Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE NXT: Aleister Black and Ricochet and a team I can’t remember advanced to the finals of the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, with the winner getting a shot at the War Raiders at NXT TakeOver: Not Brooklyn. Also, DIY died for the final time, and then did the same thing in real life. :(
If you missed this episode, you can watch it here. If you’d like to read previous installments of the Best and Worst of NXT, click right here. Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where everything and everyone is terrible.
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for March 20, 2019.
Triple H Is Your New NXT Champion
I guess this was inevitable. He’ll defend the championship against The Undertaker in a no holds barred match at NXT TakeOver: New York.
But no, since Tommaso Ciampa has a neck injury that’ll keep him out of action for another goddamn year, Proud Papa Triple H takes a break from his busy schedule of emasculating Becky Lynch and winning old man battles for the mild enjoyment of Mohammad bin Salman to clarify the title situation. Also William Regal is dead, I guess?
Anyway, the winner of a fatal five-way match tonight will move on to TakeOver to face Johnny Gargano in a 2-out-of-3 falls match for the NXT Championship. I think everyone with even a passing interest in NXT wanted to see the conclusion of the years-long Gargano/Ciampa feud, but shit happens, and “all our best guys competing to wrestle our best wrestler in our best and most prestigious match stipulation at our WrestleMania weekend show” is a good fuckin’ audible. It’s absolutely the best thing they could’ve done, besides secretly bringing back Neville, remember that Bo Dallas exists, or just handing the belt to Eric Bugenhagen.
That leads to the only match on the show: Velveteen Dream vs. Adam Cole vs. Ricochet vs. Aleister Black vs. Matt Riddle. Like Lucha Underground, NXT makes sure that if it’s only giving you one wrestling match in an hour, it’s giving you the best one it can.
While I wouldn’t call this the “best match” I’ve ever seen at Full Sail — in my brain, my “favorite” matches and “best” matches always come back to the ones with the most important character moments or stories, because NXT is an NWA-ass promotion that cares as much about why things happen as what happens — it’s certainly one of the most exciting, and the kind of match you could show to a non-fan to explain why you just spent 15 minutes happily clapping. They’ll probably ask you why a match with five people in it only ever seems to have 2-3 people in the ring at the time, and why the people who aren’t fighting are crouching by the apron watching instead of participating, but that’s a “how WWE works” hand-wave.
The best description of the match I can give is that it felt like the final 15 minutes of a really good Dragon Gate six-man tag, complete with nobody having to tag. They pair off a lot, and only really bring a third into the ring if they’ve got a fun spot to do or need to transition to the next pair. There’s a Tower of Doom spot, because if you don’t do a Tower of Doom in a multi-man wrestling match now they send you to prison, and enough broken-up near-falls to fill a Scottish duck’s money bin. You’ll watch most of this with your mouth wide open.
Adam Cole ends up taking the win, which is the result I wanted to see, because:
- I just saw 30 minutes of Adam Cole vs. Johnny Gargano at an NXT live event in Cleveland, and it was bonkers good
- Johnny Gargano can’t win the NXT Championship unless he wins it from Ciampa, or at least until Ciampa’s well enough to show up and crutch him in the back of head for touching Goldie, because those are just the rules
- Adam Cole becoming NXT Champion will begin to validate Undisputed Era’s claim that 2019’s going to be their year, especially if the War Raiders are hanging on to the Tag Championship for a while
Elsewhere On The Show
Io Shirai is a mood
Bianca Belair fixed her broken catchphrase by prefacing it with, “because my mindset is,” and I’m happy I don’t ever have to complain about this again. Plus, Bianca needs to realize that the tiny Asian women wandering around backstage at Full Sail in the latest from New York & Co. are the last motherfuckers on this Earth you want to puff up your chest to.
Billie Eilish is doing one of the official themes for NXT TakeOver: New York, which is great because she rules and that’s a killer song, but two notes:
- this is not Poppy, who should be an onscreen NXT character by now, and
- the combo of Billie Eilish and Disturbed is the most hilarious “we’ll only move into the next century if you drag us there kicking and screaming” combination of official themes ever. Next TakeOver they should have official themes from King Princess and Buckcherry
Queen Cathy’s face when Kona Reeves tries to flirt with her is also my face every time he wrestles.
Next Week:
Dusty Rhodes and Sting team up to face the Mulkey Brothers in the finals of the Crockett Cup. Who will win??
