Our Shameful Royal Rumble Prediction Post & Draft

The Royal Rumble is coming up and it actually looks like it will be a fun show. Maybe it's because I (Rick City) haven't watched much wrestling recently, but it seems to be a pretty unpredictable show. This is especially true of the Royal Rumble match itself.

And that's where this post comes in.

John Dos Passos 2 and I have decided to make this a little more interesting/shameful this year with a series of picks and predictions on the Royal Rumble match.

So, we're going to make some picks and award points for stuff and come up with a "winner" out of the two of us for the show. In a more accurate sense, none of us are winners, but we're doing this anyway.

The first point is simple: I will take the even numbered entrants and he will take the odds. If the winner is an even numbered entrant, I get a point. If the winner is an odd, he gets a point.

Now, we're also going to make a few predictions on various aspects of the match. Each correct prediction is worth one point.

The First Elimination

RC: Mojo Rawley, because why not?
JDP2: I'm gonna go with the Big Show.

The "Iron Man"
This is a prediction of who will last the longest in the match

RC: The Miz
JDP2: God, the Miz is the smart choice, but I'm going to say Braun Strowman

The Shortest Time in the Match

JDP2: James Ellsworth
RC: Xavier Woods

Who Will Eliminate the Most Competitors

RC: The Undertaker
JDP2: Braun Strowman

Predict Surprise Entrants
22 people have officially been announced, so that leaves eight spots for potential surprises. Who will they be? (One point for each correct guess)

JDP2: Samoa Joe, Kane, the winner of the UK tourney (who also will get the Saddest Pop), Kurt Angle, HHH, Nakamura (who loses to Roode at the NXT thing), James Ellsworth, Kevin Nash

RC: Kurt Angle, Kane, Samoa Joe, Booker T, AJ Styles/John Cena (whoever loses their match), Mark Henry, Apollo Crews, Sting (because a guy can dream, right?)

The Last Elimination

JDP2: The Undertaker
RC: Chris Jericho

The Winner

RC: The Undertaker
JDP2: Chris Jericho

Now, we've also come up with some categories that won't have definite answers, but they're just for fun/shame:

Most Awkward Elimination

JDP2: I'm going to go with the Big Cass. He's awkward.
RC: Something Braun Strowman does.

The Competitor with the Least Chance of Winning

RC: The Big Show. Doesn't he already have a match for WrestleMania against Shaq booked?
JDP2: Least chance of winning? Big Show because he has that match with Shaq at Mania.

Cheap Pop Entrant
This is for someone who you know won't last long in the match, but they're announced just to make the crowd cheer.

RC: Booker T
JDP2: I made the prediction that Ellsworth comes out to Shawn Michaels' theme. I'm counting that as a cheap pop. I will enjoy this.

First Elimination That Makes the Crowd Do an Annoying Chant

JDP2: God the crowds. I'm going to say they'll still be doing a stupid chant from the Reigns match, so pre-Rumble?
RC: Can I say the opening bell? Because I expect a "THIS IS AWESOME" chant.

Saddest Pop Entrant
This goes to the competitor who will receive the worst reaction/no reaction for entering the match.

JDP2: The UK Tournament Winner
RC: Mojo Rawley

Wacky Kofi Kingston Non-Elimination
You know he'll have some stunt. What will it be?

RC: He'll be eliminated but no official will see it and he'll convince the refs he did something crazy to stay in the match and they'll believe him.

JDP2: Kofi will get knocked off the ropes but fall through a wormhole and travels back in time to the WrestleMania with the Trump / McMahon match. He convinces Steve Austin to "accidentally" give Trump a real stunner. Trump, while recuperating in the hospital undergoes psychiatric evaluation, is put on medication, and now sees himself as a loser. As such he doesn't try as hard to hide his financial issues and is charged with tax evasion by the IRS and is convicted. His family has to work for a living at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. As Kofi reenters 2017, he realizes that not only is the world a safer, saner place with Barack Obama entering his 3rd term in office, also but we all have developed lizard tongues and donuts rain outside the arena.

Or he jumps onto a hot-dog cart and pushes it around the ring.

Okay, now that we've done that nonsense, we're also doing a draft. John Dos Passos 2 got to pick first overall by random generator, and we'll alternate picking people from the list of announced competitors until there are none left. If the person you pick wins the match, you get a point.

First Pick (JDP2): The Undertaker
Second Pick (RC): Randy Orton
3 (JDP2): Bray Wyatt
4 (RC): Dean Ambrose
5 (JDP2): Chris Jericho
6 (RC): Dolph Ziggler
7 (JDP2): The Miz
8 (RC): Big E
9 (JDP2): Goldberg
10 (RC): Brock Lesnar
11 (JDP2): Braun Strowman
12 (RC): Rusev
13 (JDP2): Big Cass
14 (RC): Luke Harper
15 (JDP2): Cesaro
16 (RC): Baron Corbin
17 (JDP2): Kofi Kingston
18 (RC): Sami Zayn
19 (JDP2): Sheamus
20 (RC): Xavier Woods
21 (JDP2): Mojo Rawley (No clue who that is)
22 (RC): (He was in NXT & was Zack Ryder's tag partner. He's horrible.) Big Show

Mailbag of Shame: Volume 1

Many successful websites have mailbags.

We would like this site to become successful.

So, here's a mailbag.

But seriously, this was fun to write, and if you have serious (or not-so-serious) and shameful questions about pro wrestling, send us a message at @wrestlingshame or @johndospassos2 or @RickCity. Or you can email us at [email protected]. And follow us on Facebook.

@JohnDosPassos2 @WrestlingShame Saturn and Kronus formed the best tag team in ECW history, right?

— A$AP Flyera (@BCanneyBSB) January 13, 2017

Thanks Brendan! Always good to hear from someone from Flyera twitter.

To answer your question, no - that's ridiculous. It's the Dudley Boys. It has to be the Dudley Boys.

Saturn and Kronus are the Andrew MacDonald and RJ Umberger of ECW. Although, I'm sure Ron Hextall will be able to trade Saturn and Kronus to Boston for eight 3-round picks.

.@WrestlingShame Who is your favorite wrestler of all time and why is it Fake Diesel?

— Ron (@ronfelten) January 13, 2017

Ah, thanks for your question! Ron is a friend of this website.

Actually, my favorite professional wrestler of all time is Randy Savage. But my favorite wrestler of all time  -- ironically speaking -- is Fake Diesel.

Fake Diesel, for those of you who don't know, is one of the strangest things to happen to pro wrestling during the 1990s. Glenn Jacobs - who would later be repackaged as Kane - was made to fill-in for Kevin Nash (nee Diesel) who had recently left for WCW. Apparently, Vince McMahon's perspective was that he owned the copyright on the characters, so he could just get different wrestlers to play the roles. There isn't a great YouTube clip of it, but if have you the WWE Network, check out the RAW episodes for September 1996 and Fake Razor Ramon and Fake Diesel's debuts.

True story: I was working in the concession stands at Hersheypark Arena the night that Fake Diesel and Fake Razor Ramon debuted. The crowd was pissed. I remember people coming to my stand and complaining about Diesel and Razor Ramon, which confused me. After my shift, I found my friend Scott sitting in the stands and watching some matches (this was back when the WWE would air one live RAW and then tape two or three hours of material for future shows) and he filled me in on what had happened.

Fake Diesel is, nevertheless, amazingly wonderful and horrible - all at the same time.

@Rick_City @JohnDosPassos2 For real though, have you seen any truth to the romurs of Angle at the Rumble?

— Tim (@_tkelley) January 16, 2017

Hey, there Tim!

(actually, Tim didn't send this question to Mailbag of Shame per se, but it was a wrestling question and , well, why not?).

There have been rumors about him coming back for awhile now, but to be honest, I have no idea.

Although, the Rumble is being held in San Antonio.
San Antonio is the home of the Alamo.
"Remember the Alamo" was a war-cry in the Texas War of Independence.
Settlers wanted to secede from Mexico partially because they wanted to bring slavery to the territory.
Slavery was the major cause of the Civil War.
There were two "Bloody Angles" of the war (Gettysburg and Spotsylvania)
Kurt Angle return imminent.

@JohnDosPassos2 @WrestlingShame What does WWE measure success by now? All TV ratings are down & Network is way cheaper than PPV.

— Rick (@Rick_City) January 16, 2017

@JohnDosPassos2 @WrestlingShame Wouldn't they naturally be making much, much less than in the past?

— Rick (@Rick_City) January 16, 2017

Rick, the co-runner of this site, sent me a few thoughts on the Network, and I think there are some interesting points here.

Loyal reader -- we are up to seventeen! --- Travis offered his own take on Rick's questions here:

@Rick_City @JohnDosPassos2 also even though TV ratings are down. Their broadcast rights are up. It's their #1 revenue source

— Travis Holman (@HolmanTravis) January 16, 2017

And based on my research, Travis' points are correct.  As you can read in Ian Frisch's great piece on Vice -- the main stream of revenue for the WWE is television, as roughly 35 percent of the company's annual revenue comes from their recent television deals (especially the newest agreement with NBC Universal).

But in a bigger sense, the company's financials don't appear to be on solid ground. There are divisions like WWE Films which continually lose money, while the Network has presented its own problems. In comparison, Frisch notes that the WWE claimed a loss of roughly 5.6 million dollars in the second quarter of 2016 from the Network. And there are a number of problems with the Network: as one interviewee in Frisch's piece claims, the company is now charging users $10 a month for something they used to charge $50 dollars per month (one major pay-per-view a month) while adding increased internal costs. Additionally. there is the real problem of users leaving the service. From Frisch's piece:

Because the profit margin of the network is only in the 10 percent range, WWE needs to boost their subscriber numbers just to survive, let alone sustain growth and keep shareholders happy. "If you get more TV viewers, WWE gets the same amount of money. If you get more network subscribers, WWE gets more money," Harrington told me. "That's a great thing, but the challenge is, where do all these added subscribers come from, especially if TV ratings keep falling?"

Another way to gauge WWE Network's progress is the "churn" numbers, or how many people terminate the service after signing up. For the second quarter of 2016, WWE gained 625,000 total subscribers, but lost 471,000, giving them a net addition of only 153,000.

I was curious to know the total churn numbers since the network's inception. "We don't give those numbers out publicly," George Barrios told me, but according to documents submitted to the SEC, WWE Network has amassed 4,587,000 total accounts since launching in 2014, while 3,076,000 accounts have left the service (leaving us with the current number of active accounts: 1,511,000). That means that 67 percent of accounts that were created were eventually canceled (I refer to them as "accounts" rather than "subscribers" because theoretically one person could sign up and bail more than once, thus skewing the metrics).

Skewing the metrics is nothing new for the WWE -- especially in terms of their public claims of attendance records for "entertainment purposes" -- but there appears to be a real problem for the company with the Network. While live shows, merchandising, and other traditional forms of revenue appear to be strong (especially television), the company's emphasis on the Network long-term might present bigger issues for it's bottom line unless it can generate stronger revenue from the service. 

Hmm. Forgot to add a joke to that last section. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed our first Mailbag of Shame! I'm working on an overview of Rick Rude's career, and I'm sure we'll do something interesting come the Royal Rumble!