Danielson and Punk are nearly giants in AEW. thats my biggest gripe with their product. save a small few i dont believe anyone on the roster could win a bar fight with their mother's anal virginity on the line.

(punk least of all and them booking him like he's a tough guy out there working shoot holds is a fucking joke.)

punk should be working guys twice his size fighting from underneath. get his heart and never say die spirit over. then maybe you can add a mean streak to him and make him look credible again...

...but now? if you dont think the massive ppv buys on the ufc cards he was humiliated on dont give him stink (especially the 2nd bout where he lost to guy with no profights who was brought in specifically to job to him) youre a delusional mark

unless of course your only goal is to promote him to the IWC crowd. but if thats your goal you can skip paying punk, you already have that entire fanbase watching

I think he's more to the former rassling fans who liked him.... like me. Stopped watching rassling, don't care about UFC... yeah, I did see Punk get his ass kicked there, but that didn't stop me from initially being super excited to see him come back to rassling. I know the whole drill, suspension of disbelief.

AEW hasn't done much since his signing to keep me interested, besides from signing another entire guy who isn't Punk..... but
I told myself I'd give it until at least the next PPV....

of course signing punk is exciting. no one could question that. its a major event in the wrestling world. but this approach to his booking is very wwe. ingoring something so massive as his ufc run due to how embarrassing it is the most vince thing a company could possibly do and it benefits no one.

when you build punk up as a badass, with out him having to reestablish himself first, you bury whoever he's in there with. it lacks all credibility.

you're exactly right to say it violates the suspension of disbelief (even if dismissively.) its of critical importance.

the people who arent hanging off the end of punks dick do remember it. and while you may not want to explicitly dredge it up you can still acknowledge it implicitly. an angle, booked over a year or so, of asking the question in a variety of ways "does punk still got it?" is exactly what you need to organically build his credibility back, and this is the important part, without sacrificing that talent youre desperately trying to establish to him.

Booking psychology-wise, I do wonder about the subconscious detriments doing stuff like Bryan and Nick Jackson has on fans. Bryan’s a great wrestler, but do honest to god fans of him, specifically his personality, want to see him go to a B-tier promotion to beat up guys smaller than him? It doesn’t feel rewarding as a story to me.

It made total sense in a visual way for Bryan to kick the shit out of Nick Jackson too. But doesn’t that say something about why Nick Jackson is there? At that level? And why he doesn’t get the shit kicked out of him every week?

It’s just one of those things like wrestlers pretending the camera isn’t there, or their music hitting for run-ins, or their forced verbiage that adds to this impression that just shutters immersion.

A lot of people were frothing over that match. And in terms of what was done — the execution of the moves and such — I’m sure it was. But I think a lot of internet fans don’t have their finger on the pulse of what the average fan wants as much as they all think they do.


Maybe it’s his own stuff, but it could also just be the booking. He’s over as a face, so you wouldn’t turn him heel yet. But you also don’t need him the World Title picture, so you have him slumming it with guys underneath.

I think there’s a way to make a guy you aren’t pushing into the main events interesting, and without him smiling “I’m just happy to be here” all the time. But this booking is not known for its nuance.

You know what would have been funny? If he called out Daniel Garcia for a match on Rampage, and true to form, the jobber totally owned Punk.

I agree that the UFC stuff would affect him way more than most wrestling fans realize. There’s a certain type of fan that can ignore it. There’s another type that can’t. But even if you think you can, the more he kind of just floats around makes you think more and more about it.

Punk’s always had a hype vs. reality problem too. He had this in WWE. He makes a big splash raising a stink about how great he is, or implies how great wrestling is going to be with him in a top spot. Then he gets the chance and...what changes? And I’m not even really saying that as a knock on the guy. He is talented as fuck.

So much of what this company does seems to be to further endear themselves to an audience they don’t have to endear themselves to.

does darby allen benifit from doing a favor for the guy last seen getting toyed with for 3 rounds by a fighter with no pro wins and is so underwhelming that even in vctory in front of a very large buyrate cant get booked for his second profight anywhere on planet earth?

we know, for a complete fact, that cm punk could get rolled over by any random street thug 100% of the time. he was completely out wrestled, specifically, the entire fight. from a fighter his size.

most of the audience is larger than punk. mos of the audience could wax punks ass in their own minds. probably in actuality as well even. but the mind is the only thing that matters. and if you remove the IWC and their roughly 1 million viewship everyone knows this as fact

if youre bringing punk in the goal has to be to bring in eyeballs. is it unreasonable to address this elephant? does anyone benifit from ignoring it?

and for the love of god he should NEVER use a shoot hold. it completely implodes immersion

This is cogent reasoning, but to play devil’s advocate — do they get anything out of addressing it either? I think, in their minds, they’ve done the “Does Punk still have it?” thing, which the Darby match was probably intended to be.

Does bringing up he got his ass kicked in the UFC cool him off to even that crowd as well as to the people who would already be cold on him anyway.

I don’t think his film career has helped him either. He did this movie where he got ghost cum on his face or something. I’ve heard him spoken of as a shitty actor, lol.

That’s like inviting people to remember, lol.

i say unquestionably yes.

again not explicitly. you have him work from underneath in his matches. taking densely one sided heats with the hope spots being fighting from the bottom. very short hope spots, very brief comebacks. maybe some flash pins. tons of nearfalls. establish hlw hard it is to keep him down. this plays into what his defenders chirp when you bring up his ufc run. "he showed so much heart." theyve been selling you this angle themselves for years.

you don't want to put him under every night but you dont want him looking like he's better either. and certainly not have him running around puffing his chest talking about how he's gonna beat people up.

you want him desperately fighting like his life depends on it and preferably guys who are larger than him. you structure his matches like an 80s midsouth baby. the drama should be in the struggle.

if you, perhaps wisely, dont want to mention mma (and again perhaps you shouldnt) you simply build the angle around his long absence and his age. can i still keep up? this is a tried and true angle that has worked for 70 years.

the angle is he needs to prove he's the best in the world. to himself.

and the drama is maybe he's not.

(and culminates in some major baptismal event where he slays a dragon and from there we begin anew)

a kings road approach could also translate well to establish incremental growth

"finding himself again through the adversity"

Absolutely nobody does, and they look ever worse when they have an entire stable about how MMA fighters are better than the AEW roster. They are clearly trying to make fans think Dan Lambert is shooting, but he doesnt bring up the one thing that is concrete proof that real fighters are better than fake tough guys like CM Punk?

And the happy to be here stuff he is doing is bullshit too. This dude swore up and down he would NEVER return to pro wrestling. And the argument of "oh he didnt know there would be AEW" when he said it is also a bad counterpoint.

He could have went to NJPW, Impact, ROH, or anywhere else for 5 years before AEW. He could have went to AEW at the start. He didnt, he turned them down multiple times, dismissed them and even bjried them a few times. The reason, he wanted to go back to WWE. He choose to show up on a talk show for WWE, hoping it would lead to an offer to return. His agent asked, Vince had no interest.

Fast forward a year, he had his agent ask again, no interest from WWE again. Finally he accepted it, and took Tony Khan's money.

He failed at MMA, he failed on reality TV, he failed at being an actor, he failed at being a talk show host, he failed at being a comic book, writer, and he failed at crawling back to Vince.

Even if we want to forget about all of that, this guy pretended he was above pro wrestling for 7 years. He ignored fans who wanted him to return for 7 years. Now we are just supposed to believe he really loves pro wrestling and he is happy to be there? No, he went to AEW as a last resort, and despite all the times he spoke poorly about AEW and how they do business, he was lucky enough that the owner is such a mark that he could still work him for a big money deal.

It has been like 6 weeks and Rampage ratings are already a few hundred thousand lower than they were BEFORE he returned. I use Rampage because it is where he debuted, and it is where he has had his tv matches.

I think people were willing to watch his return, but aside from the "lets see his return", most people are not able to have continued interest because of his complete lack of credibility.

That’s good stuff. :y:

I’ve got no problem with CM Punk returning to wrestling when the timing is right for him and his bank account. It is true that he turned them down, but I put that on them.

My one of my biggest pet peeves in wrestling is when wrestling promotions make a deal out of other combat sports being better than they are. The wrestlers are supposed to be legit. Got no problem with MMA stars stepping into the wrestling world, but it should be presented like they are just changing disciplines, not coming into a world where they are automatically going to kick everyone’s ass, because real fighter > pro-wrestler.

If Dan Lambert wants to do a Jim Cornette impression, he should be doing heel manager Jim Cornette, not podcast critic Jim Cornette.

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They’re doing a special hour-long Buy In at 9 PM on YouTube ahead of Rampage. The two matches:

Lee Moriarty vs Bobby Fish, and....

....BRYAN DANIELSON VS MINORU FUCKING SUZUKI :eek:

Wow, Daniel Bryan already being demoted to YouTube

R.I.P.

Quite surprised Suzuki is hanging around the U.S. still.

Figured he'd be back in Japan with G1 just about to wrap up.

Lol. I remember when Punk did his press conference after his debut and someone asked if he would wrestle on the YouTube show and Tony just widened his eyes and shook his head no.

I guess it’s a good idea to throw a big match on YouTube for more people to see occasionally though.

he's been doing a bunch of indies and having a great time from what i've seen. makes sense if it's kind of a scouting trip, too.

more people will watch this youtube show than the one they've been doing. i would respond that way too at the thought of punk wrestling on dark

Forget the Youtube show, I remember Punk saying he wanted to work with all these new young guys, like Matt "Evan Bourne" Sydal, on his 4th match in :rofl:

I don’t want to hear about how this promotion doesn’t hot-shot. Way to give away a big New Japan match too. It’ll do them no good. The bottom is falling out of this thing.

Lol, TK has done another embarrassing interview where he’s implied the WWE has come after him, he won a “war” and he tried to get “Watch Your Wrestling” over as a thing (or “WYW”). Holy desperate.

Oh, he also said he “chose” the Rampage time slot.

All this programming is hurting everyone. That and the quality of it, but the sheer amount of time you have to fill dilutes the impact of even the stuff that can be argued to work. Rampage, Elevation, Dark, Rhodes to the Top, ffs it’s too much. How many hours of content is that a week? This has been a WWE problem too, obviously.

It’s not coincidence there is less interest in wrestling as there is more wrestling available.

The ratings (albeit an archaic and flawed system) suggest this is the case.

Ain't nobody watching Elevation/Dark except the real die hards who watch everything anyways. They are definitely not being made to attract new eyes or attention.

Exactly. They are bonus pre-show matches for the live Dynamite crowds, or people who want something else to do at Universal. During 2020, it was a chance to give back to the wrestling community by getting a shitload of out of work indy wrestlers a payday at a time that indies weren't running.

Those shows have their own angles going on but very little, if any, of it carries into the main two shows. It's for the diehards and new fans aren't expected to be watching it.

TK announced Hangman vs Omega set for Full Gear, Omega finally goes to lose the AEW title

Of course not, but generating unimportant content isn’t exactly good for manufacturing an urgent image for yourself.

Fuck yes! Post PPV dynamite I believe is in Virginia. It’s time for a new sheriff in AEW town.

Wish AEW was on tonight......

It's Wednesday.... isn't it on?

I think they need to keep Omega as champ. Hangman has like zero momentum

No it's on Saturday this week and next week cause of the NHL on TNT...