From nytimes.com

Ring of Honor had a match that I was very excited about this week. War Machine, Raymond Rowe & Hanson, were set to take on the Briscoe Brothers. Unfortunately, they doused me with cold water as soon as they went to the announce booth. Prince Nana was brought in for reasons that are beyond all logic. Kevin Kelly explained it as having to do with a later match. Still not a good enough reason. I was disappointed by the placement of the match as it came on to start the show. My fear was unfounded. The match was about twelve minutes with a double disqualification as a result of the quartet brawling on the outside. It’s too bad that Rowe got seriously injured in a motorcycle shortly after this was recorded. Mark Briscoe came out with a Keep Calm & Man Up shirt. It may be the first time that ROH has intelligently used a recent trend on one of their shirts. Kevin Kelly brought up a point that Jay Briscoe hasn’t been pinned in two years. As much as I might enjoy this match up, I’m thinking it would be wise to keep Jay in the still very thin main event pool. If ROH felt Jay needed a buffer until his next title bout, then so be it.

Moose & R.D. Evans created a tag team last week. This team is why marble mouth is on the head set for the whole show. Moose was scouted by him and Evans is his mortal enemy. The reasons to have Prince Nana as your scout on TV is again beyond my comprehension. If he is legitimately a good scout, then good on him. Pay him well to do that job, just leave his poorly speaking ass off of commentary. Moose won the match while R.D. Evans stole the pin fall but Moose seems to be tolerating it for now. I would imagine this process will back fire enough for Moose to flip out and go back to baby face.

Michael Elgin versus Cedric Alexander was a very good match. They showed Alexander coming up short in a couple of aspects during the match. Michael Elgin ended up knocking him out when he had Alexander in a submission hold. That aspects drove home what I was confused about the entire match. As I have documented, ROH decided to keep Elgin off TV for a month and a half after his title victory. His first title defense, the crowd cheered for him. Now two weeks later, I started wondering what was going on with the crowd. It was pretty much crickets from the crowd for Elgin to start the match. The crowd only cheered on Alexander. When the finish happened, it explained the crowd reaction. The problem with that is none of this story line has been explained on TV. I had chalked it to the fickle ROH crowd turning on all of the baby faces. Elgin is turning heel evidently without any set up on TV. I’m not sure that makes ROH the worst in a bad week of wrestling programming. – Kevin