Real American Live Reactions – NXT Takeover: Unstoppable Preshow

Right away, looking at the preshow panel I’m a little disappointed.  In the past, we’ve had guys like Paul Heyman and current or former Main Roster wrestlers join the NXT preshow panels just like they used to do with the PPV preshow panels.  Tonight, unless there is a surprise or two, it’s just Renee Young with Byron Saxton and Corey Graves.  And unless I’m mistaken, that’s the entire Main Roster PPV preshow team save for Booker T.  I miss having Heyman and the bigger name wrestlers on the preshow because they were usually the most entertaining.  I don’t have anything against Renee Young, I think she’s a fairly decent interviewer, but really the interview segments that WWE puts together have been as bland as plain yogurt for several years now.  She was actually a lot better working with William Regal on commentary for NXT than these guys they have doing it now.  And Byron Saxton gets on the mic and is just so bland and insightful.  As much as I criticize Michael Cole, he’s at least excitable.  Cole at least reacts to what’s going on, even if the result is usually ignorant.  Corey Graves is just Mr. Cool on the panels.  He’s always calm, cool and collected and like Saxton he’s not very excitable, but he’s not bland.  He puts his personality out there on full display and while you don’t usually hear his reactions in his voice, you see them on his face.  And he usually says things that make sense and don’t bore you to death.  For a guy that’s mostly there because his in-ring career got cut short due to injuries and WWE is doing right by him, he’s pretty decent at what he does.

It’s been reported for a while now that Hideo Itami had a shoulder injury that was going to keep him out of action for 6-8 weeks and news broke earlier this week that he was officially being pulled from the Triple Threat #1 Contender’s Match.  On the preshow tonight, they sold his injury as a parking lot attack perpetrated by Kevin Owens.

Greg Hamilton interview with Stephanie McMahon, basically just a back-patting interview over the success of NXT.  Nothing she’s saying is wrong, but a lot of it doesn’t really need to be said.  The people who are watching NXT already know how awesome it’s been to this point.

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