12 Hot Takes On The Week In Wrestling (Jan 6)

3. NXT Heals All Wounds And Brings People Together

In the last few years, Zack Ryder and Emma have been two of WWE's biggest missed opportunities. Everyone knows what happened to Ryder: in 2011, the man took WWE's words about grabbing the brass ring to heart, got himself over with the WWE audience and, through sheer determination, clawed his way from the undercard. In September 2011, his merchandise sales broke into WWE's top ten and stayed there. His single-minded commitment to the pursuit of the United States Championship actually gave the title back some legitimacy for a little while... and then it all went to crap, as 2012 saw WWE systematically, ruthlessly bury the character on television and relegate Ryder back to the undercard for the next three years or so, with a clip around the ear for stepping out of his jobber niche. I get that the man was probably never exactly main event material, but ouch. Meanwhile, Emma and Paige were the ones who originally delivered the showstopping matches that made WWE decide to give the NXT women's division more of a focus. This continued after she'd been promoted to the main roster to team up with Santino Marella... which meant that the WWE audience could watch the hardcore submission wrestler battling for the NXT Women's Championship on NXT in the same week as seeing the same wrestler being wasted in rubbish comedy skits on RAW. Talk about a disconnect. Well, it looks like heading to NXT from the main roster has been good for both of them. In the ring, as one half of the Hype Bros Ryder is the most fired-up he's been in years, and Emma's back to being her badass, take-no-prisoners self. Added to that, for at least a couple of months the two have been posting pictures to their Instagram accounts of visits to Disneyworld, the Empire State Building, and various other places that might be construed to be romantic hang out spots, leading the kind of people who post comments on celebrity Instagram accounts to TOTALLY FREAK OUT IN ALL CAPS WITH EMOJIS THAT I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW EXISTED. You know the kind of people I'm talking about. They're one step below Twitter stalkers and one step above YouTube trolls on the Ashton Kutcher Scale of online idiocy. On New Year's Eve, the two finally went public at the same time, with a pretty definitive simultaneous 'my woman'/'my man' post on Instagram, which is nice. The whole NXT vs WWE thing is a worrying trend, though. With Bayley and Finn Balor both indicating recently that they felt that NXT was better for their careers than the main roster, and with wasted main roster talents finding a new lease of life on the supposed developmental brand, plus NXT merchandise doing brisk business online and at live events, it's not going to be long before WWE faces the prospect of NXT talent objecting to appearing on RAW altogether.