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It’s pretty obvious they want to grow NXT largely away from WWE and without going too hard or hot-shotting. It seems to me that they are weary about stirring up the fan-base about being “unfair” and creating more of an underdog culture around AEW. It’s pretty obviously slow and steady with them, which is why it is absolute bullshit when Meltzer says stuff like “Vince wanted them dead.” Yeah, the Dusty Tag Classic was really going to achieve that.
The ratings for AEW and NXT are both so low and so comparable that it’s really a stalemate. The way you say “they can’t beat AEW” has this taint of AEW being some sort of juggernaut or something. It’s a distant, distant 3rd/joint 4th in the race, isn’t growing an audience and is a mess when it comes to coherent stories. They’re thriving off the hardcore fan-base that are going to have their dicks in their hands whenever WWE stock goes down and are going to support AEW no matter how much they suck because they’re not WWE and still have new car smell.
Double or Nothing II hasn’t sold out (yet). The buildings aren’t selling. The PPV retention rate between Double or Nothing and All Out was something like 30%. They’ve lost about 500k potential viewers. Any criticism you have for WWE can apply to them. A lot of the time they even act like a more bush league version of WWE.
It’s not completely cold with the passionate fan-base yet, but it is cooling. When that final straw of goodwill finally snaps, it will be just another TNA. It’s sad, because someone really could come along and challenge Vince right now, but it’s not going to be a promotion that treats Glacier like a legend.
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