NXT Minus 6: Change Is Gonna Come

I am Fanboy #1 and NXT is the Black & Gold Standard of professional wrestling, but it’s not perfect. Here are 6 changes NXT easily could and should make.

6. Last call for the Last Shot: Adam Cole deserves a better finisher. The Last Shot is dookie juice. He never hits it clean and it can’t happen spontaneously. I prefer finisher where your opponent doesn’t have to sit around for days waiting to get hit. Time for the champ to serve up a new drink.

5. Shave and a haircut: The era of the lumberjack is over. Ditch the soup catcher beards. Yes, even Tommaso Ciampa. And some of those guys need a ponytail or scrunchie or something. If I had a nickel for every time Cole, Pete Dunne, Killian Dain, Damian Priest, etc. had to stop to whip their hair out of their face, I’d buy them all haircuts. 

4. Last rites for the Priest: Damian Priest is good in ring, but his character is a mess, so I don’t care about anything he does. I think he’s a nightlife loving priest with a Green Arrow fetish and dreams of immortality. Why stop there? Thanks to an experimental surgery, he has an actual heart of a lion beating in his chest AND his mom was a Peruvian sun goddess. Bring him back as Punishment Martinez and I would 100% believe he’s Mercedes’ cousin. 

3.  Jumped in the back flash, it’s a gas gas gas: Hardly a week goes by when someone isn’t getting jumped in the back, jumped at the Performance Center, laid out by a mystery attacker. How can they be so lazy? As we speak, we’re still waiting to hear who jumped Finn Balor, why Karrion Kross jumped Tommaso Ciampa AND who kidnapped Raul Mendoza and Joaquin Wilde. Please find better ways to create and extend story lines.  

2. One Fall!!! Listen up, ring announcer lady. It’s real simple. You say, “This match is scheduled for one fall,” then you pause for two seconds while the crowd yells ONE FALL! You want the fans involved and engaged. You want them to feel like part of the action. You don’t want to be the school teacher squashing their fun. Let the fans have their moment.  

1. Hit the breaks: I understand why NXT moved to a network. I understand why there are commercial breaks. I don’t understand why they need to be in the middle of a match. We are watching Matt Riddle pound Roderick Strong. COMMERCIAL BREAK. When we return, Strong is smashing Riddle. It’s disorienting and always makes me think “what did I miss?” You are in the business of telling stories. Stop doing things that take my mind away from the story you are telling. There has to be a better way.