Thoughts on Lesnar/Joe?

[KaiserGlider]

IWC opinion on this match seems to be split, so I'm curious what the reaction is here.

I thought it was a very good match, but I hated the finish. Totally came out of nowhere; Joe should have been monster enough to take more punishment than that. I'm tired of these abrupt endings to Lesnar matches.

[SlightlyJames]

The ending was way too abrupt. I'm not saying he had to throw down a barrage of F5s to finish Joe but the only offense Brock had beforehand was a handful of Germans. Joe dominating the match then getting dropped by one finisher is something that was typical to the worst years of John Cena being on top, it just feels cheap and unsatisfying. The worst part about it is that when he was on top, Joe looked like a complete monster, it felt like we were in for a great match then Brock noticed the time and clocked out. Big disappointment.

[Hanley!]

I thought it was disappointing. Too short, they didn't give Joe enough, and Brock didn't do anything outside of his now incredibly thin playbook.

Ultimately, this match did little to justify Lesnar being champion. His matches are still as formulaic as ever. And while at least the feud leading up to this match was entertaining, Samoa Joe gets the majority of the credit for that and the rest of it goes to Heyman. I don't think Lesnar deserves his current spot.

I don't think this match did much for Joe either, though the feud will have raised his stock. They've made it pretty clear that we're not going to see a rematch here. Joe jumped Brock before the bell and hit him with a low blow, so this wasn't an even contest - but Lesnar still defeated him in short order. He was comprehensively beaten. Some people are going to say that this match helped Joe, but I don't see it. You don't establish a new monster heel by having him get easily dispatched by another monster heel. You could argue that Joe was on offense for the majority of the match, but that just made it all the more frustrating when Lesnar just shook it all off to hit the singular (for once) F5 to get the win.

[VaderBomb]

You guys remember when Lesnar worked part time and had 20 minute matches?

At least Cesaro got an Iron Man match to make up for the unacceptably short Universal Championship match. Even 10-12 minutes would have sufficed.

[VaderBomb]

Since Survivor Series 2016, Lesnar has only wrestled for a combined 17 minutes during PPVs.

Excluding the Rumble match, he's been in the ring for only a little over 12 minutes.

[Str8Shooter]

I thought it was pretty good. The ending was somewhat abrupt but I thought Joe got a lot of offense, certainly more than most get against Brock. Lesnar was selling his ass off too. He got beat up, almost got choked out a few times.

[KaiserGlider]

I thought Joe looked really good right up until the F5. He went total beast mode on Lesnar right out of the gate and put him through the table, looked super intense throughout, cut every corner he could and wrestled a very smart match. Arguably the best Joe has looked in a a decade, until the SuperCena finish OutOfNowhere. That's really my problem with it, and it's the same problem I had with Lesnar vs Ambrose. Both good matches that ended right when it seemed as though things were about to kick into high gear.

On one hand, I can see the argument that the F5 has been booked like a real finishing move, as it only took one F5 to beat Goldberg and Joe. But they're doing it backwards. We've seen Cena, Roman, and Undertaker kick out of at least two F5's, so it doesn't feel right when a big dude like Joe can't even take one. With Goldberg it kinda made sense in kayfabe, since we never really saw how much punishment 2016 Goldberg could take, so I kinda assumed he was a glass cannon. But anyway, if the F5 was built like this from the start, it wouldn't be disappointing when someone loses after getting him by it, and it would mean so much more if someone kicks out of it.

As for Joe, I think it will be hard to say how much this elevated him until a couple months from now. Reports said Lesnar was really happy with Joe (you'd have to be fucking blind to not be happy with Joe's work in the past month), so we'll see if that goes somewhere for him long-term. One of the things that is definitely not in Joe's favor is the amount of big guys on Raw that the company is really high on. If he follows the same path AJ Styles did last year and ends up being on Smackdown, that could work out great for him.

[prophet]

I didn't watch it but from what I've read Joe dominating Brock for most of the match and got caught. Did it not feel like Brock got lucky when you watched it live?

I'm tired of seeing people kick out of multiple finishers. For me the first finisher should be the end of the match 90% of the time then when you do see somebody kick out of one it's more of a big deal.

[SlightlyJames]

I didn't watch it but from what I've read Joe dominating Brock for most of the match and got caught. Did it not feel like Brock got lucky when you watched it live?

I'm tired of seeing people kick out of multiple finishers. For me the first finisher should be the end of the match 90% of the time then when you do see somebody kick out of one it's more of a big deal.

It's not that it was only one finisher, it's that it was almost nothing more than that. Brock was getting fucking crushed for like 80% of this thing and when it come time to go home he pretty much just got up and won with one move, there was no build to it, no momentum, it felt like there should have been at least another 5 or 10 minutes to the match but it just ended in a really abrupt and unsatisfying way. A lazy finish to a red hot match.

[Hanley!]

I didn't watch it but from what I've read Joe dominating Brock for most of the match and got caught. Did it not feel like Brock got lucky when you watched it live?

I'm tired of seeing people kick out of multiple finishers. For me the first finisher should be the end of the match 90% of the time then when you do see somebody kick out of one it's more of a big deal.

I agree that they have guys kick out of finishers way too much. But when Brock usually needs three F5s to finish a match, it makes Joe look lousy to be the one guy who can't get up after one. Especially when it's all Brock did in the match other than a few German suplexes.

And I know if they want to dial back on the kicking out of finishers then they have to start somewhere. But I don't think the new monster heel that's starting to get over big should be the first casualty here. More importantly though, they're not going to start dialing back on guys kicking out of finishers anyway. How many F5s do you think Reigns will kick out of at Summerslam? Because I guarantee that number will not be zero.

This was a pretty obvious example of WWE not bothering to protect Joe because he's not one of their guys. They like him right now because he's over, but they don't care about his future. He's not in their long term plans. They'll beat him until his value is expended and then move on.