Lashley doesn't work for me on several levels:

1. Having the guy playing an intense monster when he shows no intensity is counter-productive. He's completely not believable and comes off as a guy pretending to be scarey.

2. He's sloppy in the ring. I've counted I think 4 moves from the last two weeks that could've resulted in a serious injury. He's extremely careless when he's throwing guys around and needs to either go back to OVW for seasoning or drop the stiffness down a few notches.

3. Inconsistent with moves. One move it looks like he just broke the guy in half and the next he softly puts the guy on his back. This will get fixed with time.

4. Too generic looking.


Kennedy I'm iffy on:

1. I like the concept of the gimmick but I don't see how they can keep it interesting for more than a couple of months.

I've only seen Lashley once, and again that squashes Vito is alright in my book. He'll probably come across as shit to me over the next few weeks though.

I don't see anything special about Kennedy, especially in the long run. He's a rather boring wrestler, and his ring intro will get stale in 6 months (at the most).

Smarks have really overrated Kennedy.

Well there's a fuckin' surprise. Imagine if he wrestled in ROH. He'd probably considered the best wrestler ever despite having the el generico moveset of doom.

(only jabbing at ROH fans who are blindly in love with EVERYTHING that promotion does, and shits all over everything else)

Meh, I like him. But he's definately in the flavor of the month Smark category though...

When exactly did the smark flavor of the month thing start? I don't really remember that being a big thing a few years ago.

I will give Kennedy credit. He's probably the best OVW guy to come up since John Cena.

Since I've joined the smark community I've noticed it.

I've noticed it too, though sometimes that flavor of the month stretches out to many months.

For example, a lot of smarks really dug John Cena in 2003, but they collectively soured on him in early 2004. Granted, Cena's clever raps were replaced with scripted jokes about penises and suddenly an elbow injury at the Rumble made it that his matches were one sided squashes.

But still, now very few smarks even want to admit to kind of liking the guy.

He ruled... for about a week in August 2003. The Hogan stick worked back in the 80's because wrestlers back then relied more on that charisma than actual workrate. This is 2005, not 1985. Cena needs to steal Doc Browns time machine and come back to the future.

I didn't have any problem's with Cena's in-ring work for most of 2003. It may have been that he was put up against far superior workers, but they did a good job covering his weaknesses.

Then in 2004, suddenly they were putting him against the likes of Rene Dupree and Big Show.

I typically don't pay much attention to Cena's tv matches, but every title defense he's had on PPV (except for Unforgiven, haven't seen it) have been good-great.

It's kinda hard to have bad matches with Chris Jericho and Kurt Angle, and JBL has shown he can deliver in No DQ Matches.

I was big on Batista and Cena before they hit WWE. I had a few OVW videos from a guy in my dorm, and I marked out like a bitch for Leviathan and Prototype. Once they hit WWE, I got a little disappointed, and Cena still hasn't tickled my fancy since hitting the big time. Batista didn't disappoint much, though everyone calling him Botchtista for a while really got me down.

I would also like to suggest the possibility that Lashley was brought up so that marks would think Monty Brown is a Lashley rip off

Now that you mentioned him, I missed the team of Deacon Batista and the Reverend D'Von.

<---serious.

I liked Deacon Bautista

I think that is actually going to work against them, seeing as at this point in time Brown would make Lashley look second-rate.

I know Lashley has the amateur background, but that's not doing him a drop of good right now.

That's not the important part. The important part is that the marks see Lashley first, so they immediately consider Brown a Lashley rip-off. That puts a slight advantage to Vince. His hope is that the fans won't watch TNA long enough to decide who's the better wrestler.

Simple... they both suck as wrestlers, but Brown has the crazy guy charisma.

...But I like Kennedy.


...And Cena.

Well, the difference is that WWE is still heralding Lashley as a newcomer while Monty Brown is given top guy status in TNA.

I agree that WWE is trying to make Brown look like the rip-off, but I think it isn't going to work out the way they want it to.

I don't think it will either, but I could see that being the logic behind him getting called up

I still have hardly seen Lashley wrestle.

He's alright. Nothing special, except he did a crotch throw. Which looked scary