Wrestling Observer Newsletter Update

- Richard Blood, Jr. (Richie Steamboat), Jonathan Good (Dean Ambrose/Jon Moxley), Colby Lopez (Seth Rollins/Tyler Black), and Windham Rotunda (Husky Harris) have all signed contracts with WCW. This is being looked at as a major coup for Jim Ross, who became the Head of Personnel a few months back. It also appears that Jim Ross may have burned his bridge with WWE, so to speak, as officials there are livid. Ross apparently knew of the loopholes in the developmental contracts which he was able to utilize in signing the four talents, which in some ways could be seen as unethical. Ross hasn't commented on the situation, but sources close to him told us: "All I'll say is this - he has no regrets for his actions and if you really want to question the ethical side of the situation, then question the ethics behind how Vince McMahon has treated Jim Ross over the last two decades while you're at it." The talents are not expected to debut until January.

- Two more additions to the talent roster are John Hennigan (John Morrison) and Chris Mordetzky (Chris Masters). Hennigan signed as soon as his contracted expired last Wednesday. Mordetskzy is an example of a guy that has been poorly treated by WWE. He was brought up too soon because of his look and then he received two Wellness violations. Triple H buried him on RAW, in fact. He left and then came back but much, much smaller. It turned out the joke was still on him, because despite improving and becoming one of the better workers on the roster - and you wouldn't know that unless you watched Superstars - he was let go again. So they hired him because he was big, he got in trouble for what he did to get there, left and got small so he wouldn't get in trouble any longer, and they fired him despite showing improvement in the ring. Like the FCW Four, they'll be debuting most likely sometime in January.

- There's a lot of heat on Austin Aries right now. Aries has made it very known that he's unhappy with getting shuffled out of commentary in favor of John Layfield. It's funny because Layfield and Lenny Leonard have specific commentator contracts (they're not as good as active wrestler contracts), but Aries was given an active wrestler contract to be a commentator. He's apparently coming off as a man who thinks he is worth more than he is.

- The upcoming episode of Underground will be a tribute episode to the recently departed Mark "Bison" Smith. Smith was a part of the tag team DOOMSDAY and was 1/2 of the tag team champions. He was meant to be a big part of the promotion in 2012 as they were going to strongly focus on tag team wrestling, since neither WWE nor TNA do that. No plans yet on how to resolve the tag team title situation, but the booking going forward was leaning on Wrestling's Greatest Tag Team vs. DOOMSDAY at Starrcade. There's also some question about what they'll do regarding the Richards/Caras match that was supposed to main event this week's episode.

- We were finally able to get some buyrate numbers for the iPPVs they've produced so far. The Lou Thesz Memorial Tournament did a little under 900, with over half coming from replays. I would say that should be considered a success given the extreme lack of build for the show. Halloween Havoc did 1500, which is being seen as a huge success since it equals what CHIKARA did, is better than the last ROH iPPV, and exceeds the first ROH iPPV. The TV viewership has been between roughly 200,000 and 400,000. The goal is to try and hit 3,000 iPPV buys for Starrcade, which will be one hell of a tough sell since no other promotion has done that much yet.

- The company is still looking into national TV. There are a lot of talks going on with some pretty big networks. One of the owners of the company has a history in television, so that should help. Historically, selling wrestling on TV has never been very good for anyone. ECW died under TNN and WWE had to fall back on USA when they left Spike because no one else would take them.