Credit: WWE.com
The great lie of AEW was that they were going to give us this sports based presentation of wrasslin. They are giving us silly indie wrasslin. I watched Extreme Rules last night and it could be summed up with Solomonster's intro to his live review after the show. It was a show full of controversial or questionable finishes where you're left wondering who won or what happened. Imagine a basketball game ending and you're not sure which team won. Those are not good finishes.
I feel like AEW, which I don't watch but do follow and want to do well... burns through potential feuds and talents too quickly. I know that everybody can't be Asuka or Goldberg and be unbeaten for years BUT AEW keeps presenting wrasslers as monsters like Cage and Archer and then in their first big match they lose. They don't have a ton of big names or matches they could do. I want them to start stretching things out and building more long term. Again, I want AEW to do well as a wrasslin fan. WWE does not pay me therefore I have no loyalty to them or desire to be THAT guy who roots for them to put everyone else out of business.
A delicious irony of the pandemic is WWE can't pay Brock Lesnar enough to leave his farm and likely they can't get any other old wrasslers to snatch TV time from the younger ones. The ratings and viewership are at TNA levels now and it's all their fault. The Attitude Era was hotshotting and juice. I think they need to hotshot for a month or two. People need to cuss and get color and get violent. People watch wrasslin because they want to see violence. Hotshotting for too long is bad because you numb the audience to everything. Blood would mean something in WWE because they haven't done much of it. But if they did it too much, it would become meaningless.
Speaking of things becoming meaningless: I think wrasslin promotions have too many championship matches. What I mean is, the money in championship matches is the promise of a title change. So when you have filler throwaway challengers like Dolph Ziggler where you KNOW they're not going to win... it waters down the belt itself and the importance of the title of champion. You look back at the championship reign and think "they had one meaningful feud, if that... And a bunch of filler with people who had no momentum." I feel like sometimes you could just do video packages and promos for the champion to have a presence on shows or a tag match or something but every PPV doesn't need a title defense.
I want wrasslin to be great again. I want things appropriately built up. I want it to be presented seriously like an actual sports league but better since it is a work.