Lock Jaw gets it

Pretty much agreed on that Reddit post that Slik put up there.

I still watch Dynamite every week because I genuinely enjoy the wrestling. But my engagement with the stories is at an all-time low. And Tony never seems willing to hire anyone to help keep him focused so it just doesn't feel it'll change anytime soon.

One of the beauties with early AEW is that almost nobody wrestled on consecutive weeks. They had a roster that was big enough to allow them to rotate the ring-work, guys would wrestle once every 2-3 weeks but pretty much everyone important would be featured in vignettes, promos, angles etc. They had a good rotation going.

That continued right on through the pandemic, especially with their taping schedule being what it was (live episode Wednesday, taped episode Thursday, then everyone goes home for 2 weeks).

Now it's just the polar opposite. Same people wrestling every week and while I'm not about to complain about seeing a guy like Danielson wrestle every week, it's a problem when you have sizable chunks of the roster going unused.

I understood AEW got burned over the summer with fuckloads of guys going out hurt at the same time, but they are mostly healthy now. Mox was supposed to take a vacation on September and it never happened. Khan's all but said he "can't afford" to lose Danielson for a month to do the G1. Why not? Are advertisers demanding all the big names work every week? It's a mess.

Thinking more about the Danielson/MJF angle...it's repetitive yes but I think part of the reason it feels this way goes well beyond the basic framework of "Danielson runs an MJF gauntlet". There's actually some differences in this angle than the previous gauntlets and they're easy to miss because AEW seem to be poor at explaining things.

On paper the MJF/Danielson build is actually really smart. The story is that the responsibilities of being a champion are killing MJF, heavily because he can't actually get away with his usual bullshit. He didn't get to choose Danielson's opponents, he didn't get to pick stipulations, and even trying to force Danielson into a Labors of Jericho series of matches has ended up screwing him over in the long run because now he has to wrestle a match type that favors the challenger.

He wanted the brass ring and now he's gotten it and it means that he has to go places he doesn't want to go, he has to wrestle people he'd rather not wrestle, and so on and so forth. The only alternative is to give up the belt, a thing he'd never do. Danielson, conversely, loves and wants nothing more but to wrestle matches, so the moment he's negotiated it so the reward is worth the risk his only issue is getting to the finish line. In its way it's kind of a funny inversion of MJF's feuds.

But none of that is really made clear. Nothing is made as clear as it needs to be, which means that every week on here people have come in not knowing who canonically is booking Danielson's opponents (it's Tony Khan, not MJF), how long he needs to win matches for (it was for five weeks, which feels arbitrary because the top five rankings functionally do not exist anymore), or even that MJF is coming actually unglued (because MJF has played nearly every single version of his character except for the "I'm actually deep because I was bullied when I was younger" version). And I can't blame anyone for that because there have been weeks where I've been unsure of that myself, and have only noticed it because I caught words Excalibur was saying at his full auctioneer pace when running down cards.

Some of AEW's problems are heavily about circumstances that are out of their control, or a general reluctance to give indicators as to why wrestlers have been cycled out (Wardlow getting injured, for example), but some of it is really just a seeming refusal to not simplify things and hammer home the same beats over and over so even a fourth-grader could understand it, which is what you need to do for a large TV audience.

Speaking solely about my experience watching for a couple months after Punk went over... seems like Tony relies heavily on the internet fans to "fill in the gaps" on his stories for him. Since that is his primary demo he sees no need to change as long as people keep filling in the gaps for him.

Once enough of the IWC turns against him, then we'll see Meltzer and the other "journalists" turn against AEW to shift with their market as well, and then things will unravel quickly....

That's always been a problem for the entire time: relying on people like us to carry the product. Folks like us who even know who the fuck Meltzer is, let alone care one way or the other about what he says. Folks like us who have at least a cursory care about what's going on in NJPW, NWA, MLW, AAA, or the surprisingly still upright corpse of Impact.

Relying on the internet wrestliing community to watch all of their shows, including the web-only stuff that's obviously nowhere near appointment watching, and understanding that an angle is happening between X and Y that involves a thing that happened between them at an indy show in Britain over some New Japan title where most of the "normal" fans will have prob'ly have only seen Dynamite and wonder who the hell those two guys even are.

Relying on the IWC to *know* who someone like Shibata is and caring enough to want to see him against Orange Cassidy. Relying on the IWC to "fall for" just plugging New Guy Z in with Veteran W and expecting them to automatically get an instantanious rub of stardom instead of actually building anyone.

And again, it comes down to being an opposite extreme from WWE. When you had the perfect storm in something like The Ryder Revolution, it was unique in being a time and place event where he - individually - was about as over, if not moreso, than any of the top guys on the card *because* he had a burgeoning social media groundswell that the company just didn't understand or quantify, and was in a position to capitialize on it in a way that Matt Hardy before him couldn't (realistically speaking, Matt had the vision, but was WAAAYYY too early on that forefront, trying to build a fanbase when the world was still just getting used to dial-up and chatrooms and not when everyone had a microcomputer in their pocket and could instantaniously interact). Heck, WWE still had commentators bash "the internet" and and style it to be a total of 30 basement-dwelling neckbeards globally, and only maybe half of those might possibly be into wrestling just to trash it instead of a thing that, again at that point, EVERYONE had access too at pretty much any time if they had a nice enough cellular phone or computer/laptop... while AEW likes to pretend now that that is all that exists and the only way everyone consumes everything in every interest all the time and all of those interests intersect for everyone.

There should not be a need to hold Bryan Danielson from the G1 or stop Mox from vactioning or doing the originally planned NJPW timeshare because nobody around can be assed to actually "build" folks (plural) that anyone would or should care about to be able to carry the company in the absense of one or two talent, but there is a very bad habit to only trade on most folks who already came in with some sort of name behind them from elsewhere. About the only people who seemingly bucked that trend were Darby Allin, Hook, and Dr. Britt. Even then, most of those people end up spinning wheels instead of being any sort of help or hinderance.

Yep. The problem with the hardcore niche audience is that they’re the ones that are going to look elsewhere for their wrestling. They’re already watching WWE and know that it is better. If something else tickles their fancy more, they’ll abandon AEW in a second.

Yeah pretty much all of these people are "spinning wheels" by this point in various stages. Especially Hook.

Hook is admittedly still green but I can't see how he's never going to stop being green if they don't ween him off of one-sided, heavily choreographed matches. Booking-wise it seems AEW are very scared that fans will stop caring about him the second he loses a match. And so he's still on squash duty.

I think they're in a similar boat with Jade. Her win streak is really tarnished when you consider how it's booked. Her only fully easy wins are against non-contract Dark talent. Her first loss is probably still be saved for Kris Stat but again, does it even matter if Jade's consistently shown she needs interference to beat anyone remotely important?

They took a good guiding principle with the "wins and losses matter" stuff and then ended up at a very weird destination with it where they've booked themselves into a corner with undefeated streaks.

AEW’s stories rarely make sense. That gets pointed out a bit more now, but nowhere near as much as it should. And when you’re appealing to an audience that likes to be rewarded for paying attention, it is eventually going to become alienating when the goodwill erodes.

Jaime Hayter was red hot off her title win. The easiest and most sediment billing was turning Britt on her, giving her the full fledged babyface run between two homegrown stars and having Hayter go over and be the center of the division.

Instead she’s still a lackey, just with a belt. Saraya going heel was a good idea and they pivoted well, but that should be getting built up to feed to Hayter at the next ppv and it’s not. Complete waste IMO

Related: saw on reddit a few days ago that the AEW rankings have not been updated on their website since August 31. That is still the case as of right now:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpmVJISW...png&name=small

I'd like to believe that they had Britt turning on Jamie leading to a Revolution title match penciled in, but then Saraya proved to be so dislikable that they needed to get her heel as soon as possible and figured they could keep Jamie and Britt as a unified front a bit longer. But now they're just in this awful Originals vs. implied Ex-WWE feud. What's that gonna lead to, a tag match at the PPV? Jamie should be getting the solo focus.

Also you know Britt vs. Jamie is something they'd want to do at PPV, so now it'll be another 3 months and they'll have to stretch the split out even longer now then if they'd just done the angle people were ready for when she won the belt. Annoying.

Yeah they finally did away with the rankings, which I understand because it felt like they were barely adhering to them anyway. Like it became a running joke that FTR were the top ranked team for months and months yet they'd never get a title shot, teams lower ranked than them kept getting shots and AEW made no real attempt to explain this away.

I think near the beginning Cody said that "quality of opponent" was an implied metric for deciding rankings, sorta like college football. Which again is a cool idea in theory but in practice you can see how it would hamstring them.

Like during COVID they started running 16 Dark matches a week. And yeah, it was cool that Khan was helping giving a shitload of indy workers a check every week at a time when indies weren't running. But then you had guys who lose whenever they're on Dynamite show up with a chevron showing they had a career record of like 75-19. Looked clunky.

Are we ready to admit the rankings were a bad idea from the start?

Haven’t watched Dynamite yet, about too.

I heard AEW are adding another hour, sounds like some kind of talk show? Big ol meh from me, wrestling talk shows don’t interest me but seems like a show of support from the network which is interesting and really goes against a lot of the internet narrative.

Sounds like they’re trying to drum up interest more than anything. I don’t expect this to do well.

Could be a ploy to stretch AEW even further to dry it up so they can cancel too.

That's a consequence of not actually making with any sort of actual card hierarchy or building any other talent to see him square off against. Though I'm primarily talking about Hook, it applies to Jade as well. They're either pounding an endless parade of jobbers and clowns or they would immediately jump to who would be considered main event... with absolutely no road to climb up there. There is no true middle card, ironically making them stuck in the middle card. This would be like if in WCW, you had someone getting weekly wins on WorldWide, but then the "serious" talent on Nitro and such only consisted of guys like Sting or Goldberg or Scott Steiner. There's no Fit Finlays or Dean Malenkos or Filthy Animals to go up against to help climb the card... it's either Roadblock or Macho Man. You can't just jump from "Lightning Foot" Jerry Flynn to DDP and expect to be taken seriously.

Most of AEW's roster consists of nothing but pre-"Purple Rain" Prince Ieukeas and Blitzkreigs.

I dunno if you're trying to insult Blitzkrieg there but if you are then sir are a fuddy duddy.

Tony seems like he’s dead set on going the old school route of building up credible monsters and not butchering it seemingly on purpose like WWE has done over recent years. But he’s also scatterbrained and too influenced by current wrestling, consciously or not, to fully commit to it. So he just sticks with the squashes for too long.

Then there’s Wardlow who probably should still be doing squashes. It may not be ideal at this point but it’s preferable to what they’ve done with him.

Wardlow squashing jobbers would be much better than "I'm mad at Samoa Joe because he cut my hair and my dad died" for sure.

Has Tony Khan actually ever elevated someone with his booking?

Touché. Is that the match where they couldn’t open the door, so everyone just slipped through the bars?

I get what you're saying here but I recall the old school method being used to create monsters out of people who were believable as monsters. I don't remember it being used to elevate kids who weigh 130lbs dripping wet into world destroyers.

Wardlow’s booking should disqualify Tony from Booker of the Year contention immediately.

I said it was probably too early to split him and MJF when it happened. Why would you break these two up if the plan wasn’t to GO with Wardlow?

Well yeah, in Hook’s case it’s because he’s Taz’ kid and Tony was an ECW mark.

No botching of the booking of a monster will ever match Ryback though. I don’t think it can ever be topped if someone tries.

I dunno, they didn't really botch Rybacks build as much as drop the ball once he got there. But looking back at his behavior over the years I feel like maybe he might have brought some of it on himself. He seems quite a bit of a tool.

I still remember him slamming 2 (and I think sometimes even 3) dudes at one time. Was a hell of a thing to see.

Also I was talking with some folks on the book about Hook yesterday. It was in the context of some AEW marks bitching about Cody being pushed in WWE is just because of nepotism due to being Dustys boy and that TK doesn't play nepotism like that. So someone brings up Hook and they literally tried to explain how nepotism has nothing to do with him and it was just laughable to me. He won his dads imaginary title from one of his dads "clients" while his dad was on the mic talking about how awesome he is. If that's not nepotism then nothing is.

Nepotism.











Nepotism.

Feel like we're about due for one of those "hook disappears for 3 months and comes back and we act like his last story never happened again and have him squash some jobbers before we put him in another story we'll drop 3 weeks later"

Danhausen should attack Hook and beat him for the FTW title because Hook forgot all about him. Very neglected, very evil.

He’d have the rename it the (NC)TW Title.

I'd go with Frick The World or something but yours works too.

Dave Meltzer said he heard talk AEW might be adding another championship, the gist of it being an 'Interpromotional Championship' that can be defended on either AEW or ROH television.

More belts!

Man I was just thinking that AEW needed more titles. This still isn't enough but it's a step in the right direction!

Whatever your feelings about any of the guys I mentioned that were on the lower rungs of WCW, they were doing jobs to the actual stars at 10:05 am on Saturday morning. Blitzkreig included.

Then you get up to guys like Konnan or Glacier or Mortis (specifically while he was Mortis: still in the mask and being accompanied with James Van Den Berg), who would be the guy who beats all those guys but consistently counts lights for guys who "the championship comittee" are looking to push in any sort of meaningful way. They were the WorldWide gatekeepers.

On a side note, it's one of the reasons why I always "hated" Konnan. It was like his whole gimmick was talking shit and getting hit. Before I knew about how he was previously a big deal in Mexico or his previous stint as Max Moon or any of that shit, I was introduced to him being "stereotypical movie gangbanger" who had just enough intangible charisma to trash talk almost anyone, but then he does the job often in record time. I knew guys like that for real, there was no desire to get behind that on TV.

The only belts they need are the men’s and women’s world titles, tag and the TNT and TBS belts. I don’t mind midcard titles because it gives lesser guys/guys you want to build up something to have a program for.

The rest is just excess that doesn’t mean anything.

Also, push Willow Nightingale. The crowds love her, she’s got great music, she’s good in the ring and has charisma. Give her Jade’s first loss. Doesn’t have to be an emphatic win. It can be a hard fought match that Jade dominates, but Willow preservers and wins with a roll up to counter Jaded. Jade still looks strong and can move up to a sink or swim program against Hayter while Willow goes thru all the b level heels in the women’s division.

I have a dummy feeling that Saraya is getting the belt at Revolution. While I think that would be pulling the rug out from under Hayter, I also feel like Tony missed the fucking boat on her abs a red hot title feud with her and Britt. Granted they can still get there. But if Saraya does win, at least the belt will get consistent tv time again. I’d still hate it.