Montana wrote: ↑Mon Dec 18, 2017 4:45 am
I disagree... First of all, his reign accomplished EVERYTHING that they wanted to be accomplished during it. Were there 5 stars matches, no... but people were talking about ROH again. Highest attendance ever pretty much. He brought the entertainment side to ROH with great promos. The actual Ring of Honor. The new ROH belt. He was always in the wrestling news, for various things. Tweeting with regins, keeping ROH in the news. It's smart. He got the new face of the company over in a big way, on a BIG show. I'm very sure Cody could have used politics to retain at Final Battle, but he realized it's good for business as Dalton Castle was ready and deserved it.
Some of the reigns his was better than:
Xavier
James Gibson
Homicide
Jerry Lynn
Eddie Edwards
Kyle O Reily
Christopher Daniels
and you could even argue reigns like Michael Elgin, and one of Adam Coles.
Personally i think he's going to win the belt back too.
1. With the exception of Xavier, all of those reigns you mentioned were
at most half as long as Cody's, and Elgin's clearly ended much earlier than was planned.
2. "Accomplished everything they wanted to accomplish" is a phrase that could apply to pretty much all of those reigns you listed aside from Elgin, Kyle (unless you believe that the plan was always for him to lose it back, which seems possible), and Gibson (and in Gibson's case it was just because he signed back with WWE. Given time, Gabe would have gotten everything he wanted out of that, too).
3. The problem isn't that there weren't any ***** matches. It's that (aside from maybe the Daniels SOTF match, which I haven't seen yet) there weren't really any **** matches, either (aside from one that Jay Lethal carried him to, in another promotion, that was still in and of itself a worse version of a match that Lethal and Cole had in that same building for ROH the year before). Hell, there were barely any *** 3/4 matches. Pretty much all of Jerry Lynn's defenses were better (aside from maybe the Cabana defense), and Jerry was almost fifteen years older than Cody at the time.
Meanwhile, in his six months as champion, Cody only had two real feuds (although even the Dalton feud had very little build that actually felt like a feud), and of his fourteen title defenses, only about three or four of them involved a challenger who had actually done anything to earn a title shot, and one of those defenses didn't even take place in ROH. He got handed a f*cking first time ever match match with Minoru Suzuki in Suzuki's first time in US in decades and put on a sh*t-show. He got handed top New Japan talents like KUSHIDA and Sanada... and put on a sh*t-show.
4. As people have said time and again, Cody has nothing to do with the attendance. I have never seen anyone get so lucky about being in the right place at the right time as Cody. He started his indy tour and was able to be carried by top-notch workers like Zack Sabre Jr. and Marty Scurll and Chris Hero, but after a while he wound up getting pretty clearly exposed and everyone was down on him... until the moment he put a f*cking Bullet Club t-shirt on and all of a sudden the crowd is going nuts for him despite having the same sub-par matches because Bullet Club. The attendance rise in ROH has nothing to do with the booking and nothing to do with Cody. It's all about the Young Bucks and the idea of "Bullet Club." You could replace Cody with Chase Owens and do the same spots and people would go equally gaga for them and the same amount of tickets would be sold.
5. You say Cody "brought the entertainment side to ROH?" What he has brought is the exact sh*t this company is supposed to not be about. Cody is a walking cartoon character. He moves around like a f*cking like a Power Rangers villain trying to scare any children in the front row. He's a G-d damn clown. Cody's promos aren't even in the top half of the company, and, to be honest, I'd bet that if most of the undercard guys were ever allowed to talk, they'd probably better promos than Cody, too.
The "ring of honor" is idiotic. Save that delusional heel bullsh*t for WWE. Actually, scratch that. I think WWE is actually above doing that sh*t. Save that bullsh*t for TNA.
Do you know what that ring really is? It's yet another thing designed to help him stall. He gets to waste a minute of potential match-time every match expecting his opponent to kiss it and having them do something rude in response. He also gets to waste time on the outside asking fans to kiss it (which allows him to claim he's doing something different from all of the other times he rolls to the outside to stall by just walking around, or running to the back of the crowd, or throwing a chair or whatever.
The "entertainment side" of ROH didn't need help on promos. We have The Briscoes and Kenny King and Marty Scurll and Silas Young and The Addiction and the Motor City Machine Guns and Jay Lethal and Colt Cabana and Dalton Castle. We just lost Adam Cole and Bobby Fish. The only part of the "entertainment" in ROH that has needed help was the in-ring side, and Cody has done nothing but drag that down into the dirt, and taken the title with him.
6. The new belt doesn't mean sh*t. It's a piece of metal that either the company decided to waste thousands of dollars on just to try to swerve us into thinking that there was no way Dalton would win the belt tonight, or it's a piece of metal that Cody himself wasted thousands of dollars on because he's a f*cking mark.
7. Taking potshots at WWE used to be considered a low-rent and classless thing to do, and ROH has (almost) always differentiated themselves from other indy companies by not doing it. I thought it was a classless move here, too.
8. Explain to me how Cody "got the new face of the company over in a big way" by dropping the belt to him in a mediocre thirteen-minute match. He kicked out of Cody's finisher for the first time in ROH? So what? It's the same move we've seen kicked out of a million times before in WWE. And it's not like this was being pushed as a Rainmaker-esque worldkiller move, either. It never felt like anything more than Cody hitting his finisher to get the win in a midcard-length match that happened to be in the main event because the world title was on the line.