Chainsaw
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Post by Chainsaw on Oct 28, 2021 0:37:13 GMT -5
Paid way too much money for them to rebrand them and then run into a period where people couldn't play sports. Anything else I say will probably go against board rules, but if you know my history the last 2 years, I'll just say... womp womp.
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Oct 28, 2021 0:38:54 GMT -5
It just shows how f***in' quickly the house of cards can collapse. I mean, Ring Of Honor had clearly seen better days, but there was no indication they were literally on death's door. Impact outlived like four deathwatch threads. The thing that saved them was Anthem buying them and the permanent TV home they have along with Twitch. They lucked out pretty insanely. If Sinclair goes under it's gonna be a matter of ROH's assets and where they're sold and how. If they have a show booked for April they seemingly want to have confidence they can survive... but if Sinclair goes under it will all fall on who buys ROH's assets and if they can keep the company afloat in some manner even if they lose their TV.
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Chainsaw
T
A very BAD man.
It is what it is
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Post by Chainsaw on Oct 28, 2021 0:39:09 GMT -5
Wild.
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Post by Lance Uppercut on Oct 28, 2021 0:40:42 GMT -5
Paid way too much money for them to rebrand them and then run into a period where people couldn't play sports. Anything else I say will probably go against board rules, but if you know my history the last 2 years, I'll just say... womp womp. Wait, are they the ones who bought the fox sports west here and why it’s now called Bally’s? I was wondering what happened there. Also, I totally forgot Bally’s existed after all their gyms became la fitness over here
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Oct 28, 2021 0:42:24 GMT -5
I'm also gonna go out on a limb here and say giving Marty Scurll a million dollar deal and control of the booking just for his entire legacy to completely collapse like three months later could NOT have helped ROH or Sinclair as a whole... especially if Sinclair already were dealing with financial struggles beforehand. Depending on how much of that deal was guaranteed? That probably turned out to also be a disaster for them financially in the end.
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Celgress
Bill S. Preston, Esq.
The Superior One
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Post by Celgress on Oct 28, 2021 0:45:31 GMT -5
I'm also gonna go out on a limb here and saying giving Marty Scurll a million dollar deal and control of the booking just for his entire legacy to completely collapse like three months later could NOT have helped ROH or Sinclair as a whole... especially if Sinclair already were dealing with financial struggles beforehand. Depending on how much of that deal was guaranteed? That probably turned out to also be a disaster for them financially in the end. Morally Marty was in the wrong, however, I wonder what about legally. Unless there was an ethics clause in his contract ROH might have been forced to buy it out when they released him which would have cost a pretty penny. Just another possible expenditure they could ill afford.
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Oct 28, 2021 0:50:16 GMT -5
I’m furiously booking a feud in my head between Joe Gacy and VINCENT battling for Harland’s love. I seriously wonder if WWE will be interested in any of the talent. Maybe a year ago they would scoop up a bunch of guys but now with this new signing and training mentality they have? A lot of dudes are gonna fall out of their radar... might be good for other promotions though.
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Post by hashtagdaley/JudasDay on Oct 28, 2021 0:52:33 GMT -5
I’m furiously booking a feud in my head between Joe Gacy and VINCENT battling for Harland’s love. I seriously wonder if WWE will be interested in any of the talent. Maybe a year ago they would scoop up a bunch of guys but now with this new signing and training mentality they have? A lot of dudes are gonna fall out of their radar... might be good for other promotions though. Ya, a few years ago the entire roster would already be wearing “WWE PERFORMANCE CENTER” t-shirts and posing for their intros. Nowadays though? Probably not. Im gonna hold out some hope though. I need that Joe Gacy / VINCENT, ya dig?
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Mecca
Wade Wilson
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Post by Mecca on Oct 28, 2021 1:19:13 GMT -5
Peacock ruining it with ad breaks plus scattershot releases, ie Smokey Mountain To me the bigger thing is that WWE owning so much of wrestling history already just sucks, and I don’t want them swallowing up more. That's literally their goal, they seem to think they're the library of professional wrestling.
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Post by A Platypus Rave is Correct on Oct 28, 2021 1:20:40 GMT -5
While I'm sure a few months ago there'd be a lot more interest in it, I could see the WWE showing interest in a few of the people in RoH still...
The big problem if RoH does fully close is gonna be Impact, AEW, WWE, Etc. only have so many spots on the roster and like all of them combined probably don't have enough space for literally an entire roster of people.
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Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Oct 28, 2021 1:32:13 GMT -5
While I'm sure a few months ago there'd be a lot more interest in it, I could see the WWE showing interest in a few of the people in RoH still... The big problem if RoH does fully close is gonna be Impact, AEW, WWE, Etc. only have so many spots on the roster and like all of them combined probably don't have enough space for literally an entire roster of people. Right, like the biggest hope is that the pandemic will have eased enough by then for some people to get international bookings, maybe, and even that's going to be tricky.
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Mecca
Wade Wilson
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Post by Mecca on Oct 28, 2021 1:36:38 GMT -5
While I'm sure a few months ago there'd be a lot more interest in it, I could see the WWE showing interest in a few of the people in RoH still... The big problem if RoH does fully close is gonna be Impact, AEW, WWE, Etc. only have so many spots on the roster and like all of them combined probably don't have enough space for literally an entire roster of people. They'll probably show interest in a few people. I just don't see many of the upper guys being very interested in WWE like they've proven over and over that if you wear a mask they'll ruin you unless your names Mysterio.
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Chainsaw
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Post by Chainsaw on Oct 28, 2021 1:55:29 GMT -5
I just know there's some chucklehead at corporate who is readying a proposal to rebrand Ring Of Honor as a f***ing MMA promotion, I just know it.
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Post by honsou on Oct 28, 2021 2:00:56 GMT -5
It would be interesting to see if AEW would buy them out, especially now that it would basically just be buying their tape library and the IP. Could be an interesting way to start a streaming service
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Chainsaw
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A very BAD man.
It is what it is
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Post by Chainsaw on Oct 28, 2021 2:19:57 GMT -5
I just saw that Sinclair's 3rd Q earnings announcement is on Nov. 3rd. There are no coincidences.
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Glitch
Grimlock
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Post by Glitch on Oct 28, 2021 4:14:15 GMT -5
As soon as the thread here was made that was titled "Ruh Roh!"a while back, we should have seen the end coming. Especially how it was said that Impact and Roh traded places.
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Post by Can you afford to pay me, Gah on Oct 28, 2021 4:45:10 GMT -5
Sinclair bet everything they had on being able to have a streaming platform to watch sports and gamble at the same time, but the sports leagues don't want to work with them on either the streaming or gambling rights so now they have an empire of 3rd rate cable networks that are priced like 1st tier. Also my earlier post about how they played themselves with the Regional Sports networks by over charging for it to providers. To the point most of the providers told them to take a hick. 2 years later they didn't budge on it and now they hurt themselves.
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Post by HMARK Center on Oct 28, 2021 5:35:24 GMT -5
Yeah, for those wondering what the full story is here with Sinclair, the article before from the Hollywood Reporter touches on a good deal of it: when Disney purchased 21st Century Fox they were told they had to divest of Fox's regional sports networks (Disney owning those AND ESPN would've been pure monopolistic insanity). Disney seemed just fine with that, likely didn't want to deal with them despite the often lucrative contracts and fees they could charge, and Sinclair swooped in and purchased the Fox Sports regional channels for about $10.6 billion. A merger followed that led to the rebranding that became Bally Sports.
RSNs, as they're called, are big business; lots of pro sports teams have started trying to make their own so they could make a lot more money, plus use them as stashes to hide their overall team profits (the Yankees with YES and the Mets with SNY are two New York market examples). But Sinclair now had a whole slew of them all over the country, and figured they could leverage that position into something big: in this case, with cord cutting being as prevalent as it is, they wanted to start prepping a Bally Sports streaming service that would be coupled with a live online sports gambling platform.
A few rather big problems, there: 1. Sinclair and its RSN subsidiary, Diamond, have no experience setting up digital services like that. They'd be starting from scratch to develop one, and their partners in MLB, the NBA, and the NHL likely wouldn't be thrilled relying on a newbie to the field. 2. Speaking of which, the commissioners of MLB and the NBA, Rob Manfred and David Silver, have publicly stated they're not interested in having Sinclair be the middle man for such a service. All these leagues see the writing on the wall: they've all made insane money over the last 10-15 years or so off RSNs, but with more people leaving cable they know they'll have to shift sooner than later, and odds are they'll want their own streaming/gambling services, not anything that forces them to rely on a major third party. 3. WHOOPS, COVID! Suddenly all those RSNs have fewer games to show, and the games they are showing are getting worse ratings than usual, likely leading to worse advertising deals (that bounced back in 2021, but the damage was done in 2020). 4. The cherry on top, despite these issues Sinclair has still been charging very high rates to providers to carry their RSNs, and many providers, both satellite and online, have decided to stop carrying them rather than get stuck at the negotiating table.
End result: Sinclair's entire business model is threatened. Said it before, but I shed no tears whatsoever for Sinclair if it goes under, for reasons more appropriate to discuss in other places.
But I think a lot of us have some misconceptions here about ROH, and might be missing what the actual potential parallels with WCW are in this situation: -ROH basically had to be sold to an entity like Sinclair when it was, otherwise it would have died years ago. Cary Silken poured a ton of money into the promotion once he fully took over in 2004, but there was only so much he could do, and the promotion never really made money during those golden years of ROH's early life. This includes when they got a deal to broadcast on HD Net back in the day: ROH may well have been paying for that timeslot, costing Silken even more money.
-ROH, by most accounts, has been profitable for Sinclair. Granted, this is at least in part due to Sinclair not exactly sinking tons of money into the promotion; they certainly put enough in to allow a solid number of wrestlers to earn full time livings, and they've invested at times to increase production values, but costs were kept low enough that ROH's overhead was, again going by accounts I've read, not really a major issue for them. Catch is, that doesn't mean ROH has been raking in tons of revenue/profit, either; it's a mid-sized promotion, so it hasn't gotten the exposure of a bigger brand that could lead to it getting, say, lucrative live TV deals or what have you. That means that while they've mostly made money, Sinclair might still see them as expendable.
-In that sense, there's a WCW parallel: a parent company goes through some craziness, the promotion suffers for it. Where there might not be a parallel is that ROH does not necessarily have to follow WCW's fate; remember, a big reason WCW died the way it did was AOL-Time Warner dropping it from TNT/TBS, thus hurting its overall value, but importantly due to a lawsuit Vince McMahon had an in to purchase WCW if its assets became available...which they did. There's no such arrangement for ROH and a company like WWE right now, so it's entirely possible that ROH comes back in April and perhaps runs more independently, or finds a new parent company/investors, etc.
That said, it's obviously not peaches and cream; there's a lot that could go very wrong here, and it's going to be a very nerve wracking time until we see where things actually end up. Hoping for the best for all the wrestlers and staff, of course; if Ian's reading this, hope all is well man, we know you'll land on your feet however this shakes out but hope this all turns out to just be a bump in the road for you guys.
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Post by kingoftheindies on Oct 28, 2021 5:38:47 GMT -5
It just shows how f***in' quickly the house of cards can collapse. I mean, Ring Of Honor had clearly seen better days, but there was no indication they were literally on death's door. Impact outlived like four deathwatch threads. The thing that saved them was Anthem buying them and the permanent TV home they have along with Twitch. They lucked out pretty insanely. If Sinclair goes under it's gonna be a matter of ROH's assets and where they're sold and how. If they have a show booked for April they seemingly want to have confidence they can survive... but if Sinclair goes under it will all fall on who buys ROH's assets and if they can keep the company afloat in some manner even if they lose their TV. Anthem also has also shown a lot more interest in helping Impact grow than Sinclair has for ROH... or at least consistently. Hell they bought a TV channel just to get Impact on a better channel. I really do feel for the talent. I've been critical of ROH a lot over the years but I do think they had built a very unique roster in the last 2 years that helped them feel unique again. Hopefully ROH will be able to come back, but I expect quite a few names to show up on Dark tapings. For tryouts. Rush, Baltimore, Dragon Lee, Flamita, Brodie? See ya in AEW. Gresham? See ya in Impact. Curious to see where others go but those ones all seem like give ins
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Oct 28, 2021 5:55:32 GMT -5
Paid way too much money for them to rebrand them and then run into a period where people couldn't play sports. Anything else I say will probably go against board rules, but if you know my history the last 2 years, I'll just say... womp womp. Wait, are they the ones who bought the fox sports west here and why it’s now called Bally’s? I was wondering what happened there. Also, I totally forgot Bally’s existed after all their gyms became la fitness over here Yup, those morons.
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