Brandon Stroud at Best and Worst of Raw wrote that the Daniel Bryan/Kane match on Monday, which featured the tag champs in a “blindfold” (creepy sex mask) and with one arm tied behind their back,

“was awful and a waste of time. It made everyone involved look stupid. The Prime Time Players are worthless, and in a few months when you decide to give them the ‘this is the team that is WINNING now’ push, we won’t believe it. Kane doesn’t look good beating two worthless guys with one arm. Daniel Bryan in a gimp hood having blindfold matches is depressing.”

Monday’s match was like a living nightmare.  Any regular listener to The Intercontinental Podcast knows how much Brayton and I are willing to complain about the current tag division, as is nearly anyone with interest in the tag belts.

On Friday Night Smackdown, the two teams did literally the same exact thing, and yet somehow, the match was entirely entertaining!  I should step back for a minute; the match was different in that the roles were reversed, Kane wore the sex mask and Bryan had his arm tied.  However, the characters were exactly the same and the scenario nearly identical.  

Putting Kane in the mask became entertaining in a way that it simply was not with Bryan in the situation.  The Prime Time Players won, AS THEY SHOULD HAVE on Monday.  The match felt very Chikara-esque… comedic in the right ways given the situation all of the characters are in.

Even the Prime Time Players had a couple good spots, one at the beginning where Darren Young was trying to trip Kane by bending on all fours.  Eventually Young yelled, “It’s not working, Titus!” as if this was their big plan going into the match.  Hilarious!  

I don’t know how it happened, but the match on Friday that nearly mirrored the match on Monday was so much more exceptional.  If only it had happened in front of the larger, live Raw audience.

On January 7th, 2013, WWE Raw ran a total of 2 hours and 21 minutes. CM Punk was featured in some way during the final part of the show for 59 minutes total

This is omitting the 5 minutes of Big Show/Kofi and Hell No/Vickie filler segments.

The 59 minutes represents roughly 40% of the entire show.

conversely, Titus O’Neil’s commentary is horrible and the greatest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

“Dolph Ziggler comes to the ring with a point, and it’s a good one — wrestlers don’t know when to hang it up, and Jericho’s gonna end up just like Roddy Piper, showing up every six months for a paycheck to be kinda sad and start lonely ass chants when someone should be turning off his microphone. Ziggler’s comments have merit, but they aren’t right… he’s being a dick about it, and that’s why we should boo him and cheer for Jericho. We want Jericho to prove he’s still got it, and that he’s not going to fart on his legacy and namedrop his equivalent to Mr. T on a Raw 20 years from now. We want him to stick up for Piper and tell Ziggler he’s full of shit, because he’s going to prove himself at SummerSlam.

What we get instead is Jericho responding to merited comments with insults about how Ziggler’s hair is ugly (Jericho’s the one with a balding faux-hawk) and how Ziggler’s shirt is pink (Jericho is wearing a sparkling jacket with a popped collar and no pants). A bad guy says something reasonable, so the good guy acts like a child and calls him names. Where have I seen that before?

It’s just agony for me. We need to reboot and restore some moral balance to what’s going on. I can’t keep justifying cheering for the guy who makes sense if the arena and announcers (and fans, and fans on the Internet) think I’m a contrarian for doing so. It just doesn’t feel right. The talking point about wrestling being one of the most pure artistic expressions of simplified good versus evil got washed away with those stupid Vince Russo shades of grey, and now nobody knows how to write a shade of grey, so we’re left with a big blob of shitty grey and nothing to feel or cheer for. It’s why we get on the Internet and yell at each other about wrestling. If the wrestling was good, we’d be okay just getting together and yelling at THEM.”

-Brandon Stroud

Good Guy Bullies