I'm VERY ready for Mondays to go back to having nothing except wrestling happening on them... the past two months have made it a real chore to manage to get a RAW Recap done in a timely fashion, thanks mostly to a need to tend to two other shows before bed.
 

• Starting on RAW, we got part of the show centered on the revelation that Triple H/the Authority wouldn't actually pursue a WWE Title rematch with Roman Reigns (which is odd).... instead, Shane McMahon -- who was in charge of RAW, because apparently winning and losing at WrestleMania has no actual meaning -- put together a 4-way #1 Contender Match.
   
  And -- again, because winning and losing at WM32 did not matter -- AJ Styles scored the surprise win to become Reigns' first challenger.
   
  From my perspective, things seemed to line up for Chris Jericho to get the first shot. (1) He's a heel, and such an over-the-top hceeseball heel that he gets smarks to boo. (2) He's not hanging around much past Payback, anyway. (3) Him beating Styles at WM32 doesn't make much sense unless you were building him up for something. All of which adds up to (4) Jericho would have been perfect to do the honors and slide into his next vacation by trying his best to "make" Reigns.
   
  But then: BOOM, Styles gets the win. That's, ummmmm, interesting, to say the least.
   
  If it's as simple as greasing the wheels towards that much needed Reigns heel turn, then fine, I'm on board.... but I can't help but have this nagging suspicion that some higher-ups in WWE are still trying to "win" the argument with regards to Reigns, with a sneaky little backdoor move.
   
  Just skipping past how sad and petty WWE is if they feel they are at odds with the people who pay their bills, it COULD be that WWE is purposely setting up a cut-and-dry example of the "home crowd vs. away crowd" theory that they spent the past two weeks feeding to the media, anytime somebody asked about Reigns getting booed.
   
  Reigns and others had been coached up to give the party line that this was a FEATURE, and NOT a bug, as it illustrates they are reaching the entire universe of fans, not just one type. They frequently used a dubious baseball analogy, saying that Yankees fans are always gonna boo the Red Sox and vice versa. But here's the thing: the Yankees don't have to sell a single damned thing to Red Sox fans, and they don't bother trying. There is no hypothetical geographically neutral venue where the Yankees and Red Sox have to play all their games. If the Yankees and Red Sox played 18 games per year (which they do) -- and instead of playing 9 in NY and 9 in Boston, all with red hot crowds almost-unanimously cheering for one side, and averaging 40,000 per game -- they played games in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, and so forth, you know what happens? You get 15,000 who are willing to show up, and with a different split in the fanbase everynight. And that would be a very shitty business model for them to pursue.
   
  Just like it's a shitty analogy to put out there, if you're WWE. [And even worse if they actually believe it, internally.] If WWE didn't have a monopoly, you could play the "home field advantage" card, to some extent, with "wrestling industry" as MLB, and various territories and federations as the franchises.... but that doesn't exist any more, and you can't say "what plays here won't play there" (and be intellectually honest about it). WWE is a traveling show where there is ALWAYS a benefit to delivering a satisfying climax to the night's narrative. Going into an event, with a pre-made excuse that half your fans are always gonna be pissed, is no way to do business. Figuring out how to write your show to un-piss-off as many fans as possible is always the goal.
   
  I'm starting to digress, but let me go back to my little conspiracy theory.... cuz the "un-piss-off" option is to realize what's been wrong for the past year and a half and give Reigns his heel turn. But the insecure and wacky "let's prove we're right about this home crowd/road crowd idea" method is to put Reigns in their against a poster boy for the "road crowd."
   
  Put Reigns in there against a heel, and any boos Reigns gets are his fault, or the fault of WWE for not doing the turn. But here, against AJ Styles, WWE is putting him against a beloved "smart" fan favorite, who is tiny, who can't talk, and who was a nobody until 4 months ago. Ergo, of course, some of the "difficult" fans will boo Reigns and cheer for Styles.... but there mere fact that Reigns gets a bunch of cheers from the kiddies and the casuals who view Reigns as the more convincing pro rassler PROVES THERE IS A HOME CROWD FOR REIGNS.
   
  Or something like that. It's predicated on all or most of the kiddies and casuals siding with Reigns, but I honestly wouldn't put it past WWE to be doing this because Reigns vs. Styles gives them an excuse to downplay the importance of some boos, and gives them an excuse to vastly overplay how much any cheers "proves" they are right.
   
  We'll see. Reigns seemed to be willing to be a bit more dickish this past week (or, at least, a bit more one dimensionally dependent on being the good guy), so it could still be the straight heel turn.... or hell, HHH could show up and make it a 3-way (or Vince could put somebody else in, because honestly: why WAS Shane allowed to be in charge, anyway?), and blow up this whole little diatribe of mine.
   
  But hey, you can't un-read it, now!
   
  RAW's other main accomplishment was debuting a bunch of NXT talents in front of a very receptive crowd. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Apollo Crews is as close to a can't-miss prospect as has walked into WWE in a long time, simply because he does all the things that we fans appreciate really well, and unlike every other "smart" favorite to show up over the years, he also has the size and look that Vince likes. I actually thought there was a chance of Crews debuting at the Rumble, but in all the hub-bub that weekend, the slot went to Zayn, instead.... regardless, he's ready to be a significant contributor.
   
  File Baron Corbin under "NOT a smart favorite." But he does have the "WWE-style" size and move set to be a useful mid-card heel.  
   
  With both Enzo/Cass and the Vaudevillians jumping to the main roster, NXT's tag division has had almost a complete turnover in the past 18 months. [And the cool thing is: the future STILL looks bright, with American Alpha slated to be the breakout team of 2016.] Enzo/Cass are "what you see is what you get," in terms of being a classic little man/big man team (where the little guy talks the talk and the big guy walks the walk).... the Vaudevillians will have to thread the needle a bit more carefully, because it'd be real easy for the fans to not take them seriously, but starting them off as subtle heels (which is what they did this week) bodes well; their act just works better a snively heels, but bringing old tymey 1930s antics full bore out of the gate would have been a mistake (just as the Ascension who turned it up to 11 with old tymey 1980s antics out of the gate).
   
  A couple of returns, on top of the debuts, too: Cesaro and Maryse. Needless to say, one's probably quite a bit more significant than the other as he shakes off the rust. But Maryse could bring a nice little extra element to Miz's character; she always had the "it" in terms of personality and charisma.
   
  Anyway, Monday was an interesting 3 hours, to be sure, and probably deserved a bit of discussion... I just didn't get to it till now, on the grounds of WWE served up an equally interesting 3 hours of Friday (NXT Takeover), a not-so-interesting 4 hours on Saturday night (Hall of Fame), and then freaking SEVEN hours on Sunday night, so honestly, I was happy to let myself get distracted by something else.
   
  
• Then, last night's SmackDown, which basically served as everybody's collective chance to slow down and get back to normal.
   
  Per SD SOP, that means just randomly putting 4 awesome guys into a main event tag match and pressing "PLAY." Cesaro and AJ Styles beat Kevin Owens and Chris Jericho in a really fun match, with a little help from Sami Zayn. In addition to being a really good match, it represented a logical manuevering of the various pieces, and now, you could easily do Owens/Zayn and Jericho/Cesaro at Payback, in addition to Reigns/Styles.
   
  Show opened with a short-and-sweet confrontation between Styles and Reigns, in which WWE "protected" Reigns with a brief segment and audio tweaks... but again, he played the cocky dick role a bit, so we could be inching in the right direction for Roman, too.
   
  In between those bookends, the most significant segment was Miz retaining the IC Title over Zack Ryder. It was a good wrestling match, not as much about the bells and whistles as Monday's, and probably sends Ryder back to whatever night "Superstars" airs on the Network.
   
  The rest: Dean Ambrose got healthy by re-appearing after his WM loss to Lesnar, and squashing the hell out of Tyler Breeze... Nattie, now the #1 Contender to Charlotte, similarly made short work of Summer Rae... Apollo Crews had no trouble with Curtis Axel... and the Vaudevillians debuted with a win over the Lucha Dragons...
   
  Not a show that set the world on fire, but a nice way to kick back and catch your breath with some solid wrestling, after the weekend's 17 hour onslaught.
   
  
• Ratings for both RAW and SD were up over recent weeks, with RAW doing especially well.
   
  RAW would have set a year-to-date record, if not for a fairly profound drop-off in its third hour, as the NCAA Finals hit high gear. [Talk about yet ANOTHER distraction I had to deal with on Monday night; that ending was amazing!] Instead, with a nearly 400,000 viewer drop between Hour Two and Hour Three, the three hour show lands in a tie with the post-Rumble RAW for best audience of 2016.
   
  SD gained about 100,000 viewers over last week, right about at its YTD average (an average that is bolstered by much higher numbers in January than since).
   
  
• In other news about audience size: I was right about WWE fudging the announced attendence for WrestleMania. WWE announced 101,800 on the night of the event, which just seemed implausible given the tracking of ticket sales leading up to the event.
   
  Within 48 hours, even WWE was admitting that the final "paid" audience was 97,000, and other sources claiming that there were 97,000 in the building, but about 94,000 paid.
   
  Two ways to spin it: as an utter abject failure, considering WWE's goal was to break the venue record of 108,000... or a massive success, as this objectively smashes the previous WWE record of WM3, and is LIKELY the all time wrestling record, too (nobody really believes the figures claimed by Kim Jong Il for a WCW/NJPW two day event in the 90s, where supposedly they drew over 100,000 on both days).
   
  But why try to spin it, at all? It's still a shitload of money in WWE's pockets, either way.
   
  
• Shinsuke Nakamura was the breakout star of last Friday's NXT Takeover event on the WWE Network... for those who were familiar with his work, he proved he could get it to translate in an awesome match against Sami Zayn. For those seeing him for the first time, as long as you got past the first five minutes (some of Nakamura's antics make Jeff Hardy look normal and butch), you were blown away by the rest.
   
  Well, exactly 7 days later, and I'm hearing that Nakamura just got helped out of the arena after landing badly on a moonsault attempt. Tonight, NXT is in Columbia SC, and his match against La Sombre was stopped after trainers came down to check on him. D'oh.
   
  We could just wait and get word in a day or two, but I'll add in wild speculation from my tipster that Nakamura wasn't hurt badly, but instead sold the hard landing, because he had been bleeding after a hardway shot, and the ref was having no lucky getting it to stop with a towel. So they had the trainer come out and just call the whole thing off, rather than keep going with the visible blood. We'll see if that's true, or just wishful thinking...
   
  
• Samoa Joe was significantly bloodied on the Takeover show, in his main event against Finn Balor.... and the ref and trainers also couldn't stop it, and Joe wasn't really giving them more than 20 seconds at a time to try. Could be why there's an increased suspicion with regards to what WWE might or might not do about unstaunched blood loss...
   
  FWIW, I didn't think the hyper attentive trainers hurt the match THAT much. Joe's clear frustration managed to do just barely enough to cover up the fact that (realistically) Balor was being given lots of free time to recover.
   
  But then again, the reason I didn't get too upset could also be because Joe/Balor wasn't ever gonna be any better than the 3rd (maybe even 4th) best match of the show. The aforementioned Nakamura/Zayn match was the best, and man alive, Bayley and Asuka delivered the goods, too. Those two are probably my two favorite women in the company, right now, and they do it in two totally different ways. I also thought the opening tag title match was really good, and not just "fun" because Gable and Jordan brought it, but genuinely GOOD, with Dash and Dawson holding up their half, too.
   
  If, for whatever reason, you have the Network, but don't make NXT regular viewing, NXT Dallas gets my highest recommendation. Well, really, any of the Takeover specials is recommended.... but last Friday's was particularly strong, the best one since Brooklyn.
   
  
• The Undertaker was pulled from some smaller house shows on the second half of WWE's upcoming European tour.... but he's been added to the April 19 SmackDown tapings in London, fueling speculation that he might still have an onscreen role with regards to the Vince/Shane storyline (which took an odd turn on Monday, when Vince just willingly gave RAW to Shane, and Shane later tweeted that it was a "foot in the door" and there was more coming).
   
  That said, I've been doing this a long time, and if I had to guess, I'd say that WWE added him to the SD taping because when they do these overseas tours with TV, they do RAW and SD back to back at the same venue, and ticket sales for the second night are always miserable, so they always add SOMEthing at the last second. This time around: the Undertaker.
   
  Still, the thing with Shane and Vince is a head scratcher, to say the least, unless you just accept that Vince has the maturity of a 4 year old to give in THAT easily.
   
  
• Last thing for today is word that Blackjack Mulligan (real name: Robert Windham) passed away yesterday at the age of 73.... for most of us, the only time we saw him on TV was when he passed the torch to the New Blackjacks. But he was a WWE Hall of Famer who cut a wide swath in many territories (and worldwide) as a singles performer in the 70s, before setting up shop as a tag team with fellow Blackjack Lanza in the WWWF.
   
  He'll also live on through the careers of his sons Barry (a major star and WWE Hall of Famer in his own right) and Kendall (also deceased), and his son-in-law Mike Rotunda (a/k/a Irwin R Shyster) and Mike's sons Bray Wyatt and Bo Dallas.
   
  Mulligan had been struggling with health issues in recent years, and Bray/Bo had missed a few dates to be with him though some tough moments.... hopefully, the original Blackjack is now at peace; OO offers up best wishes to all his family, friends, and fans.
   
  
• Alrighty, then.... that does it for me here today. Barring any unforseen demand upon my time and attention, I'll see you all again in about 72 hours, to tell you what I thought about the just-completed edition of RAW that will play out on Monday.
   
  You wrap your head around that mangling of verb tenses, and I'll take my leave. Later on, kids....