make the guy a champion one month and want him out of the company the following month.

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I understood your point. What I was saying and I alluded it with "for different reasons" is that Vince might have had positive feelings for Bret and his being in the WWF for the life or majority of it at least of the contract. Then it is possible Vince in September after making him champion went "Wow was that contract a mistake!" Sports teams suffer bad contracts that they wish they could have taken back...sometimes within the first year of the deal.

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Changing your mind about a long contract less than a year into it indicates, if not a lack of long-term planning, then at least a lack of foresight. Then they kept the belt on Bret all the way through Survivor Series, with the plan being that he would lose the belt in his home country to the person whom he hates the most, while he has a clause in his contract stating that he has control over the finish and while he has a provision in his contract (I'm probably misusing those words) stating that he doesn't even have to wrestle that match. On top of all that, they've already informed him that they have no intention to honor that contract, which is the sort of thing that might make him less likely to go along with company plans that he was always going to find disagreeable. I guess it shows a long-term commitment to their idea about when and to whom he'd drop the belt, but they either didn't think about or did a bad job of considering how much of a headache that match would be, and it left them in a spot with no wiggle room. As soon as they told him about the breach they should have started planning how they'd get the belt off him as soon as possible, because at least that way they have two months or so to make it happen, and he might not have used up all of his required dates by then, too (not sure about when this happened).

 

Was there even a reason to tell him of their plans to breach the deal while he was still champion? The whole thing seems incredibly poorly thought out, and the way they were still scrambling for a solution in the week heading up to Survivor Series makes me think that they'd assumed that everything would just work itself out. I think that's what Loss meant by pointing out that, using nothing but PPV matches that they actually did schedule, there's a pretty easy path to get the belt where they wanted it.

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It's a commitment to long-term planning, but a commitment to incredibly stupid long-term planning and a beyond stupid culmination of that plan, and then they didn't use any of their escape windows. It's a disaster all around.

 

Loss mentioned using One Night Only and Badd Blood to get the Bret-'Taker-Shawn title progression, but what about just using RAW, when RAW desperately needed a huge Nitro-like moment? Unless the mess of the "lost my smile" debacle and Bret already having lost it on a RAW earlier that year was what killed that, which is its own epic of terrible decision-making.

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