Wouldn't it be ironic if Spike worked up a deal with ROH to take the old spot of Reaction, then gets better ratings than Impact?

I do hope ROH gets a better basic cable deal. I've heard nothing but good things about it but never got the chance to experience it.

Ironically, I just started DVR'ing that show because I enjoy the in-ring action. C'est la vie.

Wouldn't it be in TNA's best interests to incorporate as much of ROH's talent as possible? They could treat them like WCW/WWF treated ECW in the '90s.

That sucks man. Davey Richards is one of my favorite wrestlers. HD NET is the best channel I've ever watched. It's my home for MMA. I love it, and I hear that Comcast is trying to pick it up. I switched to Verizon just for this channel.

I am a fan of old style professional wrestling, because I grew up watching the product from the 70's and 80's while reading the Apter Magazines to follow story lines from the territories all over the country. I have been watching wrestling for the last 10 or so years just hoping that the product will someday return to at least resemble what I grew up loving as a kid, but no matter how much I hope that it will, it never seems to materialize. I guess it is me in someway holding on to what was such a huge part of my childhood, and hoping to get that nostalgic feeling just one more time.

I finally got HDNET programming right after Thanksgiving, and have been watching ROH on TV for the first time. I had heard several places that ROH is the closest to old shcool as you can find and that their product was superior to the overproduced products that were out there today with WWE and TNA respectively. I was excited to check out their television product to maybe recapture that feeling one more time. After watching their show, I can say that some things seemed to be better than the major companies but ROH still left something to be desired for me.

As a kid growing up I was always drawn to the guys that could give believable promos and those that could were always my favorites. I loved Flair, Murdoch, Cornette, Arn Anderson, etc., because to me they could turn an angle into something believable. I could actually imagine a guy like Harley Race getting pulled out of a police car in handcuffs with blood on his shirt from whipping some guys butt for running around with his wife. When he said he was going to beat someone up it was believeable and when he told you why that was what I always enjoyed watching.
One of my favorite promos of all time was a highly upset Harley Race who had jsut put a bounty on Ric Flair's head that no one was succesful in collecting. He screamed in his promo for someone to "take the $%&# money". It felt real because he was able to convey the impression that the young Flair was really a threat not only to his belt but also to take the torch of being the traveling NWA champ and being the most important wrestler in the NWA at that time. You could feel a sense of realism in that, which there likely was, as Race knew he was at the end of a 15 year run as the main man in the NWA. He knew that Jim Crockett was gaining power in the NWA and that Flair was going to be the focus going forward. Though most folks knew everything was work by this point, there still was this feeling that maybe some of those angles like that were at least partially a shoot, and if you went to see the matches who knows what was going to happen.

ROH missed the mark for me as I still see guys who seem to be reading promos or are at the very least tightly held to what they are supposed to say. I have to say to me this is the biggest annoyance as I feel that promos were an artforom and as I stated above the most important aspect of the program to me. I often hear the knock on TNA being that they are simply trying to emulate the WWE product and really aren't differntiating themselves from what Vince and Co. are doing. I think the same argument could be made for ROH as the segments seemed overproduced to me for them also. I have watched guys like Davie Richards who are small but can deliver a ton of highspot type moves that do not resemble anything remotely close to an athletic contest, and certainly nothing you would see in an actual fight. I mean could you imagine Brock Lesnar doing a moonsault in his next UFC fight? Of course that would be ridiculous, and would never happen, so how can I pretend that I am watching anything that has any bit of legitimacy to it?

The point is that ROH appears to me to just be yet another knock off of the current sports entertainment product that is out, only with an obviously limited budget and resources. I can only speculate but feel that this may be due to the fact that this is somewhat forced on them by the network because the network has their own idea of what wrestling is supposed to look like (see Jim Herd, Vince Russo, etc that really know nothing about the unique entertainment form of professional wrestling)

ROH needs to get back to what gained them a cult following in their early years when guys like Bryan Danielson, CM Punk and Somoa Joe, were their main draws. Those guys were believable because they were allowed to be an extension of themselves turned up a few notches, and people can really sense that. It is what Punk still has to this day, MIZ has and what is making Jeff Jarret's MMA persona so much fun to watch. You can be over the top ridiculous if you can make it seem at least the smallest bit believable and that is where ROH seems to be missing it as far as I am concerned.

Wherever their next TV deal comes from they need to be sure that they don't lose who they are for the sake of growing the company. If they do that, they will alienate the true fanbase and once those fans are gone, they are gone (See Southern NASCAR fans for an example). Sorry for the long post but I am passionate about wrestling and would like to see it return to something that is respectable and believable. I have given up that TNA will ever be able to accomplish that, but it may not be too late for ROH if they can get the right deal.

My God, I hope it gets a TV deal. I record Raw and ROH on Monday nights because of work. I find that if I've read a rundown of what happened on Raw before I watch it, I don't feel like watching it anymore. If I read what happened on ROH before watching it, I still watch it. The difference? ROH's wrestling is worth watching no matter if I know the outcome or not. Watching WWE guys work the same way every week is not.

This could actually be a break for ROH. Because of the limited amount of homes HDNet could reach, being able to go somewhere is probably a good thing. It's not at a WWE production level; but for what it is the show is very good.

They definitely have the talent to get an audience. Fans of great in-ring workers will really enjoy what ROH brings to the table. They got to fine-tune the show on HDNet and can now take it elsewhere a much more polished product.

I wonder which show reached more viewers, ROH or Wrestllicious? Hopefully ROH can find a cable home worthy of their product. Versus comes to mind.