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What does it say about the "Booker of the year" that his program only does a decent number of viewers because a former employee is going to be on the show? The quarter hour drop offs were alarming, especially since the Joe vs Dustin match was good.
What does it say about Tony Khan and his booking? What I have said for years now, he’s a terrible booker who is devoid of the skills needed for the position and shouldn’t have the job. Airing that video was just so, so weak, on many fronts. And the Dustin vs. Joe match held up better than the Will Ospreay vs. Kyle Fletcher debacle from last month so the rating could have been worse than it was.
As a staunch supporter of AEW, I have found myself no longer being as supportive. But I think I started to see the signs a long time before anyone else and it goes back to AEW Dark. At first, I loved the show. They had some good matches. Then COVID happened and I enjoyed it because it was helping to save the Indy wrestler. But then I noticed TK saying that AEW Dark had a stacked show of 14 matches, etc. I’d get excited. Stacked means awesome. And all I saw were long squash matches. Jon Moxley took a long long time to beat this one guy whose name I can’t remember but was used in Moxley’s feud with Brian Cage. I was fast forwarding and I felt bad cause the match took like 10 or 15 minutes and I thought I might be missing a banger. But as more and more wrestling got good and I had to be picky, I dropped Dark. All it was were competitive matches with obvious winners. That philosophy has spread, first into Rampage, then Collision and now Dynamite. I fast forward much more than ever. I get TK wants a sports-based product and the last place team sometimes beats the first place team, but he never does that. He sticks to the wrestling formula except he makes the obvious take so much longer to reach. Danielson will beat Archer. Archer never wins anything. Why is it taking so long to get to the conclusion. No one wants to see that. And I think it all started with Dark but our desperation during the pandemic masked it. What do you think?
I think you must be a new reader because I was saying these things well before you noticed. The pattern of where AEW was going was clear for years now and it wasn’t good. As I mentioned above, Tony is a terrible booker. He has zero idea how get over characters and storylines and then present the product to the masses. He books to a niche section of the overall fan base and he will keep his company a by far secondary product if he doesn’t change the way that he does things. He likes to call AEW a challenger brand. The only challenge right now is to keep from losing more viewers, WWE doesn’t sweat them at all.
Does Tony realize how stupid he comes off by celebrating that Dynamite got up to 819 thousand viewers, which has been pretty much give or take a few thousand the normal viewership for last 6 months?
I would guess no he doesn’t. Bragging about being average isn’t a good look but like his Uncle Dave, self awareness isn’t his strong suit.
What in the world is Will Ospreay thinking? His comment on Dynamite was stupid and sexist, because why would anyone be offended by being with a beautiful strong woman like Stephanie to begin with? Made worse by the fact that Triple H is beloved by most wrestling fans these days and has set the business on fire. And then he tweets more and everybody dunks on him. What is he thinking?? Is everybody in that company a petty child?
These kind of things show where people like Will Ospreay and Tony Khan are thin-skinned, crybaby dopes. Did Triple H mean Ospreay when he mentioned people who didn’t want to grind? Maybe, but he also had culpable deniability if he even cared to address who it was about. Meanwhile, Will gets his panties in a bunch and lashed out on Dynamite (and I should say I have no idea if it was all him or a collaborative effort with Tony, it doesn’t matter, he said it) about the comment. It did nothing to advance anything, it just made Will look like a dope, and that’s sad since he’s an excellent wrestlers. What made it comical to me was that the putz actually thinks that he is “grinding” because he flies back and forth from England to work one day a week. With that comment, he proved that even if Triple H wasn’t talking about him, he is right about Ospreay! He doesn’t know what grinding is. He knows what a cherry deal is! Will should have laughed at the comment. Instead, by being a whiny crybaby, he showed me that he is not cut out to work in the big time. He made the right choice going to AEW. He fits in there with some of the other Lilliputians on that roster. And if you don’t know what Lilliputians are, google the term.
What was the story with Dave Meltzer and Mike Johnson from the WrestleMania’s press conference?
I am only answering this question because Dave Meltzer seems to have some sort of issue where he can’t understand the process of being a reporter so I will explain it to him here, and it will go right over his head as many things do. First, let me say that since it wasn’t an AEW show, Meltzer didn’t actually come to Philadelphia for WrestleMania. He sent a surrogate from his site instead. Even though he wasn’t there, Meltzer definitively “reported” that Mike was not invited to the first night WrestleMania press conference. Did Meltzer reach out to Mike and ask what happened with him, like any GOOD reporter would do if they were making a mention of someone in a story? No, he didn’t. Instead he just went with “what he was told” and wrote a story and named Mike in it. Had he reached out, Mike would have explained what actually happened. I should note that Meltzer has reached out to Mike many times in the past, including one time fairly recently where he repeatedly asked Mike to confirm something that would present AEW in a better light. Since it wasn’t true, Mike didn’t confirm what Meltzer wanted confirmed. Of course this time, when it was a story that would present WWE in a bad light if it were true, Meltzer did not reach out to Mike, which again is one of the basic tenets of journalism, before including his name in his “report”. After Meltzer name-checked him, Mike took to social media to state what really went down at WrestleMania. I will give you one guess what happened next. Yep, Meltzer THEN reached out to Mike and asked what his issue was and why Mike didn’t come to him first. I can’t make this up. So, Dave Meltzer didn’t do his job as a reporter, misreported what happened and then, apparently, thought that Mike Johnson was the Amazing Kreskin and should have known what Meltzer was going to “report” before it was “reported” and then come to to Meltzer privately when it wasn’t correct. The sad thing about what I just wrote is that it’s 100 percent true. I can’t say I am shocked though. The way I saw Meltzer “report” things three decades ago is the reason that I got into this business in the first place. The truth matters, almost as much as a clean office.
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