If you were starting a wrestling company and could build it around one person not named John Cena, who would it be?  For the sake of this, consider their current ages (as in Taker is still old), the amount of time they appear (as in Rock only appears a handful of times a year) and all other factors.I’d go with Miz.  The guy knows how to antagonize a crowd like few others and it works every time.  Anyone can come out there and smile and laugh and all that stuff, but it’s impressive to get someone that is so loathed and hated to the point where the fans will boo whatever you say.  He’s a young guy and can cause a lot of havoc on a show.  He’s been dedicated to improving his game too and he’s a credible main event heel.  The Hollywood connections don’t hurt either.

Your picks/thoughts?

It’s not CM Punk.I’m going with Randy Orton.  Think about this for a minute.

To open the year, Punk was leading the Nexus.  This time for him, in short, sucked.  He lost feuds to both Cena and Orton and the group fell apart.  Until June when he got on a winning streak, Punk did NOTHING.

Let’s look at Orton.  He starts the year losing title matches to Miz and then starts his program with Punk.  He beats Punk twice on PPV, including in an underrated Mania match.  The key to this feud though: he got rid of Nexus in about a month, totally on his own.  Cena at one point had a team of six other guys and never could do it in 6 months.  Orton did it alone in 1.

Then he goes to Smackdown and has the Feud of the Year with Christian.  Tell me one bad match he had in that period.  I’ll spare you the time: they were all great.

At Night of Champions, dude got a good match out of Mark Henry.  That should seal this for him already.

Hey look: another good feud, this time against Cody Rhodes.

Then he had a good feud with Barrett to end the year.

On top of all this, he high fived me at a Smackdown taping in August.

The guy had an all around great year, winning two world titles in the process.  He had and won two feuds with top level talent, and the guy has zero chance of winning this award in anything major, because the year starts in June when Punk talked a lot and had two great matches instead of Orton, who had at least 3.

Your thoughts/picks?

This isn’t much of a surprise.Since everyone knows that this is Cena vs. Punk at MITB, I’ll talk about some of the other commonly named matches.

Orton vs. Christian – Smackdown.  This was by far and away the feud of the year for reasons i’ve already gone into.  This was probably my favorite of them, although you really can’t go wrong anywhere.

HHH vs. Taker.  Why is this on everyone’s list?  It’s not a bad match but for the life of me, I don’t get where everyone gets this idea that it was some masterpiece.  It needed to be about ten minutes shorter and THEN it’s a great match.  Way too much laying around when we’re all just waiting on Taker to win.  There was no drama for me here at all, especially with the HHH Tombstone.  Answer this: when has anyone not named Kane had success tombstoning Undertaker?  It’s a running joke.

Your picks/thoughts?

Basic question: who do you think does these the best?For me, I’m going with an older guy and saying Jesse Ventura.  Whenever he comes out he gets huge ovations and sounds like he could be in the booth again full time tomorrow.  He’s just entertaining and sounds like he’s the smartest guy in the room.

Your thoughts/picks?

Note that I said wrestler, not annoying heel commentator.For lack of anyone better (or is it worse?) I’m going with Otunga.  The guy is just worthless, although the lawyer character is FAR better than the A-List guy.  This is one of those where there isn’t a clear cut winner so this is widely open for other answers.

Your picks/thoughts?

This one should be a bit arguable.I’m going to go with the downward spirals of the Hardy Boys.  Jeff went from being a heel (seriously, WHO THOUGHT THAT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA???) to Victory Road and Matt made him look like a pillar of stability by comparison.  These two were at one point considered the future and now they’re running jokes.  And Jeff will be world champion by Mania.

Your picks/thoughts?

And I mean PPV, not Raw/Impact etc.It’s hard to go against Money in the Bank.  I mean, you had two great matches and one classic with a great moment to end it.  Just an all around great show and nothing all year comes close to it.

Your picks/thoughts?

There are a bunch of options for this.But it’s pretty easily Cole in general.  If I had to specify something, it’s the overuse of Twitter.  If you look at the Survivor Series buyrate, it came in low.  Do you think that if maybe Rock had gotten something other than Cena’s Lady Parts trending it might have been better?  Like maybe, Survivor Series This Sunday?  That’s the problem with this Twitter obsession: they’re using it for the wrong things.  Who cares if Alicia Fox is trending?  She’s on TV for a minute a week.  Get something where it’s advertising a PPV or better yet, ADVERTISE THE FREAKING PPV.  I’ll stop there because I could go on for a week about this.

Your thoughts/picks?

The common sense answer would be Cena vs. Rock or Punk.  I’ve never been one for common sense though.I’m going with Christian vs. Orton.  They never stopped having good matches and the feud naturally progressed very well.  You would see them building on sequences throughout the series of matches, such as the dive out of the corner by Christian being caught in an RKO.  That turned into a fake in the second match, then Orton faked Christian by waiting with the RKO again.  That’s thinking and calling back to previous matches, which is very rare today.  I loved this feud and the blowoff was great.  Feud of the year to me.

Your thoughts/picks?

More options than I thought here.I’ll take Rock’s return.  The rumor for the guest host was Justin Bieber and then they had the legs get out.  I was skeptical when I saw them because I thought it would still be someone else, but I didn’t predict Rock.  That was awesome and a great thing to see.  And for those of you that still think it, no he didn’t abandon us in the first place.

Your picks/thoughts?