You don't adapt by arbitrarily letting sh*t go if you think it's cool enough. You adapt by changing the rules. The NHL thought that the two-line pass rule was preventing exciting plays from happening so they responded not by telling the referees to let it go sometimes, but by eliminating the rule altogether.cero2k wrote: ↑Jul 5th, '18, 15:03except it is not a problem, it's only your problem, no one else complains about it, especially to the point where they're willing to hinder what is considered, by laaarge (majority?) consensus of wrestling fans, the best wrestling match ever. I believe Gabe is a good booker and I believe that he made that call because it made sense to THAT specific story, not because he learned that his guys are going to spend more than 20 seconds outside the ring and they don't want to break a count.Big Red Machine wrote: ↑Jul 5th, '18, 11:40
Soccer is a horrific example, considering that they don't even play a consistent amount of time in every game. This "stoppage time" silliness needs to stop right away. Just blow the whistle and stop the clock when the ball goes out of bounds. That way you don't have to round to the nearest minute and every game can be played for the same amount of time like it's supposed to be.
Yes, it's up to the referee's discretion, but there is a certain level that is just WAY over the line, which gets crossed in basically every match. In a real sport, when a call that is up to the referee's discretion winds up going against the rules and affects the outcome of the came, that referee is absolutely crucified. And during the game, the announcers always preach fidelity to the rules. They will try to explain to you what they think the referee saw (or didn't see) that resulted in the referee making the call he/she made. That is vastly different from what we see most places in pro wrestling nowadays where the referee blatantly ignores the rules and the announcers hail him/her as some sort of hero for doing so.
As for the Watts analogy, that doesn't hold any water. Watts' changes to the in-ring product all had to do with psychology. He took away top rope stuff because he thought he could retrain the audience to accept it as this sort of devastating thing that heels could do illegally to hurt the babyface, not because he had some hatred for this new-fangled jumping stuff.
There is a clear and obvious solution to this problem. Gabe found it. Why can't anyone else?
Soccer is a perfect example, because in sports and in wrestling, sometimes you need to adapt. Rules are important, but the anal enforcement of them only leads to boring ass spectacles that kill momentum. ESPECIALLY, in a fake sport like wrestling.
And that's exactly what Gabe did. There was no story that required the rules to be changed. They were changed so that wrestlers could give people that wild brawling on the outside without having to hurt the momentum by running back to the ring to break the count, while keeping people like me happy by creating a reason for them not to be counted out.
Yes, wrestling is a "fake sport," but it's a fake sport in the same way that The West Wing is a fake TV show about American politics. But that TV show has a premise which must be adhered to. Just because it's a fake show about American politics doesn't mean that you can decide that in this one episode Barlett only needs forty votes to get a bill through the senate just because you have a cool speech about the hard work of a dedicate minority that you want him to give, because that's not how American law works.
You can't have a ref decide to just not count the wrestlers out because they have a cool spot they want to do (never mind a pointless lazy spot like the usual Suzuki-Gun chair stuff) because that's not how sports work. Referees evaluate things based on adherence to the rules, not coolness. And to have guys nor get counted out forever and then only have a count-out start when you want the drama of a count-out tease is even worse because having a rule switch between applying and not applying solely as demanded by the plot purely for the sake of drama is cheap drama and sh*t storytelling. And that's not just a pro wrestling thing. That's a key element of all storytelling.