NoFistsJustFlips

Christian has only had the TNT title like two months now. Don't get confused and lump Luchasaurus' reign as his lol. So to answer this I don't see either reign as anything that couldn't have existed without the titles they have. Christian could have the exact same Patricarchy story without any title involved. OC could have worked a bunch of TV matches without a title and done the same worn down story with the big Mox challenge. To emphasize the point a bit, what would have changed if the titles were swapped? Could Christian's story been the same with the International Title? Yes. Could OC's story have been the same with the TNT Title? Yes. It's all interchangeable and undefined. If you have titles you have to give them purpose for them to have a meaning to a story. Without purpose they all blend together and don't mean very much. It's not just more psychologically satisfying, it's necessary to tell coherent stories. If I had to go back 12 months and scrap one, I'd scrap The International Title. You run OC's same story with The TNT Title and your run Christian's same story with either The FTW Title or ROH TV Title. Or vice verse. Because they're all interchangeable and meaningless. Doing that doesn't change one single story beat in either story. Because the titles themselves aren't essential to the story. Any title fills the role equally. Which is kind of the problem I'm trying to point out. JCP had three separate style stories going because the three titles were different. AEW run the same style stories with every belt. Out of all the secondary titles in the whole entire company, The ROH Pure Title is the only one with a definable identity. And that helps greatly in telling the story of WHY the guys go after that title go after it. It's the technical wrestling purist's title to show they are the best at technical wrestling. That's what titles need. A thematic purpose to exist beyond 'oh look a new belt'.

I'm writing this message from the future, Thursday to be exact, and they do now lol.

Between ROH & AEW there's 8 men's singles titles. That's way too many. Each brand should have a world title, a mid-card title, and mayyybbbeee some sort of non-traditional gimmick title. In ROH's case World, TV, & Pure is fine. AEW should be World, International, and FTW which should take on no DQ hardcore rules to set it apart OR have the TNT Title but have it take on gimmicked TV Title rules like 10min time limits which would elad it to being a more sprint / lucha oriented title. Can anyone even decipher what the hierarchy is? What's more important International or TNT? Is Continental better than those? Worse? Even if you disagree with there being too many titles, I would hope you'd at least agree there needs to be a better defined hierarchy. In the old NWA JCP days you knew World title was most important, US was secondary because it made you #1 contender, TV was after that because it may not be as important as the other two but you're on TV every week making more money if you win. The way everything is presented outside of the AEW World Title is basically 'here's a belt, these two guys want it' without any specified stakes or purpose or implications for what title means what. They are the utter definition of props.

We all agree AEW has hit a rough patch. Everyone has their own ideas on what will help dig them out of the hole they're in. It's pretty obvious TK's plan is... moarrrrr beltsssss. Let me put on my counting hat for a second. AEW Titles (9) -Men's World Title -International Title -TNT Title -Continental Title -FTW Title -Women's World Title -TBS Title -World Tag Titles -World Trios Titles ROH Titles (7) -Men's World Title -Pure Title -Men's TV Title -Women's World Title -Women's TV Title -World Tag Titles -World Six Man Titles Non-AEW Titles on TV often (5) -AAA Mega Title -AAA Tag Titles -NJPW TV Title -NJ Strong Title -IWGP Tag Titles Dude. AEW / ROH have 16 belts now. 16 regularly defended and canon titles. Then there's also the ones often defended. We're up to 21. And that's not even all of the outside titles used this year. 21 sets of belts is way too fucking many. None of the belts mean anything outside of the AEW men & women's World Titles. More belts is not the answer. Because if everyone is a champion than no one is a champion. It's just crazy that there are that many belts rotating on the different shows. It drives my OCD crazy and annoys me to no end. I think this ties in to the greater discussion being had in the thread too because there has got to be fans out there that don't follow super closely and every time they tune in there's new belts and new champions. That can be off-putting to viewers. There's this uncontrolled sloppy chaos vibe that TK's booking puts out. And this ties into that. As does starting and stopping stories. It's all connected and needs worked on. You shouldn't be adding more belts. You should be merging belts and giving structure to what purpose they serve.

I'm still not sure how you fire a coach that's coached 15+ seasons and never had a losing one. They've basically been beaten by math most seasons they didn't get to the playoffs. I don't like The Steelers much, but I do like Mike Tomlin a lot. He's not some scheming genius. But he's just a really solid and accountable dude that always gets winning seasons out of pretty bad rosters. And this roster is one of the worst. They've always been carried by defensive units but you have to have competent offensive play to compliment it and they just don't. And haven't for a few years. That feels like a GM issue more than coaching.

This is my own personal theory, not backed up by any facts yet. Just a gut feeling I feel safe throwing out there based on what's been reported. $34 million in losses is the estimate. My theory (again just a theory) is if Collision wasn't a thing that gets them to a profitable year. They doubled their production & travel costs by doing a second live show. Think about that. Buying the transmission time. Renting double the buildings. Hauling the equipment and paying employees to do the setup. Double the plane tickets for talent. A second live show that does not move tickets like the other show. A second live show that does not drive ads like the other show. A second show that gave them cause to expand their roster and keep signing more than they need. And on a slightly different note, the fiscal irresponsibility of ROH doesn't help the problem. The AEW company is owned by Tony, Shahid, and possibly minority stake by WBD and maybe others. ROH is own solely by TK. He's using AEW books to rent buildings he's using for his own company to run. I know it all blurs together but it's kind of shady when you do the digging. ROH is getting free accompaniment by piggy backing off of AEW's rent buys & production costs. And the bloated roster doesn't really have a discernible split in talent expenses. It appears to all fall on AEW's books since it's all shared talent. So long story short scrap ROH as a brand, scrap Collision as a show, and you're golden now. As is, even a 2x rights increase I don't see them getting to a profitable year. Not at the current infrastructure & spending.

I don't know how all the math shakes out but The Giants technically being only one game back of a playoff spot is mind blowing. Tommy DeVitto baby As it stands now I'll be at The Giants vs Saints game this weekend. I am pumped that there's still meaning to it because a couple weeks ago it was looking like an enhancement match on an episode of Superstars in 1987.

Well you're not wrong lol. I don't believe in becoming a wrestler as a hobby. This is a business for professionals. No not everyone is going to make it. But anyone in the business should be striving to make a living off of this. So if WWE isn't personally something he's striving for... then like why is he in the business? That's ny basis for why I think this is so dumb. Maybe he's got a bad look & body now. But there's plenty of guys that got good got serious and transformed their bodies. He's shooting himself in the foot if his line of thinking is 'well WWE wouldn't want me anyways'. What WWE want can change on a whim. Don't limit one of the biggest sources of income in the industry just because this mark lawyer wants to have a story to tell on a Cornette podcast.

So I'm very much for workers making as much money as possible. I'm also anti cooperate entities for the most part. But this trademark issue is some bad business. The trademark owner is basically getting manipulated by Cornette crony Stephen New. That dude just wants to have a story to sit back and laugh with Cornette about. He isn't taking the worker's best interest in mind. You wouldn't send a cease & desist or an injunction making them blur it if you were trying to make a deal. You'd allow them to keep using it while you negotiate. Basically this Huffmanly kid is gonna end up black balled from WWE for the way this is being handled. Even if he comes to an agreement with WWE they will hold a grudge over the trouble it caused. Just a monumentally bad faith way to handle it if you're trying to look out for the worker's best interests. He may still get a good payout but will never be considered for a job there ever.

Wonder how the naming conventions go. If XFL is the brand name ala NFL, would the conferences be the XFC and the.... UFC lol. Have they mentioned anything about the merged companies name yet?

TK as The Devil would be the worst possible thing that could happen. Listen Austin vs McMahon was one of the best stories of all time. McMahon is a God tier heel. But the end result of that run is he basically forever made WWE the default heel in all stories moving forward. The repercussions are still felt today. Turning the owner heel turns the company heel. In a time where there's a little uneasiness about the product & the future that's the worst reveal possible. If TK was as great of a performer as Vince maybe there'd be short term gain. But that man should never be an on air character ever.

One more interesting Punk related thing I noticed. It's the most social thing ever blah blah blah. WWE is tagging his titter in everything. Casual fans who may not even be aware of AEW that click on his page are gonna see sooooo many AEW promotion tweets. Everything is still up. He hasn't posted since he had to have the foot surgery. But it's all positivity and promotion for AEW. WWE may be inadvertently exposing a lot of new people to AEW by tagging him so much / not asking for him to remove all the AEW promotion. Just find that interesting.

Punk in it for the money is an interesting thought. Because he's portrayed the public persona of it's not about the money at all it's about his principles. Like he was making tippy top guy money in WWE in 2014. The money wasn't enough because the product was soul crushing to him. I think I'm so down on that promo because it was so disingenuous. Because it bums me out that he's sold out. And not in the general sense of how we talk about sellouts normally. Slightly changing to fit somewhere and make more money. I'm talking about a whole sale rejecting who he is as a person just to spite AEW. He went to AEW to prove WWE was wrong and he was right. And somewhere along the way him being aggrieved by AEW made him do a 180 and decide actually everything I ever said about WWE is true but I still don't care I'm gonna suffer through it to fuck AEW over. The PG Punk shots people were saying about him in AEW never fit. Out of the gate he was taking shots at WWE and how it wasn't pro wrestling. Out of the gate last night he was full on company shill sunshine & rainbow overly sugary sweet and it clashed with the last 20 years of who he himself has presented himself as. Yuck.

Vanilla ass Disney PG Punk. No thanks.

4. That's how many shows it would take for Ian to mess with his pay or flights and he'd be outta there lol

I understand the grander point you're trying to make but after seeing how he's run ROH it's pretty clear he'd just create Elite Club if he couldn't get legitimate TV for AEW. Is that sustainable? For a normal person no. But TK is a billionaire. AEW will exist as long as TK wants it to exist. This is his baby. This is his first really big lone business venture. He's not pulling the plug unless it somehow drains him of a significant portion of his wealth. We are all in agreement AEW's product is down. But they sold 80k tickets to a single event. All this doom and gloom and pontificating about a war eradicating them is crazy. Their highest paid attendance is more than TWICE the biggest paid attendance WCW ever had. My final point is this, TNA. They've existed for 20+ years. With and without TV. If a small hillbilly carry turned semi professional Canadian carry can last two decades I think AEW's future is pretty secure.

I don't agree with that at all. WCW didn't go out of business because only one national pro wrestling company can exist. There's competition across all kinds of entertainment spectrums. Marvel & DC is the easiest one. WWE is more popular & profitable. But both companies are healthy & backed by billions. AEW will exist as long as Tony wants it to exist. Will it ever overtake WWE? Doesn't seem likely. But that doesn't mean they will have to close because of it.

WWE has been safe vanilla Disney wrestling for awhile now. So I'm pretty intrigued to see if Punk sparks some danger or edge into the product. I think he'll be okay politically at least for a year or so. Nothing motivates that man like a grudge and I think he feels like the AEW Tony Khan grudge is the biggest one of his career now. Sure WWE fired him on his wedding day, but that mean Cowboy guy got to make a tame worker's rights joke at him & Luke Perry's kid had the audacity to say "that's real glass". The horror lol. This does make me wonder about the opposite world we could have gotten. Had TK thrown all of his support behind Punk and lost The Elite to WWE. I feel like that's what went wrong. TK wouldn't pick a side. He played both sides until it was too late and everybody resented him. A motivated Elite showing up in WWE would have been fun. Punk getting more control to mold AEW in his image to compete with his enemy would have been fun. To me this is the least fun outcome. The Elite stay in AEW and meander around. Punk goes to WWE and has to tone himself down to fit into the Disney product. Lose / lose outcome here. But I'm still gonna watch Raw for the first time in years just to see how much of a leash they give him on the mic. I hope it works out and Punk gets to end his career with a few positive fun years at the end.

Losses help your draft pick spot, I get that. But I feel like picking up a few wins is a good thing for the current Giant's coaching regime. Those first 8 weeks Daboll was catching so much heat. The team was looking dead in the water to a point it may have had a negative mental effect. So I am more than good with them trying to win as many as you can. Save some face and pride for this coaching staff who just had a run of bad luck and try again next year. If you realllyyyyy want one of those top two QB picks you can always go and get them with a trade.

Ya and it's made worse with the design of The Forum too. The hardcam shot wasn't packed with people for rows and rows and rows like normal. It has that weird close concourse with curtains. Made it look like there was a small crowd too. I think that was a big reason why they kept pulling back and going to wide shots to show the audience in full.

You're making it harder than it has to be. TK also could have just made White give the belt back to MJF six weeks ago too if we look at it from your point of view. The thing is you have to look at it from the perspective TK isn't an authority figure. He's a match maker. He's not there to hand down punishments or "fix" anything. Swerve broke into a dudes house and intimidated the dude's kid and it was allowed to air on TV. Swerve broke into Nick Wayne's house and stabbed him with window glass and it as allowed to air on TV. This is all under the same umbrella. He's not going to strip MJF of the title unless he can't make the advertised PPV match. We didn't get far enough to say there was no replacement. It's entirely possible had Cole not come out, the "story" was White is being awarded the belt on a forfeit and defending it against someone new later. You reference the Punk thing but Punk didn't get the belt taken away because he didn't miss a scheduled PPV defense. He got hurt on a TV weeks away fro a PPV, so a match maker can make a new match with time to think and plan. TK ain't there to lay down the law in kayfabe (real life either actually lol). In kayfabe he's there to make money. MJF & Adam Cole make him money. It's entirely logical (to me) that he'd afford them extra wiggle room to make sure he keeps making money out of them. Same way legit crazy pro athletes get away with nonsense. Adam Cole is Ochocinco. MJF is TO. Punk was Antonio Brown tho, so he just had to go.

A few other thoughts. Hangman and swerve fucking knocked it out of the park. I loved that match so so much. The violence. The storytelling. The spectacle. I have been super high on Swerve for awhile now. I hope he gets a noticeable move up the ladder here. I don;t know the hierarchy of the titles outside of the World Title. I don't feel like he's factored into the World Title plans currently but man they should pivot and get him a run. They Black Scorpion-ed themselves. When the devil first appeared I'm certain it was planned to be Cole. But Cole got hurt and the story has changed. And they definitely don't know the ending to the story as of now. I never expected a Devil reveal here. But a little surprised there wasn't any story interaction at all with it. Ospreay was obviously the only person the signing could be, like I said earlier in the week. The very specific wording TK used "someone AEW fans are very familiar with" clearly meant someone who had already wrestled for them. So people making all the guesses where just not paying enough attention. With that tho, I'm surprised he got such a pop coming out. Was such a forgone conclusion I'm genuinely surprised the audience was good with it. There's too many belts. What shall we do about it? Add another belt! What the fuck is a Continental Champion. Is it higher or lower than All-Atlantic. Is it higher or lower than International. Why is it getting grouped with AEW's developmental world title & New Japan's developmental world title. Is it officially recognized by NJ Strong or NJPW? Does calling a grouping of developmental world titles and a presumably mid-card AEW the triple crown make any sense at all? Just give the not-G1 winner a World Title Shot or something. This is confusing and weird and there's ALREADY TOO MANY BELTS. Gah. Fun show.

I've seen so many people complaining about the booking here and people don't understand the nuance. Gong over most people's heads. So let's break it down. MJF got hurt in / immediately following a match. He didn't get jumped in the back. It wasn't some "out of bounds" in terms of kayfabe thing. There's no impetus to be allowed to run someone over with a car at an airport and become champion because of it. MJF doesn't have to work twice. He can forfeit the ROH tag belts to focus on the AEW world title but he does it because the titles mean a lot to their friendship. A sacrifice for their friendship. So the potential consequences of that are on him. Not AEW, in the kayfabe sense. Cole didn't work the match because he's hurt. Not that he wasn't allowed to work it by AEW. That he's hurt and chose not to. AEW let MJF use a replacement. MJF gets hurt and can't wrestle. Not that he wasn't allowed to work by AEW. He couldn't because it was so bad he had to go to the hospital. AEW let MJF use a replacement (same thing they allowed for the tag title match). Adam Cole is hurt and didn't want to do it, but because the world title means so much to MJF and he made him that promise, he decided to try and work the match. A sacrifice for their friendship. There's no logic inconsistencies with the story. People are projecting things into the story. AEW never said Adam Cole isn't allowed to work one match but is allowed to work the other match. From AEW's perspective he's allowed to wrestle, he just is hurt and letting MJF do it without him. MJF doesn't have to work twice. They both made the choices they did because the friendship means so much to them.

I don't know why I am pitching this because I hate brand splits. But the only way to make multiple shows relevant is a brand split. Would WWE's viewership be as healthy as it is if all three shows were the same rosters and mostly the same identities? WWE has 7 first run hours. But it really doesn't feel like it. Because Raw has 3, Smackdown has 2, NXT has 2. You know the pool of talent that will possibly appear and which stories cold be focused on. When WWE killed the original brand split for a bit from 2014 - 2016 it made both shows feel less than (other than NXT which really thrived by having a different roster & format). Less titles were great. But 5 hours of thea main roster felt like a chore. And made Smackdown feel so irrelevant. That's kind of how AEW feels to me. They also technically have 7 hours of first run TV as well (counting ROH), but it all feels the same. It's a muddied. There's no identities. If done correctly I really think a brand split is the answer. Dynamite, Collision, ROH Rampage. 3 distinct rosters. 3 distinct set of stories. An A brand, a B brand, and a developmental brand. Yes it's similar to WWE's format. But if AEW is insistent that they need this much content you have to give purpose to that content. Scrap Battle of The Belts completely. Extend Rampage to two hours if necessary. Give it the real sports feel WWE never has. Make Dynamite Jericho & The Elite's hangout with a more WWE like sports entertainment presentation. Make Collision the show that's a gritty no nonsense brand anchored by BCC, HOB, & LFI kinda like 1992 WCW. ROH can still be the pure sport band. Rankings and handshakes lea heavy into technical wrestling One men's World Champion. He can appear on all 3 brands. One Women's World Champion. She can appear on all 3 brands. One set of World Tag Champions. They can appear on all 3 brands. One set of World Trios Titles. They can appear on all 3 brands. Dynamite gets the Men's International Title & Women's TBS Title. Collision gets The Men's TNT Title & Women's International Title. ROH Rampage gets The Men's Pure Champion & The Women's Pure Champion. Purpose. Parity. Identities. My DMs are open TK. Let's talk.

For once, last minute fantasy tinkering worked in my favor. Pulled Burrow in favor of Purdy about 10 minutes before kickoff. That hand injury looks like it's gonna linger tho.