[jetskid48]

This is some early news, and not really a spoiler for tonight, but hopefully they'll explain it on wwe.com later or something, but apparently Joey Styles won't be the announcer anymore. Seems random and I hope its not some sort of personal or family issue for Styles. Here's the article from rajah.com:

source: PWInsider.com

It was announced just a short while ago at today's SmackDown/ECW taping in London that Mike Adamle is the new play-by-play announcer for ECW. He will be calling tonight's entire ECW broadcast with Tazz.

With Adamle in as the new play-by-play annnouncer for ECW, Joey Styles is obviously out. However, Styles' services will be retained by the company. WWE plans on moving him to an undetermined area within the organization.

[chrisisadad4308]

Boo. Styles is the only announcer I halfway like anymore. Adamle has come off like a giant tool since WWE hired him.

[Lucky]

I like Styles as an announcer. I hate the Styles/Tazz tag team. If Styles pops up somewhere else I'm fine with this. Adamle might suck but I find Styles and Tazz to be a horrible combo anyway, but Taz has been a good announcer with the likes of Cole, JR, and Matthews. So I'm game.

Plus Styles off ECW is a good thing. Now let Dreamer and Richards retire and fire Balls and we can all completely turn the page on this "ECW" farce.

[bdbdbd]

Styles is going to be awesome on Heat!

[snelson66]

Apr 15, 2008 19:28:48 GMT -5 bdbdbd said:

Styles is going to be awesome on Heat!

Styles would be awesome on Impact!. Hope WWE lets him go.

[Byrntrigan]

I'd assume WWE would keep him around for at least the ECW 24/7 crap on their VOD.

Styles to me was the least crappy outta the WWE announcers but he is a sheel of what he used to be.

Bring him and Cyrus to TNA and make The "Proffessor" a second mic stand behind Crystal...

[Lucky]

If what they said about him being promoted to head of the website is true than he should be in WWE and safe. He's got plenty of experience and I would imagine its a very comfortable position. He lives in Connecticut anyway so now there's no travel, he has plenty of responsibility, and he's probably available for WWE 24/7, DVDs, and projects. In theory I'll miss him because I think he was the best of the play-by-play men in WWE, but as I said I really, REALLY didn't enjoy his team with Taz. So unless WWE was gonna shuffle the teams around and pair him with someone else its pointless. Styles abilities weren't being used properly with Tazz and it was resulting in a bad announce team. So at worse we traded a bad announce team with the potential for good for a bad announce team that's just bad.

I presume Adamle hasn't been spending all his time calling wrestling shows so he still is basically a complete novice. At best it should take him a few weeks to get comfortable to calling wrestling. He also has to get comfortable to live TV, the WWE product, and Taz. So I'm not judging him too quickly.

But now that I discovered Josh Matthews is still employed and calling Heat I REALLY wish he had been called up to ECW. He and Tazz used to entertain me plenty on Velocity, as did he and Bill Demott, he and Ernest Miller, and anyone else he was with. Josh Matthews on ECW would have made me happy.

[Byrntrigan]

Adamle as some of you may know was the announcer for the original American Gladiators as well as a sports announcer for Chicago tv for 15 years or so.

He's descent on live tv, but seems like a sack of crap for wrestling. He will get better though, I dunno, I just take people who were wrestlers more seriously as announcers.

Taz for example. Joey Styles was and is the exception, most other announcers are meh. Old ECW Styles was awesome.

Also - it seems like he's been phoning it in for a while - at least before I stopped watching WWE completely...

[Demko]

Adamle was TERRIBLE last night. It seemed like they brought in a guy who'd never watched a day of wrestling in his life, but happened to have listened to a few tapes of JR calling matches.

There was so much dead air last night it was ridiculous. Couldn't they bring Al Snow back? He doesn't seem to be doing anything, and he'd be a natural fit for ECW, especially with Taz.

[Outback Frito Pendejo]

I completely understand Lucky's point about moving on. Still, I might watch ECW again if they brought back Al Snow with Head as a wrestler and had Joel Gertner doing color.

[derfsucks]

I think Adamle could be passable with time, but last night was awful. Watching the Brothers of Destruction match last night, even my wife piped up with, "Uh, the other nerdy guy was much better talking about things."

[bdbdbd]

Chat consensus was that he was nervous.

Nerves or not, that Jamaican me crazy line? There's no excuse for that kind of nonsense.

[Sparty]

And

"John Morrison and Mike The Miz … take on the Brothers of Destruction"

[salmonjunkie]

Hey, it's his first day. At least he's not JR who's been doing this for years and still fucks up. On Monday he called Mickie's top rope Thesz Press (that may not be the right term, actually) a BULLDOG!

That and after you could audibly hear the ref call JBL "Bradshaw" Ross called him "Bradshaw" for the rest of the night. Even got the King calling him that. Christ...

[Lucky]

Yeah. You can't really blame him for calling a guy named Mike "Mike" and calling a basic leglock a "figure four leglock." He's inexperienced. He may have practiced and researched but its his first shot of applying it and he's gonna fuck up. Even Don West became very comfortable with wrestling after some time.

Of course like West there may be other aspects that make Adamle a bad announcer. I would give him the benefit of the doubt given his history that he'll improve the accuracy as he gets experience. My problem is he's too catchphrase and silly things for my taste. The Jamaican line, "Uno, Dos, Adios!". That cheesy stuff annoys me. And when I think back it seemed common for Gladiators.

Of course I went back and rewatched ECW in order to hear him because I realized that when I watch a show in chat I just don't hear the announcers anymore. I'm using the chatters as announcers.

[punk/core]

I mentioned this in the ECW thread as well, but... the Styles news just broke yesterday afternoon so I'm assuming that's when the decision was made. Adamle only had a few hours to prepare... can't really expect him to be gold under those circumstances.

[Beer Baron]

Adamle was plain awful last night. That was the worst called wrestling show in years. At least when they stuck Coach in with JR and King, there was a chance Coach would shut up and catch his breath so the other two would talk. Having "dead air" during a match and no one says a word is unacceptable. They should fire this idiot, or at least before they put him on one of the 3 shows, have him down in Florida to get him acclimated to wrestling moves and wrestling in general. I hadn't read that Styles was leaving but that was a bombshell to me when they first announced it. It was sheer chaos from the announce table from then on. Is WWW.FIREADAMLE.COM very far behind?

[jetskid48]

FIREADAMLE very far behind. Why? Because no one cares enough about ECW to bother.


I'll second the Josh Matthews stuff, although I'm pretty sure last week Todd Grisham did Heat. I always liked Matthews and wondered why they ran him off Smackdown. Maybe he didn't want to travel neither. I've seen him on some 24/7 stuff, stuff before ppvs on wwe.com, and some other stuff. A major problem with Adamle is that he probably doesn't know a lot of moves, and that's a problem if he need to call one (pretty much the anti-JBL during that ppv Cole lost his voice). I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be a problem with Matthews. On a side note, I met him at an IMAX once and the guy is short and tiny...it's pretty hilarious that he actually got 3rd during the first Tough Enough.

[Lucky]

But it wasn't all Adamle's fault that they never stopped. Tazz clearly seemed to be overdoing it to try and cover for him. It was just all together a poor effort. Adamle wasn't good, Tazz didn't help any, and WWE put them both in a lousy position. And hell, the first damn match out of the gate was an 8 man tag with 4 guys not even on the brand. Even the most well researched guy in the world would have had to have been overwhelmed by that. If he knew the ECW roster in and out he'd still have 4 other guys, plus the general chaos and in and out of a match of that size. God knows JR would have never kept up with that many guys and would have eventually mixed up Deuce and Domino and probably the 3 black dudes.

It was just one of the worst ways to introduce the guy possible. You gotta wonder why they felt Styles had to walk away the same week Adamle showed up and why they didn't let him sit in as the 3rd man or do some Heat in preparation. They always seem to pull this shit whether its Coach for JBL, Joey for JR, Heyman for Lawler... but usually its with experienced guys. When they try and shuffle in new announcers like Coach and Armstrong they usually seem to have the good sense to give them some time as the 3rd man in the booth or hosting Heat/Velocity.

[The Bad Guy]

Why didn't they just use Todd Grisham? He's nothing special, but at least he knows what he's doing.

I guess Coach and Cole aren't my least favorite commentary team anymore. Well, at least it will be fun to make a drinking game. Every time Adamle says something wrong, take a drink.

[Lucky]

Because they paid Adamle a lot of money and want to make it worthwhile. He was gonna end up in a big announcing role sooner or later.

[bdbdbd]

Todd Grisham and Michael Cole are the same person made up differently, it'd be a bitch to get him in and out of the makeup and back to the table between ECW and SmackDown tapings.

[snelson66]

Apr 16, 2008 15:11:41 GMT -5 The Bad Guy said:

Why didn't they just use Todd Grisham? He's nothing special, but at least he knows what he's doing.

I guess Coach and Cole aren't my least favorite commentary team anymore. Well, at least it will be fun to make a drinking game. Every time Adamle says something wrong, take a drink.

You'll be passed out by :15 past the hour.

[Beer Baron]

Apr 16, 2008 13:24:52 GMT -5 Lucky said:

But it wasn't all Adamle's fault that they never stopped. Tazz clearly seemed to be overdoing it to try and cover for him. It was just all together a poor effort. Adamle wasn't good, Tazz didn't help any, and WWE put them both in a lousy position.

That is true. However, he sounded completely unprepared for what he was doing. It's not like he's inexperienced in doing broadcasting. I'm going to steal an analogy from another recap site, "if Fox or ESPN hired someone to do (fill in the blank) game for them and he sounded like that and was totally unprepared and had dead air during the game, he would be fired." That was the worst thing I've heard in all of my years of watching. Now, I never heard Don West when he first started out, but when I hear him now on TNA, he's bad cause he yells and his voice inflection is all wrong, but at least he keeps the commentary going so Mike can pick up and move along. All I know is, I hope Taz gets paid double until this Bozo figures his shit out.

[The Bad Guy]

Apr 16, 2008 15:24:21 GMT -5 Lucky said:

Because they paid Adamle a lot of money and want to make it worthwhile.

Worthwhile apparently meaning trainwreck to the folks at WWE these days.