The NXT Discussion Thread

[Kamran]

NXT Deadline is tonight...

MATCHES

• NXT Championship: Ricky Saints (c) vs. Oba Femi (Winner faces Cody Rhodes at Saturday Night's Main Event)
• Men's Iron Survivor Challenge: Je'Von Evans vs. Leon Slater vs. Joe Hendry vs. Dion Lennox vs. Myles Borne (Winner receives a NXT Championship match at New Years' Evil)
• Women's Iron Survivor Challenge: Sol Ruca vs. Lola Vice vs. Kelani Jordan vs. Jordynne Grace vs. Kendal Grey (Winner receives a NXT Women's Championship match at New Years' Evil)
• NXT North American Championship: Ethan Page (c) vs. Mr. Iguana
• Tatum Paxley vs. Izzi Dame (with Niko Vance and Shawn Spears)    
   

Edited December 6, 2025 by Kamran

[Supremo]

Most promising thing to come out of Developmental in years. Day one, they should be teaching trainees to say no to Velcro.

[SaitoRyo]

There's no holding this guy back! He's not driven by fear, he's just driven by anger (and you're under attack).

[tiger_rick]

.

Edited December 11, 2025 by tiger_rick

[I Bent My Wookie]

Fairly nothing show only made 100x better by an absolute botch by the refere/Monroe making Thea Hail the new North American champion. 

Expecting her to lose the title back at New Years Evil but a complete shit show all round. 

Edited December 17, 2025 by I Bent My Wookie

[Kamran]

Had to go see what happened:

 

[Cousin Jim Bob]

At least the commentators covered well for it...

 

Booker T is so shit. 

[I Bent My Wookie]

They played Monroe's music right away as well which shows they absolutely shat the bed on it all. 

[tiger_rick]

2 hours ago, Cousin Jim Bob said:

At least the commentators covered well for it...

 

Booker T is so shit. 

Agree. It was amateur hour but he was the worst part of it.

[waters44]

They really need to amend this rule so that the refs never count the three against the wrestler supposed to go over. I’d say it’s much better to have the ref look a bit silly then have all these plans changing for the sake of a mistake

I appreciate it could be a blessing in disguise and create some great stuff going forward but I don’t think it’s worth it personally

Keep it so the refs can count three if the planned loser fucks up, just like Speedball did against Shelton Benjamin a while back. There was no need for the ref to not count three when Soeedball forgot to kick out, it looked clumsy and the planned finish was just a few seconds later anyway. But protect whoever’s supposed to go over.

[I Bent My Wookie]

Reports that Monroe may have got the wind knocked out of her on the senton which is how it went clunky and wrong but by the sounds its also meant they've had to rework a bunch of pre taped stuff over the holidays promo wise that no longer works. 

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

Leon Slater’s definitely going to be WWE official in 2026 isn’t he? I’m all for it as I’ve never not been left impressed by him in the ring and I’m looking forward to him and Oba in 3 weeks, should be a great big man/little man match

[I Bent My Wookie]

He's great but he'll never go anywhere. Too much of a regional British accent for the Americans that want everyone to sound like Regal if they are there from the UK these days. 

He'd have made an absolute killing in Japan with some of the Junior talent thats there though. 

I do hope I'm proved wrong though. 

[BomberPat]

11 hours ago, waters44 said:

They really need to amend this rule so that the refs never count the three against the wrestler supposed to go over. I’d say it’s much better to have the ref look a bit silly then have all these plans changing for the sake of a mistake

Absolutely not. I'm biased because I was a ref, and have been (as pretty much every ref has) in the position of counting a three that wasn't the planned finish, and of slowing down and just not counting when it was the finish because I thought it wasn't, and they both suck.

But you have to trust wrestlers to kick out before the three. It's not asking a lot. But it kills a match if you suddenly waive off a three that very obviously happened but wasn't the booked finish, and it looks like shit if you don't commit to every count in the knowledge that it's the wrestlers' jobs to kick out, not your job to stop the count in case they don't. Yes, it can fuck up the booking or the planned result, and you have to weigh up how much heat it's going to get you with the wrestlers and with the promoter (in my experience, every promoter tells you that they want their referees to call it like a shoot, and very few of them actually mean it when it comes to a situation like this), but you can't, as a referee, just whiff on every count that isn't the finish if it's the eventual winner getting pinned. There's only so many ways you can blag that a pin didn't happen, and this one clearly did.

I only saw the three minute clip on YouTube, and even before the finish a lot of the pins are very ropey and Mariah's kick-outs don't have much of anything behind them. I don't watch NXT, but every clip I see of it seems to be someone fucking up a pin, or not running the ropes properly, or trying to do a far too ambitious and overly choreographed spot for their experience level. For the biggest training centre of the biggest promotion in the world, I honestly wonder what's getting taught there, because so much points to their wrestlers having horrendous fundamentals, and just being drilled to wrestle the exact match they're going to have on TV rather than how to actually work, which means everything falls apart if they deviate from the plan at all.

[garynysmon]

10 hours ago, RIDDUM_N_STYLE said:

Leon Slater’s definitely going to be WWE official in 2026 isn’t he? I’m all for it as I’ve never not been left impressed by him in the ring and I’m looking forward to him and Oba in 3 weeks, should be a great big man/little man match

Oh he's already as good as gone.