In a slow weekend for wrestling news, the biggest story was a low key departure from Ring Of Honor (ROH) management. Longstanding employee Syd Eick announced to the ROH locker room after their Philidelphia house show on Friday night that he was leaving the company, effective immediately. Eick was the sole person left in management who had been with the company from the very beginning and whose power grew to the role of Vice President when founder Rob Feinstein was forced to sell the company to Cary Silkin after being caught in a highly embarrassing Internet sting by Perverted-Justice. He had been responsible for the day to day running of the company for many years before Sinclair Broadcasting took it over late last spring.

Eick was a divisive figure backstage, often playing "bad cop" to Silkin's "good cop", in a role similar to the one WWE's heads of talent relations like J.J. Dillon, Jim Ross and currently John Laurinaitis performed for Vince McMahon. Inevitably then Eick picked up enemies, most notably the talented Austin Aries who acrimoniously left ROH in 2010 and immediately tweeted upon hearing the news:

"@ScrapDaddyAP @BookItGabe @rohcary Just heard some #GREAT news. About damn time someone got smart. #SeeYaPal #CutTheCancerOut"

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Over the weekend, Ring Of Honor had their first television taping since their Final Battle iPPV. There was plenty of good news for the promotion, but ultimately the show was tinged by a sour note thanks to a misguided booking decision.

Let's start with the positives. The show was packed out with 600 fans seated and 200 standing, which was impressive given it was their first event in Baltimore, a feat they haven't come close to accomplishing in the other new markets they have tried to break into. There is the caveat that in the past ROH has heavily papered their TV tapings to ensure a full looking crowd for the cameras, so this may not be as positive as it seems on first glance. Most importantly for repeat business, the show was well received and though fans were inevitably tired by the fourth show, the strong action and storyline twists kept them in their seats and engrossed till the very end, barring the final squash match.

This wasn't the only good news of the week for ROH, as their TV show has started airing in Salt Lake City, UT, Austin, TX, West Palm Beach, FL, and Medford, OR this month and will be coming to Grand Rapids, MI and Lansing, MI by March. For their seemingly outdated syndication strategy to be a success they need to keep finding new stations to air their programming, as even with this latest expansion it still can only be seen in a quarter of the country.

As the sole negative involves spoilers, I'll talk about it more after the jump. Full spoilers can be found at prowrestling.net.

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Well, not quite.

Despite Jay Briscoe's fancy new shoes, he and brother Mark are still the same ol' Briscoe Brothers you know and love -- or hate.

As the new Ring of Honor (ROH) tag champs, they have a litany of contenders looking to kick them off their throne and first of which is the team of Roderick Strong and Michael Elgin, both members of The House of Truth this coming week in Baltimore during ROH's monthly television taping.

I've made it no secret that i'm a huge fan of the new champs so I'll use any excuse to shine the spotlight on them. And there newest video is just such an occasion.

Take a look after the jump! And I promise, there are no dead chickens this time!

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2011 was a year of great change for the third largest wrestling promotion in North America, Ring Of Honor. It started ominously in January with the announcement that their TV deal with HDNet would not be renewed when it expired in early April. What wasn't known at the time was that Cary Silkin was in negotiations to sell the company to Sinclair Broadcasting, a deal that was completed in mid May. Three months later, ROH pressed the reset button and debuted a new weekly one hour television show on Sinclair affiliates in late Saturday night time slots. Was this move the game changer that ROH fans, management and wrestlers hoped for? Unfortunately, early evidence suggested not: although ratings were strong to decent in many markets, their attempts to run house shows in their new TV strongholds have so far been a financial disaster, drawing in the range of 325-375 fans, half of what they need to break even. But there was still hope that their other main business stream, their quarterly iPPVs, would be boosted by their increased TV exposure in 22% of the country over the last three months.

That hope was dashed this week when Dave Meltzer published in his Wrestling Observer Newsletter that last week's Final Battle iPPV drew a mildly disappointing 2,000 buys. You can look at this statistic in two ways, half full or half empty. An optimistic carny would dwell on the fact that it's a huge improvement on their Death Before Dishonor iPPV in September, which drew less than half that number. But a pessimistic reporter would point out that that was for a lame duck show with little hype and a weak lineup where ROH champion Davey Richards wasn't even booked. A fairer comparison would be their record breaking Best In The World iPPV in late June, where they managed to obtain 2,100 online purchases many weeks after they had lost their limited HDNet viewership. So the revamped TV show led to very few, if any, new viewers for their latest iPPV, which proves that it's almost completely ineffective at its goal to widen ROH's paying fan base.

The Final Battle iPPV itself wasn't much better. Though the show delivered the expected high quality booking and workrate, casual fans may have been appalled by the shoddy production values for an iPPV they paid almost $15 for the privilege of watching live, shocked by all the unnecessary head trauma inducing chairshots on display, and unprepared for the event finishing about an hour later than expected. Meltzer was particularly scathing about all the schoolboy production errors that littered the airing:

There have been a lot of frustrations watching the company the past few months because the biggest problems are those that shouldn't be there. They are owned by a television company, Sinclair Broadcasting, and if nothing else a TV company should present a show that looks professionally produced. ...the show itself shouldn't have a minor league look to it. In this day and age, and quite frankly in almost any day and age, that would doom most wrestling products.

Sure, nobody expects them to match Raw, but they are on some real stations in some decent sized markets and they can't match the TNA production values when they were bleeding to death on Fox Sports Net years back. They can't match the production values of local regional wrestling companies from decades ago when, if anything, they should at least beat them for the look of the show.

If ROH wants to expand past their hardcore niche audience, then they need to sort this out pronto, but if anything changes, then it is more probable that their owners are going to cut even more corners, as they try to stop the money bleeding at the pace it is now.

So what will Joe Koff's and Jim Cornette's response be to their promotional struggles? A conservative duo, they'll likely hold course, while keeping their business information secret, allowing them to shamelessly lie to the wrestling media at the same time as hypocritically bashing their opposition for being feckless. When asked about their TV show in an exclusive interview by the UK's Fin Martin for his PowerSlam magazine, Corny spouted this garbage:

ROH in August had no television show. In September, we went on the air with a television show which now, nine weeks later, is being seen by about a million people every week in the US. That, I think, has been our brightest success so far: going in and doing a television programme that in a lot of cases doing a better rating than the programmes it replaced on these stations.

As Meltzer clarified in the Observer, the real figure would be much closer to 30-40% of the number Cornette is quoted as delivering, given ROH's current TV penetration. If Cornette's claim was true, then ROH would have to be drawing close to Raw level numbers in the markets they air on. Does any Cagesider believe that to be plausible?

One of the worrying trends of 2011 has been how chairshots to the head have started to creep back into mainstream American wrestling, after once being thought banned from the major leagues of WWE and TNA, and performers supposedly being dissuaded from using them in ROH, due to the well known postmortem diagnosis of Chris Benoit (and later Andrew Martin) with the degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

WWE got the ball rolling at WrestleMania 27 when Vince McMahon's son-in-law Triple H dug deep into his Attitude Era bag of tricks and nailed The Undertaker with a running chairshot to the head in a spot designed to help them steal the show from everyone else on the card. The ensuing controversy led to a meaningless fine for the two veteran performers involved, but has at least discouraged WWE management from scripting another spot like that since then.

Not to be outdone by the McMahons in Connecticut, last month at the Turning Point PPV TNA minority owner Jeff Jarrett got in the act too when he used a chairshot to the head in his match with Jeff Hardy. Given that everyone in TNA management seems stuck in the late '90s, it's not surprising that they couldn't resist the temptation to go back to the hardcore well for a cheap pop.

But the most egregious offender is ironically the company with the most progressive in-ring wrestling style, ROH. At their Final Battle iPPV last week, not one, but two matches featured chairshots to the head. That's not to mention all the other dangerous spots that risked unnecessary head trauma. Bristling from the criticism that his over the top match with Kevin Steen received, Steve Corino assured everyone in a post on his blog (which can be read after the jump) that he was a skilled magician who knows the secret behind safe chairshots to the head that look dangerous and unprotected. The post was very reminiscent of Raven's argument last year that "chairshots to the head should only be banned if you don't know how to throw one properly".

Corino pointed to the fact that neither he nor Steen suffered a concussion from their hardcore stunt match as proof that the chairshots they took were safe. The problem is that recent research has shown that even subconcussive blows to the head can cause brain damage, which suggests that moves with the highest risk of causing such head trauma should be limited or better yet, avoided altogether, in favor of safer alternatives. There's plenty of ways to make a match look gritty and violent without resorting to chairs to the head, and a true magician would not need to use such shortcuts to convey that brutality.

The blame for these chairshots doesn't rest solely with the performers themselves, but also ROH management who seem to be happy to hide behind the plausible deniability that they didn't explicitly script the chairshots to the head, even though they sanctioned the use of chairs in those two Final Battle matches in question, as Bryan Alvarez reported in this week's Figure Four Weekly~! newsletter:

There were no chairshots to the head scripted into the show, and one source noted that management was very unhappy with them. The wrestlers in the tag match "got excited," and though the match was built around chairshots (as evidenced by the TV angle where Shelton Benjamin's ribs were injured with a chairshot), none were supposed to be to the head.

So unhappy with them that chairshots to the head somehow keep happening on their biggest show of the year, yet nobody ever gets punished for it. The phrase to "have one's cake and eat it too" comes to mind.

Meanwhile, as I was writing this post, Zach Arnold via Twitter brought to my attention the latest death via head trauma of a wrestler in Japan. As Frank Pozen reported yesterday, add 21 year old female wrestling trainee Miwako Nomura to the long list of those who died far too soon thanks to the physical toll of the modern wrestling business:

I am sorry to report that Happy Hour trainee Miwako Nomura died at age 21 on Dec. 27.... According to the police investigation, Nomura complained of headaches on November 15. She went to hospital and was cleared. The next day, she collapsed during practice and was rushed to the hospital. She underwent surgery for a cerebral hemorrhage and never regained consciousness. Cause of death seems to be acute heart failure but police are still investigating and will issue an official statement in January. Her death is being treated as an accident and it does not appear that there will be any criminal charges. My guess is they are trying to determine if a blow to the head led to Nomura's death.

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Ring of Honor (ROH): Final Battle 2011 is set to go down tonight (Fri., Dec. 23, 2011) from the historic Hammerstein Ballroom in the Big Apple, New York City live on internet pay-per-view (iPPV) start 7:30 p.m. ET.

CagesideSeats.com will provide LIVE blow-by-blow, match-by-match coverage of Final Battle below, beginning with the first match of the evening and right on through to the main event.

Tonight's show will feature every single title being defended. Jay Lethal puts his TV strap on the line against both "The Prodigy" Mike Bennett and El Generico while The World's Greatest Tag Team collide with six-time ROH tag champs The Briscoe Brothers. In the main event, Davey Richards defends against former tag team partner and former champ himself Eddie Edwards.

In addition to that, Roderick Strong has issued an open challenge... who will answer it? Michael Elgin also sees single action against TJ Perkins plus much, much more. Oh, and Kevin Steen is back.

Don't forget that you can order the iPPV by clicking here or on the image above. It's less than 15 bucks and will be worth every penny. So kick your shoes off, relax, and enjoy all the action with your favorite pro wrestling website. And remember to keep refreshing!

Full results and match coverage after the jump.

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Along with Glory by Honor, Death Before Dishonor and their annual anniversary show, Final Battle is a staple of Ring of Honor's (ROH) event schedule. In fact, only it and Glory by Honor can trace their lineage to the company's humble but promising beginnings when they were running nearly every show out of the Murphy Rec Center in Philly.

As a result both are looked at - and even debated over amongst fans - as the promotion's biggest shows of the year; their WrestleMania, Bound by Glory, or Starrcade.

Appropriately, as the year begins to draw to a close, so do most of the storylines going into Final Battle. It's seen more than its share of feud-ending matches like the 2004 match between Austin Aries and Samoa Joe or Aries match five years later against Tyler Black.

Final Battle has seen nine main events in its day with the 10th set to go down tonight when Davey Richards and Eddie Edwards collide for the third - and presumably last - time. We will be, of course, providing match-by-match coverage and you can also order the event here for less than $15 and watch along with us.

To celebrate, I took a look back at each headliner and picked the best three of the bunch. Before you take in tonight's event, take a trek down memory lane with me.

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It's the go-home show for Final Battle 2011, folks!

The big, year-ending internet pay-per-view (iPPV) is tomorrow (Dec. 23) but Ring of Honor (ROH) has one more show to go before they once again invade New York City.

What's that? You want to watch Final Battle 2011? Well, it's a good time that it's incredibly easy to do so! Just click here and with less than $15 -- a fourth of the cost of a WWE show -- you can check out what is sure to be a can't miss event.

Aside from an excellent video package highlighting what will be the final show of the year, this week's episode also includes former champion Eddie Edwards in singles action taking on Andy Ridge.

And in the main event, ROH World Champion Davey Richards takes on Survival of the Fittest 2011 winner Michael Elgin in a Proving Ground Contest. Can the champ defeat the Truth Martini's monster? And if he does, what kind of toll will it take on his body going into Final Battle?

But enough talk, it's time for wrestling!

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