*SPOILERS* TNA One Night Only: Victory Road

[Big Red Machine]

Credit: Billy Krotchsen & PWInsider

All the winners advance to a 12 Man Battle Royal. The winner of the Battle Royale receives a “check” and a future TNA title shot.

*Bram defeated Davey Richards with an Implant DDT.

*Austin Aries defeated Kenny King with a Brainbuster.

*Kaz and James Storm defeated The Freak and Knux. Kaz hit the Freak with a beer bottle and Storm nailed a superkick for the pin.

*Bobby Lashley defeated Samoa Joe after a spear after Joe was distracted by Kenny King.

*Abyss pinned Mr. Anderson with a chokeslam.

*The Bro-mans defeated Bully Ray and Rockstar Spud after Spud turned on Bully.

*Gunner defeated Magnus.

*EC3 defeated Sanada.

*Samuel Shaw defeated Crazy Steve with a sleeper.

*Eddie Edwards defeated Zema Ion and Tigre Uno in a triple threat match with the Achilles Lock on Ion.

*Battle Royal – Gunner and Storm are the last two with Gunner pinning Storm for the win

[Big Red Machine]

IT'S RANT TIME!

This company absolutely baffles me. They introduce this “One Night Only” where they say they are going to give us themed PPVs that are just going to be matches and have no storyline ramifications whatsoever (which they really can’t because they are taped so far in advance) for a cheap price to make up for the PPV buys they are losing by cutting back to four PPVs a year. Fine.
Then they go and they start incorporating storylines into them, knowing full well that by the time the show airs, the storyline will likely be irrelevant (and they make no attempt to shuffle the order to prevent this, either: see Aces & Eights appearing after the stable had been forced to disband). Does anything really think that Gunner is going to wind up getting this title shot?
Then they do whatever they can to make sure that no one could possibly want to buy these shows! Internally, the shows make no sense at all. They do tournaments in which, for no stated reason at all, some people are given infinitely more difficult paths to victory by having to wrestle an extra round of matches or being stuck in a three-way while everyone else is wrestling singles matches or crap like that.
Then they show us that their idea of “variety” is that you get two choices 1) a standard tournament or 2) a mini-tournament where the winners all get dumped into a big battle royale at the end. Even on the few shows where of these things happen, they still feel the need to do a random battle royale!
So they cram a whole bunch of matches onto the show to make sure there are enough people for a decent-sized battle royale, then they have do the battle royale itself, ensuring, that none of the matches get any time to be good. Then they compound the problem by taping them in batches of three a day, meaning that the matches all get even less time because they need time to tape three shows and then change the set over for the next show, and that the wrestlers need to conserve their energy, making for shorter, less exciting matches. This causes the PPVs to fall well short of the standard PPV length, so they pad it out with old video packages and don’t even bother to edit them to at least try to hide the fact that they are just re-using old video-packages, despite having had MONTHS to work on them.
The result, without fail, is a set of horribly substandard shows that are still in line with months-old storylines, mean nothing at all, feel painfully repetitive, and show an insulting lack of effort on the part of the production staff. And they thought THIS would make up for eight months of PPV buys at thirty dollars a buy.
(And as a kicker, when they actually do get it right and just book a random match, they inevitably wind up wasting a dream match like Wolves vs. Beer Money with no hype at all in a meaningless match, on a half-price PPV, costing them at least tens of thousands of dollars that they could have made by doing the match at one of their live PPVs).


Oh. And if Kaz is leaving, why the hell did he win his match?