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According to Kevin Nash, Kevin Sullivan said “Wrestlemania 14 was the day WCW Hit the Iceberg and started to sink” and believed there would no more upward momentum for the company. With Sullivan in mind, would AEW’s Iceberg Moment be 2022 when CM Punk broke his foot and had to leave Tony to his own devices? With Punk gone (plus no MJF, or Danielson for the time being) Tony went full Indy/PWG booking for Forbidden Door and his nonsensical style of booking hasn’t changed since, just the amount of people in the audience and watching at home have changed. Before that Tony had 2-Contracts-Advisor CM Punk and EVP Cody Rhodes in his ear and that’s when AEW had all the upwards momentum.
You could definitely make that argument and easily defend that position, for sure.
If you line up all the WWE Titles against the AEW Titles, do CM Punk’s Family Bracelet and Roman Reigns’s Ula Fala get to join in with WWE’s Belts? Because they actually mean more than most of AEW’s belts?
I think if you asked wrestling fans that aren’t brand partial, they would tell you that Punk’s bracelet and the Ula Fala are very, very important to their respective storylines. I think those fans would see more value in those items than in many of AEW’s Titles, yes.
Let’s say, instead of all the Elite smear campaigns done to set CM Punk off and determine the eventual fate of Punk’s AEW run… Matt, Nick, Tony Khan, and the entire locker room go fully on board behind CM Punk (aka “Phil the Booker” as he jokingly called himself to Ariel Helwani). Obviously AEW would be in better shape under a competent booker but what kind of growth could the company had achieved had CM Punk been “running things” in the past 2 years since their 2022 goodwill? We saw how exponentially WWE grew once Triple H took the book.
Obviously this is all hypothetical but I would bet significantly that, at worst, AEW would have kept its audience steady if Punk or any other good booker was in charge of the product. To your point, you just have to look at how WWE has changed once Paul Levesque replaced the really bad booker that was Vince McMahon. As mentioned above, the booking of stories matters to most fans. Selling matters to most fans. Move after move for the sake of doing moves matters to a smaller portion of the overall audience and thus limits the growth that AEW can achieve and in fact has their audience numbers going in the wrong direction.
Now that Roman Reigns is back, and Paul Heyman is playing coy on when he’s returning should the audience starting chanting their chanting to “WE WANT HEYMAN!!!!”
I’d be fine with it if they did! I would bet that Heyman will get a huge reaction when he returns and when he does, I am sure it will be in an impactful way.
Why was Darby in the Anarchy In The Arena match? He looks extremely beat up and considering he got hit by a bus 2 weeks ago he shouldn't be anywhere but his couch?
Yes, in a sane world that would be the case but in Tony Khan’s AEW, where no one sells anything, getting hit by a bus is a transition spot.
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