Post by Lionheart on Jun 4, 2007 13:51:40 GMT -5
OK, I think most of us agree that the best thing to do with Lashley is give him a manager to do his talking so he never, ever subjects us to one of his laughably unintimidating promos again.
However, here's an alternative scheme I dreamed up just for the fun of it.
Instead of pretending Lashley is anything other than awful on the mic, you start playing it up, you run with it. Have the announcers (or at least the heel announcer of whatever show he's on at the time: King, JBL, Tazz) make snide remarks about his lack of mic skills (like the crack about Shelton Benjamin a couple weeks ago). You keep him a face, but you make him a a semi-comedic face.
Everybody says Lashley should or at least will get drafted to Raw, since he's on it all the time anyway. But I think it would be more interesting to draft him to Smackdown, keep MVP there, draft Benoit to Raw to put him in the WWEC picture, and have Lashley and MVP feud for the United States title. MVP has the charisma and mic skills to get pops for mocking Lashley's lack thereof, and Lashley has the size and ring skills to beat MVP down when he needs to in order to maintain credibility.
The show's younger fans won't realize how badly Lashley stinks on the mic, and the ridicule from MVP and the announcers will just generate good heat from them or go over their heads entirely. The older fans and smarks will be able to enjoy seeing Lashley get ripped.
Best case scenario: you can sell a crudload of Lashley merchandise to the same crowd that's buying Cena junk now, and you get MVP over as a cool, smart-aleck heel along the same lines as (dare I say it?) The Rock.
There are two main wrinkles that I can think of: first, how do you get the ECW title strap off of Lashley when he goes to Smackdown? If it were up to me, I'd have Vince, in a final act of revenge against Lashley in their feud, "engineer" Lashley getting drafted to Smackdown and then have him strip Lashley of the ECW title because he "respects it too much" to see it leave the ECW brand (insert boos here, never mind the fact that they've been feuding over the ECW strap on Raw for weeks).
The second problem is whether the United States title has the cache to hold people's interest in a long feud over it. I think eventually you'd have to make the stakes higher. But consensus is probably that MVP has the makings of a future main-eventer and consensus is certainly that Lashley should have never have gotten close to a main event the way he is. So after the Lashley-MVP feud gets played out, you move MVP up to contend for the IC title (re-elevated in importance) on whichever show it ends up on or one of the two top belts, and finally make Lashley silent and give him a manager, playing it that he's sick and tired of being made fun of and he's going to do his talking in the ring as an angry heel.
Thoughts?
However, here's an alternative scheme I dreamed up just for the fun of it.
Instead of pretending Lashley is anything other than awful on the mic, you start playing it up, you run with it. Have the announcers (or at least the heel announcer of whatever show he's on at the time: King, JBL, Tazz) make snide remarks about his lack of mic skills (like the crack about Shelton Benjamin a couple weeks ago). You keep him a face, but you make him a a semi-comedic face.
Everybody says Lashley should or at least will get drafted to Raw, since he's on it all the time anyway. But I think it would be more interesting to draft him to Smackdown, keep MVP there, draft Benoit to Raw to put him in the WWEC picture, and have Lashley and MVP feud for the United States title. MVP has the charisma and mic skills to get pops for mocking Lashley's lack thereof, and Lashley has the size and ring skills to beat MVP down when he needs to in order to maintain credibility.
The show's younger fans won't realize how badly Lashley stinks on the mic, and the ridicule from MVP and the announcers will just generate good heat from them or go over their heads entirely. The older fans and smarks will be able to enjoy seeing Lashley get ripped.
Best case scenario: you can sell a crudload of Lashley merchandise to the same crowd that's buying Cena junk now, and you get MVP over as a cool, smart-aleck heel along the same lines as (dare I say it?) The Rock.
There are two main wrinkles that I can think of: first, how do you get the ECW title strap off of Lashley when he goes to Smackdown? If it were up to me, I'd have Vince, in a final act of revenge against Lashley in their feud, "engineer" Lashley getting drafted to Smackdown and then have him strip Lashley of the ECW title because he "respects it too much" to see it leave the ECW brand (insert boos here, never mind the fact that they've been feuding over the ECW strap on Raw for weeks).
The second problem is whether the United States title has the cache to hold people's interest in a long feud over it. I think eventually you'd have to make the stakes higher. But consensus is probably that MVP has the makings of a future main-eventer and consensus is certainly that Lashley should have never have gotten close to a main event the way he is. So after the Lashley-MVP feud gets played out, you move MVP up to contend for the IC title (re-elevated in importance) on whichever show it ends up on or one of the two top belts, and finally make Lashley silent and give him a manager, playing it that he's sick and tired of being made fun of and he's going to do his talking in the ring as an angry heel.
Thoughts?
