Bob’s Opinion On: Ring of Honor Issues

This past weekend has been pretty bad for Ring of Honor. There had been a lot of hype for this weekend events as they had Best In The World internet pay per view and television taping taking place. The major stuff going on was a match between Jay Briscoe and Mark Briscoe for the ROH World Championship at BITW and then the following night having a Steel Cage Warfare between Team ROH and SCUM at the television taping.

First off, the IPPV was bad. The action has been said to be great, but I haven’t seen it. The streaming of the show was awful with fans missing a lot of the show due to buffering. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if it hadn’t happened several times prior. As a result of this, ROH is no longer doing LIVE internet pay per views. Instead, they will be taping the show and allowing them to be seen via a video on demand service the day afterward.

It’s not that I have bought an ROH internet pay per view to begin with, but this is just bad. I don’t like the idea of watching a pay per view on my computer. I understand that you can hook up a HDMI cord to your television and watch it that way, but something about it just prevents me from wanting to do it. I’d much rather just order it on pay per view and watch it that way. I feel like the quality would be better to begin with.

Besides, ROH has a television deal and is on in several markets. They have a great roster of guys, though it’s nowhere near what they once had. I’ve read reports that they got somewhere between 1,800 to 2,500 buys on the internet pay per views. For an independent company, I’d imagine that’s some good money.

Their inability to produce a consistent stream has killed their business. Why on earth should fans ever buy their product again? Now their major shows will be taped and aired the next day. I’ll just read the spoilers. Test it before you buy it, but I’d never buy it to begin with. Just go to regular pay per view and accept that internet pay per view is not the future of the business. I truly don’t believe it is.

Now, the television taping has one thing on my mind. I’m a sucker for War Games. I love the match concept and there have been several great War Games matches. ROH calls theirs Steel Cage Warfare with one ring. It features the feud ending match between ROH and SCUM. How this match wasn’t put on the internet pay per view is surprising. I understand they wanted to have a reason to attend the television taping, but come on. Aside from WCW in 2000, which wasn’t a traditional War Games, I don’t recall a War Games match ever being free of charge.

The outcome of the match is horrible. Not only do you have Matt Hardy NOT win the ROH World Championship from Jay Briscoe, but you have SCUM lose the Steel Cage Warfare and they must disband. There was enough legs on SCUM to continue the heel faction. If you put the belt on Matt Hardy and allow Steve Corino to have some control over ROH… that would be incredible. You have six months of material and have the blow off at Final Battle.

At Final Battle you could have Matt Hardy lose the strap to a guy like Michael Elgin or perhaps Tommasso Ciampa to make a new star for the company and have Corino put the stakes up of his control as he gets greedy and tries to OWN the company. Something along those lines.

Instead, it’s just killed off. Are Matt Hardy and the other guys in SCUM still going to be in the company? The faction was a huge part of ROH but now they are gone. Where does ROH go from here? They won’t have live broadcasts of their major programs and now don’t have a major storyline moving forward. It doesn’t look promising.

What are your opinions on the issues in ROH? Leave them below.

Thanks for reading.