The 8 Ball: The Top 8 Reasons TNA is Doomed

Doomed may be a strong term. I’m not saying TNA will completely cease to exist on X date. However, it could become a brand without much product to sell in the near future. Think of it like the New York Cosmos, which lived on as nothing more than a name for nearly three decades after the North American Soccer League disbanded. People had fond memories of the Cosmos – Pele, Chinaglia, Neeskens. Fans of the Cosmos still insist it was the best club soccer team ever to play on (North) American soil. Officially the Cosmos never died, it just didn’t exist in the physical plane. What the 8-Ball is sure of is that TNA as it currently exists won’t be around much longer. Could turn into something like Evolve, putting on regular pay-per-views without the weekly TV teaser in between events. Hard to say, but with every shake the Magic 8-Ball predicts a gloomy outlook for TNA. It is certain this phase of TNA’s existence is going to end, and here’s why:

8. B- Matches

During the very first Impact broadcast on Destination America, Kurt Angle announced Bobby Roode vs. Lashley and pimped it as the match of the year. We knew both guys were capable of delivering it. They staged two thrilling clashes in late 2014 when Impact still ran on Spike. Yet Roode-Lashley III fizzled. It wasn’t a bad match, but it wasn’t a great match. That’s become a bit of a theme for TNA in 2015. The talent is there, but it never seems to kick into high gear. The Spud vs. EC3 bloodbath match would be the most notable exception. However, EC3 beating Kurt Angle for the TNA title was no epic. Big moment, not a great match. Havok vs. Awesome Kong didn’t set the world on fire like it should have. The BDC and the Rising had some watchable matches, but no great matches. The Wolves are reliable performers. They’ve had some sweet matches, but they haven’t had a tag classic that makes your eyes bug out. When TNA has been at its best, the wrestling has been top notch. Now it’s all right, but not necessarily worth going out of your way to see.

7. Whiplash

Losing former champions like James Storm, Magnus and Austin Aries isn’t a deathblow. All may be former TNA champs, but they’re not oozing star power. Storm arguably did everything he could in TNA. He’s a TNA original, but that and five dollars will only buy you a sandwich. Magnus was the worst champion in company history. Aries is a hellaciously good wrestler, but he’d been hovering aimlessly in the upper mid-card. By no means are these guys fatal subtractions from the roster. Yet all three found themselves involved in one of TNA’s bigger problems in 2015: stories that go nowhere. Storm was the most egregious example. What was the Revolution doing? Why did it exist? He collected a menagerie of misfits, won a tag title with Abyss (yawn) and then the group splintered as quickly as it had formed. The hell? Lately he’d been trying to seduce Mickie James to the darkside and pushed her in front of an oncoming train when she spurned his advances. It kind of came out of nowhere and the payoff may never come now that he and Magnus are checking out of TNA. Aries had a Feast or Fired TNA Championship match briefcase which got inconsistent attention while he held it and then amounted to nothing when he lost to Kurt Angle at Destination X. Superb match, one of TNA’s best in 2015, but what was the point of it?

6. Global Farce Wrestling

Jeff Jarrett is back, sort of. He won a King of the Mountain match at Slammiversary that is already being called a wrestling match that happened. Surely this is headed somewhere, but TNA’s clock is ticking. Jarrett needed to arrive with fireworks and a massive angle that grabbed the attention of the wrestling world. What we got is “Hey, Jeff Jarrett popped up in TNA.” Is there some sort of GFW-TNA battle in the works? Could ROH play along, giving us an active Wednesday night war? No idea. Given the forgettable start to this storyline, hard to believe it will become something grandiose that jacks up TNA viewership. Maybe GFW becomes the live event lifeline for TNA when it leaves the airwaves. GFW certainly could use an injection of talent. Yet Jarrett’s quasi return did little to move the yard sticks for TNA, a point on which Vince Russo turned out to be 100% correct (and that doesn’t happen often).

5. The Ex Division

Tigre Uno recently won the vacant X-Division Championship over Grado (really?) and Low Ki in a snoozer of a match. This was a title that AJ Styles, Chris Daniels, Samoa Joe and Chris Sabin helped make into one of the most exciting titles in the business. Now it’s little more than window dressing for TNA. Again, what made TNA stand out once upon a time was it put some of the most high energy talent in the business on display. The wrestling was outstanding. TNA could and often did blow your mind. It created something special that over time has become something unremarkable. Once upon a time TNA fans could brag the X-Division was the best action in pro wrestling. Now it’s a bathroom break.

4. The War is Over

A big part of what fueled TNA in its early days was disenfranchised WCW fans, who preferred a wrestling-first promotion to Vince McMahon’s testosterone melodrama. It wasn’t so much that fans were hoping to reignite the Monday Night Wars (which Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff learned in painful fashion when they tried it), it was people who missed the product the evolved out of pro wrestling’s southern territories. TNA gave it to them for a while. It had the best tag team division in the business. The X-Division was the spiritual heir to the WCW cruiserweight division. AJ Styles, Samoa Joe and Kurt Angle had five-star ring skills. WCW’s icon, Sting, even made TNA his home. Yet it’s now 15 years since Vince McMahon bested Ted Turner, and it’s become clear that TNA is never going to be the true successor to WCW. Many fans have moved on or they got alienated during one of TNA’s swoons or they died. Whatever residual WCW energy may have existed, TNA has burned through it. It’s not the promotion that’s going to take on the WWE. It’s not setting the standard for in-ring action. It’s not an upstart outfit on the verge of catching fire. The only thing TNA can capitalize on is being TNA.

3. Where’s the Stars?

Early this year TNA went back to the Kurt Angle well, making him the champion as it tried to grow its audience on Destination America. Supposedly DA insisted on Angle wearing the belt because it wanted a “name” as the top man. Unfortunately Angle’s yesterday’s news. He may be a living icon, but he’s not the man to lead a promotion forward. He holds out no promise for the future. Ethan Carter III is a much better choice, but he does not yet count as a marquee name. Drew Galloway has promise, always did. That’s why they called him the “chosen one” back in the WWE, but he doesn’t pass Warren Zevon’s Boom Boom Mancini test – “Hurry home early, hurry on home, Boom Boom Mancini’s fighting Bobby Chacon.” Name any up-and-coming marquee talent in the wrestling business and he’s not in TNA. Dixieland had Kazuchika Okada (New Japan’s champion) and Jay Lethal (ROH’s champion). Squandered both of them. Tyler Black and John Moxley went to the WWE. How Ricochet never got recruited to lead the X Division is a mystery for the ages. Point being, if you’re interested in seeing pro wrestling’s next big things, you won’t find them in TNA.

2. The Rebirth of Cool

While it’s still an underground movement, cool is creeping back into the pro wrestling business. Lucha Underground rocks on multiple levels. It puts on a seriously tight hour of television, delivering on every facet of the program: ring action, visual presentation, compelling storylines. It’s the first wrestling promotion that truly gets the 21st century. New Japan has brought its all-action style to America via its subscription service and AXS TV. Evolve puts on some of the best cards in the business. Chikara takes fun seriously. If someone were to make the case that there’s this wrestling promotion that you’ve got to check, that it will completely blow your mind, chances are close to zero that he/she would be talking about TNA. It’s not even near the cutting edge.

1. TVNA

TNA’s live event business barely exists. It’s not like ROH, which makes money on house shows and has a TV show too. TNA fundamentally is a TV show. That creates exciting possibilities in some ways. For instance, we get to see TNA’s big moments. They don’t happen behind a PPV wall or in boutique shows. The downside is no one’s watching. The most recent episode of Impact drew 293,000 viewers. That is a paltry number. Getting cancelled by DA wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal if it was building a larger audience. Some network might jump on a perceived opportunity in that case. Instead TNA looks to be dying an ignominious death. It will soon be a television program without a network. In other circumstances I’d say it could build a YouTube channel or exist as a subscription service, but that would require it to be organized in a far different fashion. Sad as it is to say, TNA seems poised to vanish.

I take requests.. The purpose of this column is to look forward. What could be? What should be? What is and what should never be? What would make more sense? 411 has plenty of columns that count down and rank things that happened in the past. This is not one of those columns. The Magic 8-Ball is here to gaze into the future. If there’s someone or something you think should be given the 8-Ball treatment, mention it in the comments section. I might pick it up for future weeks.