Courtesy of Grantland.com:

Welcome to the WWE Network

Grantland’s resident wrestling junkies break down the cutting-edge delivery of the WWE’s Internet-only channel

Editor’s note: David “The Masked Man” Shoemaker (Grantland’s wrestling guru) and Bill Simmons (35-year wrestling fan) spent the past 10 days digesting the new WWE Network, which launched on February 24 and caused a multimedia riot in the wrestling community. Is this one of the great moments in WWE history? Could you say Vince McMahon stumbled into a blueprint for a new and improved media rights model, as well as a more sophisticated way for the sport to reach its fans? Our boys decided to break it down.

Q: What did you guys THINK this network was going to be?

Simmons: I always imagined the WWE Network becoming available on DirecTV and/or cable, then flicking over to Channel 259 (or whatever) and being delighted to find some random 1980 Texas Death Match between Bob Backlund and Ken Patera. I also assumed it would feature every new pay-per-view, the Raw/Smackdown pregame and postgame shows, reruns of every show WWE has produced and pay-per-views from the past 40 years, and maybe three or four “new” shows that would definitely suck. By the way … what I just described would have been an AWESOME channel. I never saw the Internet-only thing coming.

Shoemaker: Considering it was initially supposed to be an over-the-air broadcast network, I thought it was going to be sort of insufferable. A never-ending stream of mediocre reality television to try to attract mainstream attention with old pay-per-views on late night and hype packages for the current product infiltrating everything — I mean, my life is already full enough of wrestling as it is.