Wrestling Thread

American Dragon

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For those who don’t think I ever criticize AEW, here is my thread of current dislikes.

1. I’ve been tired of The Death Riders for about 18 months now and still am. They should have turned on Mox last year. Now they are heels about 75% of the time and face with Ospreay the rest of the time. Don’t like that.

2. Don’t like that the best wrestler in the world needs help from a group to get even better. No one wants to see Ospreay bust out submission moves. He’s amazing. Let him be amazing on his own and forget about a random armbar

3. I don’t like the timing of this current PPV at all. Everyone knows Kenny is going to win. Why waste a match and give a possibility of injury to Kenny or Ospreay? Next month is all anyone cares about, at least for me. I’m considering not getting the PPV and that would only be the second one I’ve ever missed.

4. Toni, Mercedes and Thekla are awesome, but I hate that none of the other women have stepped up to be on their level. I guess Willow is closest, but she just isn’t there for me yet.

Other than those things, I’m pretty happy with AEW recently.
For point 3 - WBD wanted it, ain’t much AEW can do about that beyond being stupid and telling them no y’all are just going to have to settle for less money and lol at the thought of that happening.

For point 4 - I blame a lot of that on Tony Khan. No one ever really gets the time to do what they need to be able to do to even have an attempt to get on that level. How often does someone other than the four you mention get a live mic, for one major example?
 
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American Dragon

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Max numbers must be insane


Part promoter being a promoter, and next year or late this year is when they likely enter into media rights negotiation season as the deal they signed was for three years with a WBD option for a fourth year. Next year would be year three. Not sure when the exclusivity period would end that gives them the ability to negotiate with other companies.

But also they just did their best number in two years on TV not including Max at nearly 800K. If they only got like 100-150K HBO Max then they are doing numbers that rival or beat most of what they were getting in the company’s history. I would guesstimate 100-150K is probably the floor given the #s they do on HBO Max for PPV because If you’re already subscribed it’s silly to watch it on cable instead of Max because of the superior picture quality on Max. Unless someone really wants the PiP action, which is understandable.

If they are doing 250K+ on HBO Max then we’re talking 1 million+ territory, which they’ve only done 20 times, and three of those were the first three episodes.

And this is with the altered Nielsen ratings that have been worse for wrestling than what it was prior to Fall 2025. So it’s kind of difficult to compare what they are doing now with prior to the ratings change.

Dave claims to get the panel only numbers (which is what it was for years before Fall 2025), and I believe he said last week was somewhere around the 900K range but I could be remembering wrong. Obviously I have no way of verifying if that’s true or not so have to take it with a grain of salt.

But whatever measuring system HBO Max uses would be different than what Nielsen is doing, so it wouldn’t really be appropriate to combine the two even if we had the Max numbers.
 
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American Dragon

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Dec 1, 2020
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Get paid for like two years for maternity leave then ask to be released. Unless she wanted to just be a stay at home mom without having to deal with wrestling anymore, I wouldn’t haven’t granted it either. I ain’t paying someone two years to be a mom just so they can go work another company as soon as they are ready to return to action.