We haven’t done #AsForDynamite in a while, but I feel like we maybe need to talk about MJF’s promo on last night’s show. It was, to say the very least, electrifying, highly compelling television. And it’s interesting, too, because the company has chosen to make a public storyline out of a very real, potentially existential problem that may yet haunt them for years to come.
MJF did a fine job of laying it out, of course, but like I said, it’s an existential problem masquerading as an individual contract dispute. Which is to say that AEW beat and ultimately destroyed NXT to the point that the competition has since fired everyone and rebooted the product from the ground up. In a very real sense, NXT no longer exists, and what’s there in its place, NXT 2.0, is something completely different.
AEW then responded to success by hiring half the guys from the brand they just beat and putting them in prominent places on their own programming.
So. There is no doubt that Netflix once produced outstanding in-house content. Remember the first season of House of Cards? Remember when Netflix original programming was considered must-see TV?
Friends, that was a long time ago. I think anyone who’s paying attention will admit that HBO Max has better stuff now, and in fact, given their recent subscriber losses, we’ve seen Netflix starting to cut massively back on both staff and new original content.
Should HBO Max then start hiring old Netflix employees?
I mean… maybe? It sort of depends on who’s available and what they have to contribute, no?
This is where we find ourselves with AEW. They have a bloated roster to the point that it’s actively hard to feature many of their performers week-to-week, even with fully three hours of television every week, and they keep bringing in folks, too. Some of those folks -- CM Punk, Bryan Danielson, and to a lesser extent Miro and Adam Cole -- are guys that you MUST get simply because they’re such huge stars that they bring viewers just by showing up. But with some of these guys -- Andrade, Christian, the House of Black, etc. -- the value proposition is a lot less clear. Those guys might be talented, but no one in that latter group is more valuable than the upper card of AEW Originals -- Hangman, Darby Allin, MJF, etc -- a point which recent programming has proven repeatedly. I mean, Darby specifically just beat Andrade repeatedly in a prolonged feud, and he’s on TV way more often, but he’s probably making less than half of what Andrade is making in actual salary.
MJF might be the most vocally frustrated about his contract status, but actually, it’s Hangman’s recent feud with CM Punk that best proves the point. Both the storyline and the resulting match were 100% Hangman Adam Page. Punk brought the eyeballs and the mainstream media coverage, but really, Hangman could’ve had that feud with almost anyone.
First, the obvious. Hangman Adam Page is AEW’s protagonist. As an anxious millennial cowboy, he is Everyman to the generation of pandemic era school-shooting survivors that this country is currently raising through childhood. Hangman is the best in the world when he can keep his head on straight, but he struggles with it. As a self-sabotaging semi-alcoholic, he might not be the hero we want, but he is undoubtedly the hero we need and deserve in the year 2022. As a nation, this is who we are right now.
So he goes up against CM Punk, the establishing Best in the World, and we can all see that Hangman has everything he needs physically to retain against Punk… except that Punk gets in Hangman’s head, makes him doubt himself, and then the wheels start coming off.
The whole story is 100% about Hangman and his self-confidence. You could’ve stuck anyone in there opposite Hangman, and it still would’ve worked.
The match is the same. Hangman is doing fine, even winning, until he goes for a moonsault, lands awkwardly, and tweeks his knee. That sets up the finish, which is a Buckshot Lariat that Hangman can’t quite land because of that same knee. He stumbles into a GTS, and that’s the finish. Punk is your new champ.
Again, those specific story-beats would’ve worked with anyone. Meanwhile, Hangman definitely carried the match physically (though Punk obviously called it in the ring based on its pacing) because Punk botched two Buckshot Lariats of his own and then proceeded to botch two more top rope spots on Wednesday’s Dynamite. At the end of the day, all of this works basically because Hangman is an awesomely talented wrestler, but yo, CM Punk is no Kenny Omega out there, and everyone in the building knew it, too. Most folks, I think, want to see these two run it back eventually and for Hangman to get the win because he was obviously the better wrestler in the moment. That finish was good business, but it also kind of sucked.
To be clear, I like CM Punk a reasonable amount. I emphatically understand why he’s in the company. But right at this moment, he is looking a little old in the ring. I get that on a personal level because I am a 49-year-old former collegiate swimming champion, and I know exactly what it feels like to lose a step even when you’re doing everything right in training. I wish I didn’t, but to quote another former WWE’er on AEW’s roster, “The Truth is the Truth.”
Alas, we’ve got this dynamic all up and down the roster. Like Hangman, the Young Bucks carried the Hardys through their match at Double or Nothing, and MJF is the second-biggest draw in the company in terms of ratings, and Darby Allin is not far behind, and yet, we’ve been giving a TON of free agent contracts to guys who haven’t quite gotten over at the other place. Meanwhile, the indie free agents -- Ricky Starks, Eddie Kingston, Wheeler Yuta, Daniel Garcia, etc. -- these guys are all killing it. But because of leverage, it’s the ex-WWE’ers who appear to be getting paid.
The guys from Wrestling Observer Radio asked the question just this morning -- where do we go from here?.
They can make it an angle in the short term, and it seems like this is at least somewhat inevitable because Hangman and MJF both said essentially the same thing about Punk, which is that someone needs to protect the AEW locker room from his nefarious influence. But his specific “influence” doesn’t appear to be nefarious in any way. Rather, it seems that he’s a stand-in for a larger, potentially systemic problem, which is that a lot of the talent are worried about getting squeezed, and at least anecdotally, it also seems like they might be underpaid, potentially by vast amounts. And yeah, you know, this kind of thing is common in pro sports, and the cream usually rises to the top over time, but let’s be clear -- the best teams manage this to keep their top performers happy in the moment, too. And when they can’t, well, that’s when you wind up with Tom Brady winning a Super Bowl for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Is it concerning then that the Khans own the Jacksonville Jaguars, one of the NFL’s most snake-bitten teams? This is a family that let QB Gardner Minshew walk, so they could keep C.J. Beathard to back up Trevor Lawrence. I don’t know the money on that one, but on a sheer performance basis, that seems like it was a stupid thing to do. If they push MJF and Hangman only to let those guys walk because they are frustrated and ludicrously underpaid, well, that’s NOT good business. That’s actually self-sabotage.
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