The Future is Now
NXT "Arrival" was a great debut on the WWE Network. I'm excited to be able to watch their product every week.
I liked the extra shine they added to the arena to make it look more like a legit WWE show. The extra flair really does help from a TV production standpoint.
Cesaro and Sami Zayn stole the show. They stole the month, possibly the year. I'm not ready to call it the Match of the Year yet – it's only March – but it's the best match I've seen in 2014 so far. Fun fact: all three of the best matches I've seen this year involved Cesaro.
Paige and Emma are great. I don't know a lot about the other NXT Divas, but they are the future of their division. That was the best worked Divas match I've seen since – well, since their last match together. I hope that work rate can continue into their WWE main roster performance, but I'm not holding my breath. When was the last time any Diva worked a match like that on Raw or Smackdown? Natalya is capable. We could very well be on the verge of another Stratus-Lita-Molly-Victoria golden era for women's wrestling, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Bo Dallas isn't champion anymore. I would have paid a full PPV price just to see that. The match was OK-to-great in certain spots. Not as good as the Zayn-Cesaro match, but a proper main event that was focused more on the title switch than anything else. Adrian Neville is the real deal. I haven't seen anybody as innovative as him since Rey Mysterio in WCW. Seeing Bo and Bray's sister behind John Cena throwing a fit was better than anything else on WWE TV so far in 2014.
#NoMoreBo
Those three segments were what WWE advertised like crazy going into "Arrival" and they all delivered. Everything else was filler, but served to get a lot of midcard names some much-needed exposure. It immediately showed you the half dozen names NXT is trying to get over right now. Alexander Rusev, the Ascension, etc. I didn't go crazy for anything else in the two-hour not-PPV, but nothing was bad either.
Now that I'm hyped for NXT, I just need to stay hyped for NXT.
