#24: Jimmy Jacobs

by Phil

Jacobs’s 2008 was sort of an interesting failure. In 2007 he was a top 5 guy involved in two great feuds which he booked, that really delivered in both in the ring and out. The Whitmer I Quit match from March 2008 was probably his career match, but that was basically leftover business from 2007. His 2008 was all about the Age of the Fall, which despite some real promise, never really worked out. AOTF was really amusing conceptually, they were a college leftist heel stable. Lacey was your Women’s Studies major who was still a year away from her Lesbian semester, Necro was your older hippy in the Kuchinch T-Shirt who hung around the college kids to either sell or score drugs, Black was your Frat Boy who just read Howard Zinn a month ago and was full of newly formed anger and Jacobs was your manic depressive cutter whose friends confuse his mental illness with profound thoughts. Everyone played their roles really well, and it is a great heel gimmick, but it really only works if your audience went to college and unfortunately your average ROH fan is uneducated. The angle never really went anywhere, and the matches in the Aries and Necro feud were good, but not what they should have been. Basically he was caught in the ROH death spiral, and it dragged down his year. Even so Jacobs is still the best in the world at building an epic brawl, and one spectacular match and a bunch of good ones will get him in a top 25.

2008 Recommended Matches:

v. BJ Whitmer I Quit IWA-MS 3/1
Age of the Fall v. Briscoes/Austin Aries v. Necro Butcher Steel Cage Massacre 9/20
v. Austin Aries Dog Collar Match ROH 11/8
v. Austin Aries I Quit ROH 11/22

Career Recommended Matches:

v. Bryan Danielson ROH 12/1/07
v. B.J. Whitmer ROH 3/4/07
v. Delirious Steel Cage IWA-MS 2/4/05
w/ Colt Cabana v. Roderick Strong/Jack Evans ROH 12/4/04

2009 Outlook:

Not good, ROH is a walking corpse at this point, and he is stuck working fake Raven. It is possible that he can pull a pearl or two out of the shit, or have another good IWA-MS match, but he seems like a guy who will end up lower next year.