Rob Gronkowski famously retired from football at the age of 29. It wasn’t a huge surprise in that rumors had existed for years that Gronkowski’s body was struggling due to the beating he took on the football field, but it was still eyebrow-raising that a player as talented as him retired before he hit the age of 30.

Due to his age, rumors have followed Gronkowski for some time about a possible return to football, although he has shot them down throughout his retirement, instead deciding to do things like agreeing to a deal with WWE. But in an interview with Andy Cohen on Monday night, Gronkowski opened the door to a possible return to football, saying “you just never know.”

It turns out that might have been foreshadowing some plans. Ian Rapoport of NFL Network reported that Gronkowski indicated to the New England Patriots that he is interested in a return to football. The catch: He wants to do it alongside Tom Brady, who is now a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

As Rapoport mentioned, the Patriots would need to trade Gronkowski to Tampa Bay, but this seems to indicate the wheels are in motion on some sort of a deal. The report was confirmed by Adam Schefter of ESPN, who says that the two sides are in the midst of trade talks.

Perhaps this should not be a huge surprise, as a report from late last week indicated that the Bucs were shopping around current starting tight end O.J. Howard. Brady and Gronkowski won three Super Bowls with one another in New England, while the Buccaneers acquired Brady this offseason via free agency.

Clearly, the favorite food of quarantine 2020 is bread. Sourdough, in specific. Dalgona coffee has had a good run too. But beans are the real food MVP of this pandemic. In a time when people are anxious about their health, worried about money, and have extra hours to spend in the kitchen, the ability of beans to be comforting, bone cheap, and incredibly tasty all at once can’t be denied.

Red, black, kidney, pinto, Roman, soy… Beans — as Peggy Olson once showed us — are form, affordability, and function combined. Everything we need right now. To be fair, they were everything we needed before the quarantine too. Most Indigenous cultures in the Americas treat beans as a staple, and the current maker-movement has been reminding people of their wonders for the past few years with long odes to the legume’s infinite iterations.

With the quarantine dragging on, Zach Johnston and I decided to share whatever bean wisdom we’ve got. Zach came through with a recipe that looks like it will take you until the end of the shutdown to complete (it’s actually pretty quick, I tried!), and I add in a few tips as someone whose overarching bean philosophy is “this needs to be one the table and in my mouth in 25 minutes or so.” Regardless of which approach you take, you probably won’t screw your dinner up. No matter how many times you accidentally let the beans get scalded to the bottom of the pan. And that enormous margin for error, in this time when life feels balanced on a razor’s edge, is yet another testament to the bean itself.

Zach’s Louisiana Style Pork and Beans

I’m using the term “Louisiana” very loosely here. What I am doing is a sort of Cajun-inspired bean dish that has the hallmarks of the Big Easy cooking ways: Bell peppers in the mirepoix, quasi-Cajun spice mix in the base, and fatty, unctuous pork with the beans.

This recipe is not vegan by any stretch. But I have made a vegan version many times. I simply replace the chicken stock with vegetable stock and skip the pork shank. It’s still delicious and versatile. This is also a fairly low-impact recipe. Once you’ve made the base for the beans to cook, it goes into a low temp oven for a slow simmer. That means you’ll need about 20 to 40 minutes (depending on searing off a pork shank) to get this started and the rest of the time is just oven time.

This recipe will also feed you for a week. I ended up having beans and rice in some form for lunch pretty much every day with this recipe. To keep it interesting, I’d change up things slightly each day, but more on that later.

Ingredients:

Here’s your shopping list:

• Two-pound pork shank (unbrined with skin on)
• One-pound dried pinto beans
• One carrot
• One yellow onion
• One stalk of celery
• One bell pepper
• Tube of tomato paste
• Olive oil
• One tsp. cumin
• One tsp. garlic powder
• One tsp. smoked paprika
• One tsp. dried oregano
• One tsp. dried thyme
• Two fresh bay leaves
• Salt and pepper
• 4 cups chicken stock

Prep:

There are only two steps to prep for this meal. The night before you cook, you’re going to want to soak your beans. I place them in a mixing bowl and cover with enough water so that the beans can double in size and still be in the water. I then cover the bowl with a dinner plate. This helps the beans hydrate which lowers the cooking time later but also allows the beans to maintain their structural integrity when you do cook them.

You can skip this step but it’ll just take way longer to cook your beans and they’ll likely start to fall apart by the time they are cooked. I sometimes use a sped-up version of soaking beans. I’ll boil a kettle of water and then pour that over the beans and let them soak two to four hours, covered with a dinner plate. I’ve experienced the same results as soaking overnight with this method.

Next, get your mirepoix ready by dicing the celery, onion, bell pepper, and carrot. You don’t need to be exact here but it should be a fairly small dice. That’s literally it on the prep.

Cook:

The first thing you want to do is get a nice sear on the pork shank. I heat up a few glugs of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed stockpot on high heat. I’m using a 5l (1.3 gallons) pot that’s both stovetop and oven safe. Once the oil is shimmering, I place the pork shank in, flesh side down. I then sear off all sides. This takes a bit of time, maybe three to four minutes per side. But what you’re doing is creating a lovely fond on the bottom of the pot that’ll layer in flavor to the overall dish.

Next, I lower the heat to medium and I get my mirepoix into the pot. I salt and move around the mirepoix with a wooden spoon, bringing up all that fond into the veg.

Once the mirepoix is translucent and softened (about five to seven minutes), I add in the spices and about half a tube of tomato paste. I move that around on the bottom of the pot to release the aromatics and then mix into the mirepoix.

I then drain the beans and add them to the pot with the chicken stock. I mix everything well with the wooden spoon, add the bay leaves, and taste the soup for seasoning. I add a few cranks from a pepper mill and a pinch of salt. I then bring the pork shank back to the pot.

I cover the pot and place it in a pre-heated oven on around 275f-300f. I leave it alone for two hours until it looks like this…

I fish the pork shank out, skim the access fat, and give the beans a good stir. They should be fork-tender, still have their skins, and ready to eat. But first, we need to de-bone, skin, and chop our pork.

The meat should fall off the bone and out of the skin with little effort. I cut one-inch cubes, remove any sinew or gristle, and slice up a few cubes of the fatty skin to add back into the beans.

I cover that and let it rest for a solid 15 minutes.

While that’s resting, I make some rice. I used some Jasmine rice I had on hand. Nothing fancy — just white rice. Put about two cups of rinsed rice in a pot, add enough chicken stock to cover an inch above the rice, put a lid on, bring to a simmer, lower heat to the lowest setting, wait. Ten or so minutes later the liquid should be gone. Turn heat off, fluff rice with a fork, let rest another ten minutes with the lid on. Fluff again with a fork, serve.

Serve:

The beans have a great depth of flavor with a fresh edge thanks to the mirepoix. They’re tender with an umami-bomb base. The pork shank is a nice additional layer of protein and fat but, again, you can go vegan with this and it’ll still be great. Initially, I served this with a few Cajun-fried shrimp (I used this recipe). I’ve also served it as a simple bowl of rice and beans with a little hit of hot sauce. But I’d have to say my favorite presentation of this dish was as a burrito. I simply warmed up a flour tortilla, whipped up some guacamole, and added some shredded cheddar and jack. I made sure to get a couple of nice morsels of pork meat and fat in there and voila, a great pork and bean burrito for lunch!

Steve’s Beans

To be clear, this isn’t a UPROXX-sanctioned cooking battle. Mostly because I don’t really have a recipe for you. I just have a story. About beans.

Down in Costa Rica there is this product. Lizano beans, sold by the packet. They come in little ziplock pouches and sell for a few bucks at literally every market you’ll ever visit.

They are amazing. Famous for sustaining the local population and every single surfer who enters the country. Go on a surf trip in Costa Rica and you’ll probably eat these, wrapped in a tortilla with some avo and hot sauce, twice daily. Hell, three times.

But they don’t export them to the US or have them made at their factories here. And shipping rates from Amazon or sites like TicoShopping are guaranteed to double the cost. If they ever did release them for the American market, the demand would certainly be there. I’ve heard plenty of stories of surfers filling board bags with them before returning to their home countries. At my wedding, a friend who flew up from Costa Rica revealed that his entire gift was in the form of these beans — 50 packets — but they were taken at customs. Had it not been such a special day, I would have been devastated.

As far as I can tell, there are two secret ingredients that make Lizano beans — both the black and red varieties — so delightful. Those ingredients are:

Lard. And the easy-to-get-in-the-states:

Lizano salsa.

So that’s secret #1. Use those two things. Trust me, imitating Lizano beans is the lane you want to be in. With those ingredients in place, here’s my down and dirty/ “I’m not going to the store today” recipe:

Ingredients:

• Some beans. White, pinto, red, cassoulet, black, etc. I usually use pinto or black.
• Some onions. Purple or white.
• Some garlic. Fresh, pre-roasted, or powder — depending on the strength you want.
• Some meat. I used bacon and chorizo above. Deli turkey and ham also work. Polish sausage. Any meat, really, though I rarely use beef.
• Some bone-based stock. I use chicken or turkey. Beef would be great and pork would be wonderfully gluttonous.
• Some herbs. I use oregano and cilantro from my garden. This takes things pretty Tex-Mex, which I like. Chives or shallots would work for more southern-style beans.
• Some seasoning. A little taco seasoning perhaps. Or just cumin, salt, pepper, and paprika. I sometimes use seasoning salt or celery salt. You’re building the flavor profile, so pay attention to this part. You don’t need much of anything. And remember: In reduction-based recipes, the seasoning is going to be amped up as the dish reduces. Don’t “season to taste” until the very end. Besides, you’ve already layered a lot of flavor in and the Lizano pretty much does the trick on its own.
• Some alcohol — usually two glugs of hard liquor and four glugs of beer. Bourbon and rum are sweeter. Tequila and beer are more in the “borracho beans” lane. All very good options. Don’t use vodka.
• Some tomato element. Paste works and adds some tartness. Taco sauce works for more Mexican-style beans. Ketchup combines vinegar, tomato, and sweetness for more southern-style beans.
• Some sugar element (optional). Honey or maple syrup in the southern US. Or try agave nectar if you already used tequila. Go easy here.

Here’s another riff:

I guess I put the onions in last here. It’s nice to brown them beforehand, but clearly not essential. Nothing is really essential except for the beans, the lard, the onions, and the broth.

Prep:

• Sometimes I used canned beans. Sometimes I soak my own. It’s hard to tell which is better when they’re in a burrito, though I do like soaked better over rice because they’re less likely to break apart.
• Put the stuff in the pot.

Cook:

• Until they’re done. To your liking. If you cook until the broth is reduced away and they’re not soft enough, add more broth.

This is terrible of me but I don’t think I have a picture of my completed beans. I usually snip some cilantro over them and roll them into a burrito. They’re perfect. And though my recipe has never been recreated the same way twice, I’d be happy to challenge the beans of any other aficionado. I might not win, but I’d probably be close. Not because I’m some miracle chef, but because beans are easy to do passably well.

So make some. God knows, nothing is easy right now, let these be the thing.

Comedy Bang Bang fans know Lauren Lapkus as Traci Reardon, and Scott’s nephew Todd, and the Sunny to Paul F. Tompkins’ Chazmin, and Ho Ho the naughty elf, and about 50 other characters. She’s also the host of podcasts With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus and Newcomers with Nicole Byer, and has appeared in Jurassic World, Orange Is the New Black, and Adventure Time. Soon, she’ll make her first foray into the Happy Madison-verse, and considering how popular those movies are on Netflix, she’s also about to become a lot more famous. You can say you knew Lauren Lapkus back when (“when” equals “singing the America’s Funniest Home Videos theme as Regina Crimp”).

The Wrong Missy stars David Spade as a guy who meets the girl of his dreams, Missy (in classic Happy Madison style, she’s a former-Miss Maryland winner), who he invites on a corporate retreat to Hawaii. But it turns out he accidentally texts the wrong Missy, played by Lapkus, who joins him instead. Does a shark get punched in a face? Does David Spade dress up as a mermaid? Does he also have a threesome with Lapkus and Sarah Chalke from Scrubs? The answer to all three is… wait, is that Rob Schneider?

Here’s the official plot description.

When Tim Morris meets his dream girl and their relationship quickly escalates through texts, he throws caution to the wind and invites her to his company’s corporate retreat on an island resort… However, when a past blind date from hell shows up at the airport for the weekend getaway instead, he learns too late that he’s been texting “The Wrong Missy.”

The Wrong Missy premieres on Netflix on May 13.

---

View Entire Post ›

Since announcing her pivot to a solo career, Paramore’s Hayley Williams has been highly prolific. Williams has been releasing a new song on a near-weekly basis. The singer compiled five of her singles into the EP Petals For Armor I then shortly thereafter began promoting part two of the project. Williams’ latest track “Why We Ever” arrived last week and now her newly-released single “Dead Horse” arrives as the last track off Petals For Armor II.

Announcing the song’s release on Twitter, Williams wrote: “this one is a little different for me. im nervous. but im ready.” Still true to her sound, Williams tries her hand at a different hook. Rather than opening with instrumentals, Williams uses a sample of her voice saying: “It took me three days to send you this, but, uh, sorry. I was in a depression but I’m trying to come out of it now.” As her voice fades, a cheery beat arrives alongside honest lyricism about remaining in an unhealthy relationship for too long.

She said of the song in a statement:

“PFA II is the perfect interlude between where Petals began and where it’s going… Part III isn’t far behind. I needed these songs to help me get to a place where I could name my shame, take inventory of emotional scars, true friends, awful coping mechanisms, and discover what I desire for my life.

The latest single, ‘Dead Horse’, offers strength back to a younger, weaker version of myself. I feel like all of this needed to be said in order to embody the kind of woman I hope to be”

Just ahead of the song’s release, Williams addressed some of the criticism she’s been facing about the rapid release of singles. In a tongue-in-cheek video, Williams asked for men on the internet to give her “productive advice” on releasing a record to help her “after 15 or 16 years in the industry and five other albums.”

Listen to “Dead Horse” above.

Petals For Armor is out 5/8 via Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

Hayley Williams is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It’s odd, but even with The Fall Off on the horizon, one of the most anticipated J. Cole projects in recent months wasn’t the North Carolina rapper’s official album, but instead it was a mixtape created by DJ Critical Hype that promised to mash up some of Cole’s most beloved vocals with production from Virginia Beach hitmakers The Neptunes. Now, after months of teasing the mash-up project, Critical Hype’s In Search Of… Cole has arrived.

Clocking in at 30 tracks, In Search Of… Cole draws from all over both acts’ respective catalogs, from J. Cole’s first mixtape, The Come Up, all the way up to his most recent solo release, KOD, and incorporates fan-favorite freestyles, singles, and deep cuts, with songs like “Forbidden Fruit,” “Lights Please,” and “Love Yourz” set to classic Neptunes beats like “Let’s Get Blown,” “Come Close,” and “Hot Damn.”

The reason behind the crispiness of the blends is simple; Critical Hype was given unprecedented access to Cole’s original vocals after reaching out to Dreamville president Ibrahim Hamad. Critical Hype told Genius, “I thought it would be nice to give a different perspective of Cole’s style and flows over different production. Cole was pictured in the studio with Pharrell at the beginning of his career. They were supposed to work on something. I don’t know why it never came to fruition, but I thought it would be dope to hear Cole over some classic Neptunes beats.”

Now, if only we could get J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar in the studio…

Check out the full project above.

Click to download here.

Episode 210 (season 2, episode 10) of The Sopranos originally aired on HBO on March 19th, 2000, when Julia Roberts was burning up the screen in Erin Brockovich and Vladimir Putin was just a week away from his first election. “Bust Out” saw Tony and his crew running a classic “bust-out scam” on Tony’s high school pal turned degenerate gambler, David Scatino, played by Terminator 2′s Robert Patrick. The plan involved the gang running up huge debts on Davey’s sporting goods store’s lines of credit with no intention of paying them back. It’s a smaller-scale version of the same basic business model currently employed, fully legally, by private equity companies.

Never listened before? Well, Matt even made a video trailer for this episode:

Almost 20 years and one month to the day since it first aired, Matt and Vince are joined by producer and TV personality Nando Vila (The Naked Truth, Happy Ending, The Young Turks) to discuss this episode in Pod Yourself A Gun 210. We provide the cultural context in The Wayback Machine, run through storylines in Bada-B Stories, translate slang with Stevie B in Gabba Vafongool, identify cultural reference points in It’s The 90s, and figure out who “Da Real Gangsta” is. Along the way, we discuss our favorite and least favorite scenes and try, desperately, unsuccessfully, to get Matt to stop saying “tiddies.” It’s fine, The Sopranos was an R-rated show, why shouldn’t our Sopranos rewatch podcast be an R-rated show?

As always, ours is the first and only Sopranos rewatching podcast on the internet and if you disagree with us you are wrong and a liar. Please leave us a five star review on iTunes because we love you. Email us at [email protected], leave us voicemails at 415 275 0030.

The prequel book to The Hunger Games series hasn’t even hit bookshelves yet, but that hasn’t stopped Lionsgate from officially moving forward with a film adaptation.

According to Deadline, Lionsgate has secured director Francis Lawrence, who helmed Catching Fire and both Mockingjay, Part 1 and Mockingjay, Part 2 in the hit franchise starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, and Josh Hutcherson. Producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson will also return, with a script by series newcomer Michael Arendt (Little Miss Sunshine).

While the original films focused on the revolution sparked by Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, the prequel will center around the early years of Donald Sutherland’s fascist overlord, President Snow. But before that story hit theaters, it will first unfold in the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes written by Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins, who is looking forward to seeing her latest creation get the big-screen treatment.

“Lionsgate has always been the cinematic home of The Hunger Games, and I’m delighted to be returning to them with this new book,” said Collins. “From the beginning, they have treated the source material with great respect, honoring the thematic and narrative elements of the story, and assembling an incredible team both in front of and behind the camera. It’s such a pleasure to be reuniting with Nina, Francis, and Michael to adapt the novel to the screen, and having them share their remarkable talents, once again, with the world of Panem. I look forward to collaborating with them and all at Lionsgate as we bring The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to theaters worldwide.”

As of yet, there is no word on casting, and Hunger Games fans should probably temper their expectations on a release date happening in the near future as Hollywood continues to face a backlog of production shutdowns from the current health crisis.

(Via Deadline)

Previously on the Best and Worst of Raw: Scott Heisel filled in for me so I could move across the country during a plague. I missed Sarah Logan getting stomped out of the promotion, a rematch from NXT TakeOver: War Games, and Jerry Lawler’s first draft jokes about Akira Tozawa’s culture and ethnicity.

Things to do: Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter. BUY THE SHIRT.

One more thing: Hit those share buttons! Spread the word about the column on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you use. Be sure to leave us a comment in our comment section below as well. I know we always ask this, and that this part is copy and pasted in every week, but we appreciate it every week. Up next is WWE: Donkey Kong, and we can’t wait.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for April 20, 2020.

Best, Mostly: Drew McIntyre’s About To End This Faction’s Whole Career

Drew McIntyre will defend the WWE Championship against a former champion, Seth Rollins, in a Stamford Office Building Cafeteria Brawl or whatever at Money in the Bank. Between now and then he’s going to run through Zelina Vega’s entire faction of handsome narcissists, as Andrade, Austin Theory, and Angel Garza have become the Raw equivalent of the Artist’s Collective; a talented heel group loosely in charge of a secondary championship who lose to the more important characters every week, because they’re willing to keep showing up.

Last week, McIntyre pinned Andrade with a Brogue Claymore Kick so Rollins could “send a message” to the champion. This week, McIntyre pins Angel Garza with a Claymore Kick to send a message back. He also makes sure to beat up Andrade and Austin Theory during the match, Claymores Theory afterward, and gives Garza a second Claymore just because. Did you pick up on WWE’s subtle storytelling here? I hope none of them has a pet spider, McIntyre might drag it over to the ramp and crush it with some ring steps.

So, what’s next week? McIntyre vs. Austin Theory, with McIntyre also Claymore Kicking Andrade and Angel Garza? These three should team up with Sami Zayn, Cesaro, and Shinsuke Nakamura and start losing 6-on-1 handicap matches.

In an attempt to clarify how I’m feeling about this, I know the role of the most talented people in wrestling is often being a charismatic bad guy and feeding yourself to the dipshit hero on an assembly line, and that WWE’s an extremely Dipshit Hero-centric promotion. Hulk Hogan, John Cena, Roman Reigns, whoever. I get that the roster’s incredibly small due to running shows in an empty laser warehouse in the middle of a global pandemic, and understand the thought of putting a bunch of lower ranking heels who can work in matches against the new champ to make him look as cool and dominant as possible. It’s just that as a fan, I’ve never quite been able to find peace with the fact that being great at what you do is never as important as what you look like, or which role you can fill. It’s fine. Drew is cool, and it’s not like Vega’s team (which we’re calling “A to Z”) don’t all have 20 years of career ahead of them to stumble into something more creatively rewarding.

Five Under Four

This week’s show features five women’s matches, with all five either being under or right at four minutes long. That’s more of an observation than a critique.

Up first is Shayna Baszler turning Indi Hartwell into Indi Hartunwell with her Modified Seth Rollins Stomp to the arm. Baszler broke Sarah Logan’s arm last week, so she does the same to Indi here. Bonus points to Indi for briefly avoiding the stomp by, you know, moving her arm out of the way instead of keeping it bent at that specific angle. It only worked once, but it completely baffled Shayna there for a minute.

Shout-out to the lowest level NXT talent getting regular Raw and Smackdown gigs because they basically live in the parking lot. It’s gonna be weird as hell when arena shows resume and the roster normalizes again, and Brendon Vink stops being a main character.

I missed Nia Jax squashing Kairi Sane on last week’s show, so they were kind enough to do it again for me here. Here’s Nia lifting up the recently concussed Sane by the throat and throwing her short so she lands awkwardly on her hip and the back of her neck gets smashed under the bottom buckle. We all have fun here.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly why certain wrestlers can do dangerous stuff and get away with it but every single misstep Nia Jax takes gets turned into a “she hurts people” meme. As far as I can tell, it’s not that she “doesn’t know how to wrestle” or anything dramatic like that, because of course she does. I think it’s the fact that she never seems in control of what’s happening in the ring, and some combination of her physicality, timing, and overconfident in-ring character makes it legitimately look like she’s not taking care of her opponent. She’s just hurling them around or dropping them or punching them in the face in dangerous fashion because she’s *acting,* and the image of dominance and the performance are more important than the art of “hurting” your opponent without actually hurting them. There’s just too much of an, “oh no, something went wrong,” vibe in her matches, even when nothing’s going wrong.

Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy thing, like we did with Sin Cara. There were a few bad botches, so we started watching him wrestle looking for them, and everything that went wrong suddenly seemed hilarious and inevitable. Long story short, we probably need to give Nia Jax a break sometimes, but also it would help if she could not turn Kairi Sane’s brains into gruel. And when you hear Kairi screaming “I’M NOT SET” loud enough for US to hear it, you know NIA heard it, that’s just purposefully disregarding your dance partner’s well-being. It’s actual endangerment, beyond “laying it in” or being stiff or whatever. Why is Kairi stuck taking so much grief and punishment from people trying to get their shit in?

A quick supplemental Worst goes to Charly Caruso for asking Kairi Sane what she’s going to do about Nia’s “height advantage” during the match. She’s a hoss in a combat sport, Charly, you can say “height and weight advantage” without using it in a pejorative tone.

NXT Women’s Champion Charlotte Flair continues to wrestle on Monday nights despite being a Wednesday night champion, because … Charlotte Flair? Not like it matters when every show in the company’s being produced out of two buildings in the same Orlando suburb, but still. She eats Kayden Carter for breakfast and taps her out in about two and a half minutes. If Charlotte’s working her way through the entire NXT women’s division and starting from the bottom, I think Carter’s got one of the lowest OVRs. Congratulations, Aliyah, you’ve got next.

For a group that never did anything and broke up 12 months ago, WWE sure does keep talking about the Riott Squad. They talk about them like they were The Shield, and not a trio of loosely defined costumes that put together some backstage attacks and . They broke up off-screen because of the Draft, then all ended up on the same brand anyway. Ruby Riott got injured and returned to break up a group that’d already broken up, Liv Morgan took bubblebaths to “find herself” so she could be a problematic fifth wheel in a wrestling wedding and apparently nothing else, and Logan hugged deer corpses on Instagram, had a lengthy Main Event feud with Dana Brooke, and was also kind of a Viking? No shade to the performers themselves here, just the observation that WWE still loves saying the words “The Riott Squad” after not doing anything with them, breaking them up, and releasing one of them.

On a quick note of positivity, Liv and Ruby put together a pretty stellar finish here.

Definitely a sequence you wouldn’t have imagined Liv pulling off five years ago, so +1 for the visible improvement. Also, somebody at WWE realize Ruby Riott’s dope already.

The best match of the bunch is Bianca Belair, who goes here now, versus Santana Garrett. If you’ve never seen Santana before, think of her as the Pokémon evolution of Delilah Doom. They EVOLVE’d her using the same stone they that turned Seth Rollins into Elias, and Elias into Drew McIntyre. It’s enough of a straight-up win to help Belair look dominant, but competitive enough that she doesn’t look like one of those WWE Flavor of the Week characters who debut, go on a short winning streak, lose, and are forgotten forever.

Best: The B-Boy Stylings Of Byron Saxton

Hilarious Worst: Watch Bobby Lashley Flip This Tire

That’s it. That’s the entire bit. Lashley flips a tire. Rusev wasn’t secretly hiding inside of it waiting to jump him or anything. Not exactly a memorable feat of strength when we’ve seen your co-workers can pick up cars, overturn jeeps, and flip ambulances.

Money In The Bank Qualifiers Of The Week

Austin Theory draws the short straw and ends up in a Money in the Bank qualifying match against Aleister Black. As you might’ve guessed, Theory gets in ten minutes of offense because he’s daddy’s special boy and then gets savagely kicked in the face. The best part is easily Zelina Vega shitting on Black on commentary, which is endearing when you remember they’re married and share custody of like a dozen smush-faced cats. Zelina should add Aleister to her group (because his name starts with A, like the rest of them) and he should suddenly become an egotistical pretty boy. “Narcissistic Satanist” might be a truly unique wrestling character. Imagine if Hulk Hogan and Kevin Sullivan were the same guy.

Apollo Crews qualifies to Climb The Corporate Ladder by defeating MVP, who I guess earned a chance to qualify by being gone for 10 years and then losing a couple of matches. MVP’s doing Crews a solid by putting him over, though, and I think someone like MVP could really do Crews a favor or thirty in a managerial role. Apollo Crews is never going to give you personality growth between “smiling” and “frowning,” but he’s a killer athlete and a good performer who could really use someone to put him into a marketable context. Whether that happens or not, I’m glad to see them trying to rehab him and actually do something with him, for once.

Buddy Murphy didn’t get the Aleister Black draw, but given their history together, he might’ve done better there than getting paired with Rey Mysterio. Rey still has that crazy special power where he can make you lie across the middle rope in a position you never, ever find yourself in in other matches, and if he hits you with the 619 — a dropkick that relies on the momentum of a rope swing instead of the force of his body and legs, which you’d think would hurt more — and lands on you with a 140-pound splash, you are FINISHED. He might as well pull out a bayonet and stab you in the heart.

As always, Murphy loses, but looks great while he does it. He and Mysterio have really good chemistry together, possibly because Mysterio has good-to-great chemistry with anyone who can bend at the waist and walk upright without falling down, and their 15 minutes was easily the best part of the show for me. I don’t know if there’s another role for Murphy besides “spectacularly good loser henchman,” but I hope we’re eventually able to find it. Dude is the jam.

Regardless, congratulations to Rey for smoking Bud on 4/20.

Also On This Episode

Ced-Ric The Entertainers gets a strong win against Actually Local Talent Shane Thorne and Brendan Vink, continuing Vink’s masterful utilization of his proximity to work during a global pandemic and little panties that barely fit him to become a series regular.

Cedric and Ricochet are a really fun team who can and will do mind-blowing things together in the ring, but they aren’t going to really matter until there are similar but differently motivated teams to feud with. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express were great, but wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t gotten into a longstanding beef with the mirror universe versions of themselves, the Midnight Express. The Revival wouldn’t have been able to bring tag team wrestling back to NXT if they hadn’t had American Alpha and DIY to work with. If Cedric Alexander and Ricochet are the only team like this and the tag team division remains a Lazy Susan of placeholder champs without any real plan or purpose to hold them up, you’re going to run into the same problem you always do. The wrestlers are cool and popular, but become less cool and less popular the longer you keep them around without anything to do. Creative quarantine, so to speak.

Andrade wins a non-title match against Akira Tozawa, which is pretty good, but begs the question, “why did you use Tozawa here when he’s already booked in and busy with the Interim Cruiserweight Championship tournament on NXT?” You just had him win on Wednesday and declare that he “must keep winning.” So five days later you’ve got him losing in a completely unrelated thing? I mean, all right. I guess these are the same people who announced Drake Maverick for the cruiserweight tournament, released him, and still expected him to work. A lot of that going around.

Seth Rollins reports in from a throne he made out of a loveseat to accept Drew McIntyre’s challenge for Money in the Bank. Given how much he’s trying to look and act like Joseph Seed from Far Cry 5, I’m surprised he didn’t send Murphy and AOP out to shoot McIntyre with Bliss-tipped bullets and drag him back to the Crossfit bunker. It’s funny to imagine Becky Lynch standing there with an iPhone to film this, though. “Make sure you get the bottom of the painting in the shot, Bex, I need it to look like I’m the king of an antique store.”

Finally, in case you ever wanted to like the Viking Raiders or think they were cool again, here they are in the car together in matching clothes and prop helmets, looking like complete geeks in a Carpool Karaoke segment with self-aggrandizing chants instead of songs. They look like they’re driving to a LARP summer camp.

It’s hard to even joke about. You have to watch it for yourself. The obnoxious “VI-KING RAY-DERS!” chants are humiliating enough, the dialogue in-between them is socially grotesque. “We are VIKINGS …. ….. who LOVE to fight!” Not to mention “we worship Thor, and we’ll knock ’em to the floor,” or, “we are men with beards … who ALL should fear(ds)!” I kept hoping the nWo would pull up and run them off the road.

Maybe WWE was like, “you want to leave, Revival? We’ll show you what you’re missing out on. Who’s the toughest team in the tag team division? The Viking Raiders? Make them look like A.V. club dorks James Corden would have to politely ask to get the fuck out of his car. THAT’LL SHOW YOU.”

Congratulations, everybody. You turned War Machine into the guys from the Sonic commercials.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

cyniclone

Charly: “Ruby, you used to lead a group called the Riott Squad. My question is why do you think Sonya was trying so hard to get Mandy to date Dolph?”

The Real Birdman

I want Aliyah to beat Charlotte for the NXT title and chaos to ensue

MrOlliB

Is a fresh match up featuring Kairi Sane called Original Pirate Material?

mandrew

As someone that grew up on a farm, I can tell you Bobby that those larger low compression tires have a smaller sidewall, so even though they are larger overall, they have less mass. Also, can you just shove Lana in one and roll her down a hill? Thanks.

Mr. Bliss

All these ladders at ringside, you’d swear Rey has a custody hearing today.

troi

Lawler is wearing the cover of an MS-DOS chess game as a shirt

King of Smark Style

There’s social distancing and then there’s Lashley and Lana bits offered to us as entertainment.

I read about this in an Orwell novel.

AddMayne

Raw tonight:

LUNI_TUNZ

Lashley: “Man, I miss Sarah Logan. Anyway, I’m going to flip a tire.”

AshBlue

Creative writing the Bobby Lashley tire segment on 4/20:

And that does it for another episode of The Best and Worst of Depressing Quarantine Raw. As always, you can help us out tremendously right now by sharing the column on social media, as well as dropping down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of the show. I can make more Byron Saxton dancing GIFs if I have to.

Join us next week for more Brendan Vink and Kayden Carter as more and more of the show’s actual stars stay home. And we’re only 19 days until WWE presents ELEVATOR ACTION pay-per-view, and Daniel Bryan having a monster truck battle against Aleister Black on the roof of Titan Towers. I think that’s what’s happening. Anyway, thanks again, and see you then!

The latest attempt at getting the XFL off the ground ended sooner than the previous version of the league. Of course, this was due in major part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the league to suspend its season, lay off a number of employees, and ultimately saw its parent company declare bankruptcy after only a handful of games.

One of the league’s former executives isn’t happy about how things went down, and as a result, he’s taking Vince McMahon to court. According to Daniel Kaplan of The Athletic, a federal lawsuit filed in Connecticut last week indicates that XFL commissioner Oliver Luck will sue McMahon for wrongful termination.

Luck’s complaint is heavily redacted to protect confidential contract information. But what it does say is, “Despite fulfilling his obligations as Commissioner and CEO since May 30, 2018, Mr. Luck was wrongfully terminated by Alpha Entertainment LLC (“Alpha”), an affiliate of Defendant, on April 9, 2020. Thus, Alpha has repudiated Mr. Luck’s employment agreement. Mr. Luck brings this action for breach of contract and declaratory judgment against McMahon.”

The lawsuit notes Alpha through bankruptcy court has filed to have the court reject “Certain Executive Contracts.” The XFL filed for Chapter 11 on April 13.

Luck, a longtime sports executive and a former quarterback for the Houston Oilers, joined the league in 2018 and was told that the league was going to be a more serious endeavor than its first go around in 2001. It cost McMahon a pretty penny to secure his services, as Luck’s deal reportedly included $20 million in guaranteed money. In the complaint, Luck’s attorneys allege that he “wholly disputes and rejects the allegations set forth in the Termination Letter and contends they are pretextual and devoid of merit.”

A member of the group that represents McMahon provided a statement to ESPN about Luck’s lawsuit, saying that “Oliver Luck’s services as Commissioner and CEO of The XFL were terminated by a letter sent to him on Apr. 9, 2020 which explained the reasons for the termination. As to the lawsuit he filed, his allegations will be disputed and the position of Mr. McMahon will be set forth in our response to his lawsuit.”