Want more wrestling news, rumors, and results? Be sure to visit PWInsider.com and PWInsiderXtra.com.
You can send us questions for the PWInsider.com Q and A at pwinsider@gmail.com.
While I am enjoying various aspects of AEW, such as: in-depth character profiles, blood, and not booking endless rematches, what happened to the alleged sports based presentation? Did they drop it? How does Jake Hager get a world title match with only a 2-0 record? Darby Allen is considered the hot new act, but his record is a mediocre .500, while Sammy Guevara is highly touted with a decidedly losing record. Finally, there was no mention of how a wrestler's record or ranking came into play when determining the 8 wrestlers who were selected for the TNT Championship tournament. Where is the "sports based" presentation? Certainly not in the Jericho - Hardy skits! Outside of showing wrestler's records during entrances and occasionally mentioning rankings, I don't see a sports based presentation. Am I missing something?
It hasn’t been done during the audience-less era and I am soooooo thankful. It’s one of the things about AEW I really hated. Pro Wrestling is not a legitimate sport so I don’t want to see it presented that way. The records, for example, hamstring the booking of talents for just the reasons you mentioned. I like the show so much better as a pro wrestling show so I hope that stuff is in their past.
On RAW last night they proclaimed "Becky Lynch returns to RAW next week to confront the women’s MITB winner". Isn't that a spoiler for one of the RAW women winning the MITB match on Sunday since the rules are the winner challenges their own brand's champion, thus automatically negating an SD win?
The winner of the briefcase gets to choose who they want to fight for the Title so they could have Becky could have said she was seeing if whoever won wanted to fight her. Now we know that it didn't matter who won, she was going to be the new champion.
I know the WWE Hall of Fame is always just speculation because there are no known criteria for entering it. With that said, the speculation game can be fun. What do you think about WWE inducting Paul Heyman into next year's class? It appears that they sometimes wait to induct superstars until Wrestlemania is in the region where the wrestling star is most popular. If that's true, Heyman may have to wait until after Wrestlemania makes its way through LA, Florida (presumably as a redo for this year), and then back to the NY/Philly area. If that's true, I'd rather Heyman go into the HOF in 2021. What are your thoughts?
I think whenever Heyman gets inducted he will deserve it and the hardcore fans that are there will love seeing him go in.
I have found AEW much more enjoyable to watch than WWE or NXT during this no-audience era of wrestling. What are some things that AEW does that WWE doesn't that enhance their presentation above the level of their competitor? For example, how much of a difference does the noise from the 5-10 people around the ring in AEW make to you, or have the storylines been more compelling, etc?
The two things I have loved that AEW has done, which WWE hasn’t, are having noise from the crowd and giving us fun aspects of the show. Chris Jericho’s commentary has been great. So has The Bubbly Bunch. They acknowledge, on air, what the world is going through. WWE, meanwhile, avoids mention the pandemic at all costs. They keep presenting the show as if a crowd is there, which is mistake. It comes across as sterile. And they are doing NOTHING to put smiles on anyone’s faces, which just makes Raw and Smackdown repetitive and dull.
What is the role of the head referee? Does it make the head referee (Aubrey Anderson in this case) look bad when we have seen so many miscues and inconsistencies regarding refereeing in AEW, even if she is not involved in many of those mistakes? And how much of a difference would bringing in an experienced vet such as Mike Chioda as the new head referee make with respect to the quality and consistency of AEW referees as a whole?
The head referee doesn’t actually call the matches. That’s up to the booker and producers. They are the ones that need to give the refs the cues that they need. I don’t blame her in the least.
You can send us questions for the PWInsider.com Q and A at pwinsider@gmail.com.
If you enjoy PWInsider.com you can check out the AD-FREE PWInsider Elite section, which features exclusive audio updates, news, our critically acclaimed podcasts, interviews and more by clicking here!
Bang On Casino
