The Best And Worst Of NXT: Seth Rollins Faces His First Big Challenge And Fights For The Future

Previously on the vintage Best and Worst of Full Sail NXT: The daughter of Eddie and Vickie Guerrero showed up to “exfoliate ugliness” and earn a place in our hearts for the depressingly short amount of time she’s around. Also on the show, Tamina Snuka jumped off the top rope, and Alex Riley somehow made things even worse than that by explaining why you shouldn’t trust girls.

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And now, the vintage Best and Worst of WWE NXT for July 25, 2012.

This Week’s Historical Significance

This week’s episode of NXT is important for two reasons:

  • Seth Rollins faces Drew McIntyre in the main event, making this Seth’s first “big” WWE match on some form or another of WWE TV. It’s also interesting to see McIntyre, a guy who was once positioned to be the “future” of WWE, facing the guy who would eventually, repeatedly call himself the undisputed future of WWE. More on that in a minute.
  • The first appearance of the FALL OF MAN, the classic finisher that made The Ascension NXT’s longest reigning Tag Team Champions. Previously they’d been using the “Downcast,” which was two weak grapples: a jawbreaker followed by a flapjack, not even a jawbreaker INTO a flapjack. The Fall of Man is much better, especially the original version, which is even closer to just straight-up being a Total Elimination.

Check it out:

I guess the only upgrade they made was convincing Konnor he should jog into a leg sweep. If you’re wondering who the Ascension’s opponents were this week, feast your eyes on the classic NXT all-jobber team of Dante Dash and Garrett Dylan.

They look like wrestling figures you’d buy at the Dollar Store. They’re almost recognizable stars, but not quite. Like when you find Mistico’s head on Rambo’s body. Anyway, Dash is the one on the left — your left — who once wrestled under the much, much better name of FLEX FREEMAN. Imagine if David Otunga went to public school. His partner is Garrett Dylan, which is what happens when you sign Kris Kristofferson’s son, make him an ersatz Trevor Murdoch and name him like a child star. If you were around for the Hulu era of NXT, you’ll also remember him as the legendary CAPTAIN COMIC.

(They lose very badly.)


Best: Aggressively Weird

The week’s other tag team victory goes to the spectacularly underappreciated duo of Michael McGillicutty and Johnny Curtis, collectively known as AGGRESSIVELY WEIRD. Look at that picture of them. McGillicutty’s like, “OH MY GOD HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DICK?” It’s wonderful.

They go up against the randomly tossed-together tandem of Bo Dallas and Derrick Bateman, collectively known as … I don’t know, I’m blanking on a joke for this one. Derrick Boatman? E-C-Lieve? This is from the era where Bo is NXT’s purest babyface, non-Steamboat division, and spends the entirety of his matches getting the shit stomped out of him until he’s able to like, hit a Stratusfaction or whatever and win. Here, however, Ag-Weird’s able to trip up Bateman and catch him with a Falcon Arrow for the underhanded win, because nobody kicks out of the Falcon Arrow.

Fun note: During the match, William Regal is on commentary giving an absolute master class in how to contextually get young stars over for a broader WWE audience. For example, he talks about how he talked to John Cena, and Cena told him that Derrick Bateman was pound-for-pound one of the strongest men in WWE because he’d seen him do gnarly deadlifts. And we know it’s true! It’s amazing how far a good word from a veteran can go. It’s the difference between Regal saying if he ran into the Ascension in an alley he’d “bugger off,” and JBL calling them troglodyte shitstains with every second breath.

Best/Worst: It’s Almost A Women’s Division!

This week’s women’s … sorry, “Divas” match is one of two “guest star” affairs. This one involves main-roster farter Natalya Neidhart getting to look like an actual pro wrestler against Sofia Cortez. That’s Ivelisse Velez, if you’ve forgotten. The match is going really well, too, until WWE realizes they haven’t started the Women’s Revolution yet and end it at the 3:30 mark with Natalya taking a purposeful count-out.

Once it looks like Natalya’s surrendered (three minutes in, for no reason) she runs back out, attacks Cortez from behind and puts her in a Sharpshooter. You may recognize this trope from this week’s Raw, with Alexa Bliss, Bayley and Sasha Banks. At least Bliss had the excuse that she was up against two people. Natalya just gave up, then ran back out and easily won. You should’ve tried easily winning earlier!


Best: Cesaro Does What Now

While Antonio Cesaro is (obviously) gutwrenching the piss-Christ out of Alex Riley, the announce team (and Jim Ross in particular) starts putting over his “sneaky strength.” This was back in the day before everyone realized Cesaro is the strongest man on Earth, mind you. Ross emphasizes this by saying Cesaro has been “eating the cheese, cutting the cheese,” and “learning at suplexes.” And here I thought Natalya was the one cutting cheese on this show. I don’t know what Ross is trying to say, exactly, but I’m 80% sure I want HE’S BEEN EATING CHEESE, CUTTING CHEESE, HE’S BEEN LEARNING AT SUPLEXES on my tombstone.

Worst: Matt Striker

If you’ve ever wondered why our Over/Under on Lucha Underground columns are so hard on Matt Striker (and haven’t come to the same conclusions yourself), it’s because of how consistently, aggressively, threateningly bad he was for YEARS on NXT. Whereas most backstage interviewers come across as interchangeable dialogue cogs, Striker had (and has) an uncanny ability to say innocent shit and sound like the most condescending human being alive. If you need confirmation of this, read his reaction to any rookie during the the game show era.

Here, Striker is interviewing Drew McIntyre, and his question — I’m serious — is, “you used to be good but now you’re not, what’s up.” He phrases it in a very Matt Striker way, but he’s shading, and I wish someone would tell him he’d eventually get a NATURAL tan if he stopped that shading.

I’ve decided to present the actual Drew Mac versus Rollins match in its purest form: accompanied by the only true theme of NXT, now and forever.

Best: Future Imperfect

This is Seth Rollins’ first “big” match in WWE, happening during that Chris Masters-esque period where disappointing-ass Drew McIntyre decided to start under-the-radar wrestling his ass off, so OF COURSE it’s good. If you don’t like Rollins’ thing you might not like it, but he’s a pretty natural babyface when he isn’t talking or like, dancing, or doing things.

The highlight here is absolutely Rollins leaning into everything and bumping his ass off, whether it’s doing the Rikishi bump on clotheslines or eating big boots like this:

That looks less like the “I jumped and spun in place” and more like he got legitimately turned inside out by a six-foot-five motherfucker kicking him in the entire face. Rollins puts up a great fight and almost pulls out the victory several times, but (somewhat appropriately, looking back) falls victim to the FUTURE SHOCK DDT. Emphasis on “victim.”

Good lord.

They only got about five and a half minutes, but they made use of ALL of it, and gave us the first truly “good” match of the Full Sail NXT Era. It’d be great to see what’d happen if the modern version of these guys got a chance to go at it again … and kinda funny that the way that’d happen would be for main roster star Seth Rollins to show up at Full Sail and face NXT star Drew McIntyre. Funny how that works.

Next Week:

  • The NXT Title Gold Rush Tournament begins, featuring two big rematches and kinda validating all these, “what are we doing,” episodes
  • Tyler Breeze’s future wife shows up, and she’s almost as pretty as him
  • Big E (Langston) debuts and has specific thoughts on which numbers he prefers

Stay tuned!

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