Embrodak

Well, some of what we know about his treatment of Elizabeth is not great.

Didn’t last week drop from 1.2 to the start to 800,000 at the end?

Also Omega stood in the middle of the ring after his return and said “We’re not a tribute act” as a total non-sequitur, this whole thing may just be that The Elite and CMFTR don’t like each other.

W Morrissey is 80% of the height in AEW, it makes sense.

If Kenny really got up at the talent meeting and told them he wouldn’t have hired 8/10 of them, after the Bucks got up and put on a face of being congenial and open, and after he just got back from a long hiatus, then lol.

Look a single episode popping a good rating isn’t intrinsically noteworthy. Absent the context of the next few weeks, it’s just noise. If it stays up, then it says something, but no guarantee that will happen.

Meanwhile, Tony can’t get enough of Garcia and Yuta. Do Dark and Elevation actually generate any revenue for the company? Because they don’t seem to be doing a lot as developmental shows, and I was looking at the roster page and amazed at how many people seem to only wrestle there except for when Tony needs a squash match, like at least two million dollars of salary for YouTube shows that can’t be solvent from the ad revenue alone. I was also amazed how many people were on the roster page that I can’t imagine what they’d do with. For all the talk of bloat, I have to say that the number of people I can imagine them squeezing good television out of is actually pretty small. Even including people I don’t like, like Best Friends or Andrade, I’m left with the notion that Tony does need more wrestlers, once some of these contracts run out.

This is the problem with trying to get two guys over off of feuding with each other. Not only does one’s advantage necessarily come at the other one’s expense, but anything that gets bumped or shaved down for time screws with *both* of their pushes, instead of one. A major problem here is they don’t really have a lot of people in the Ziggler or Balor stratum (not talking about their booking here, just their position), where they are big enough that feuding with them could theoretically get a guy over, but not big enough that it’s leaving money on the table to do so. Who could Starks feud with other than Hobbs right now, fucking Jericho? How has *that* worked out for anybody? Archer? Andrade? I guess Sammy Guevara could be fun, but he’s not exactly securely over, himself. If Adam Cole were healthy, he’d be a good option, but I’m not confident Tony would have Starks go over in the end. Same for Hobbs, who’s he going to feud with? Orange Cassidy? Pac? Eddie Kingston could work, here, but he’s not as over as he was circa the Punk feud; he needs rehabbing, not being a stepping stone on someone else’s journey. Claudio is not a bad option, esp since Hobbs needs more improvement in the ring, but Claudio is not exactly a scintillating character you can have a blood feud with. Miro vs Hobbs would be fun if Miro were allowed to leave the timeout God has put him in more often - is he still hurt? People are shitting on Jay Lethal in the other thread, and I understand the “sex pest” concerns, but this is *exactly* where he and others like him could be insanely useful to this company right now. They need guys with some name value who can go both in the ring and on the mic, who can work with the younger talent and help them get over and learn how to be stars.

Theory’s accuser isn’t even online anymore. They either bought her off or determined it wasn’t credible.

Jay Lethal rules, haters can back off. If I have to see Best Friends, you have to see him. Quite liked MJF’s promo this week, was just the right amount of shooty, edgy content while being vicious and unrelenting.

Trips is also a JCP mark, though, and I can imagine him finding the story of Dusty’s son winning the title his father never did compelling.

We didn’t hear that Cody was a troublemaker per se, but we heard of personal falling outs and major creative differences, if I recall correctly. And we saw on the screen that Cody felt compelled to create a weird, hermetically sealed environment for himself, away from them. And depending on how one takes the word of Brian Last, he’s been claiming for a while that there’s a not-insignificant chunk of the locker room that’s been unhappy with the EVPs for a long time, well before Punk got there, but I imagine he has a smaller pool of people he’s getting info from, maybe even just FTR. But he did have scoops about the melee and fallout, so idk.

Punk *is* an asshole, but what we know about him suggests he needs fairly objective conditions to set him off, at least by my observation. Making him work with a staph infection, asking for way too much money for a legal defense, perceiving one as trying to turn a subset of the audience against him while he’s the top babyface, etc. We didn’t hear shit about Punk as a negative locker room influence until the false rumor of him trying to get Colt fired came out, and Meltz tried *incredibly* hard to bury him recently, with some dude on his staff saying that was a more important issue than the one summarizing Vince’s goddamn retirement. There is absolutely a tendency for entrenched interests to weaponize Punk’s undeniable assholishness to run cover for their own failings, whether it’s WWE pretending they didn’t compel him to work in a wildly unsafe state of health or the Elite trying to act like he’s the first big act they’ve had trouble with and a sui generis troublemaker when Cody was literally still there earlier this year, so some skepticism toward our own intuitions is warranted, here.

As of Double or Nothing, what we heard about Punk was that ESPN article where people went on and on about what a giving and valuable resource Punk was in the locker room. I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure a lot of this “Punk was toxic and awful the whole time” stuff is ex post facto spin by people with an agenda.

Idk how the All Out gate was, but in terms of the PPV buys, they did two months of a bad build for All Out on the heels of a month of bad build for Forbidden Door. Punk wasn’t even announced for the show until the Wednesday before! Lotta factors working against them this time out. But Tony flat out called Eric Bischoff’s statement about Punk being a financial flop bullshit and said Punk made the company more money than any other wrestler they’d signed, so he was either sunk costing his way out of a tough question or has access to more sophisticated metrics than the average observer. I tend to think a bit of both, Punk certainly hasn’t been Steve Austin or anything but has moved the needle enough that AEW is in a better position for tv rights negotiations than they otherwise would have been. Now that fan opinion has pretty well come down on the Elites’ side, though, he may not have much value left. AEW has a kind of odd business model where the growth in raw numbers is modest, to say the least, but they do a super high conversion of free viewers to paying customers. That doesn’t mean everybody buys everything, but it does mean that the people inclined to buy are pretty high-information consumers compared to the average wrestling fan. That’s part of why one can’t judge Punk’s financial impact purely from raw numbers, because Tony is in the business of keeping a select group of people engaged to where they’ll shell out for PPVs and tickets, not winning over casuals, but it also means that Punk likely does not have a lot of value to a lot of those regular customers going forward, unless they figure out a really good angle to bring him back on.

It also simply has to be said that there are holes in our understanding of the narrative of the melee. We know that the Elite barged in uninvited, and that Daniels, Buck, Cutler, and Nakazawa were suspended for being there, but we don’t know if it was this big group of 7 people barging in all at once to confront a guy, or just three with the rest coming later, or what. How you judge Punk’s actions has to be understood in terms of what and who he was seeing confronting him, and what their demeanor and posture was like. We know that Punk threw the first punch, but we don’t exactly know what happened after that. We know that Ace Steel threw a chair, but he wasn’t in the room when all of this started, so all he may have had to go on was his friend in the middle of a group of guys either striking him back or trying to restrain him or something. We know he threw a chair at Nick, but we don’t know when, or why Nick. We know he bit Omega and pulled his hair, but we don’t know what Omega was doing when that happened. Some reports say he was trying to pull the brawl apart and that Steel thought he was trying to get a cross face on him, but then I can’t square that spatiotemporally with the claim that Omega was trying to get Larry out of the room, unless there is some fixed law of the universe that Elite matches will run long and feature distracting action on the sidelines even when they’re shoots. We know Parek was there, but we don’t know if she was there from the start (she was supposedly seen talking to the Bucks before anything started) or if she walked in after everything happened. If she was there, why did she let the Bucks barge in? If she was talking to them beforehand and didn’t go to the locker room with them, did she tell them not to go and they went anyway? Did she tell them she’d meet them there and they jump started the confrontation without a semi-neutral party that could de-escalate and signal to Punk that he shouldn’t assume the worst? It’s just a mess. We can say Punk was 100% in the wrong for disrespecting a guy paying him millions of dollars and giving his career a resurrection after those embarrassing UFC fights, but beyond that, it seems like there’s a lot of motivated reasoning happening on both sides.

A big group of people stormed into his locker room immediately after he called them out publicly, in what wrestling company in history would that not have been perceived as a hostile and provocative act? And in what company on the planet would management confronting the guy before the big boss that he just embarrassed in front of what is technically a national press not be a boneheaded and needlessly escalatory act? The fact Omega tried to mend fences later that night suggests at least some self-recognition of fault on his part. Idk, it seems obvious to me that most litigations of this are reliant on what one thought of the participants going into it. But at a bare minimum, I think taking Meltz and SRS’s statement that the Bucks and/or Kenny are not who told them about the Cabana stuff as proof that Punk was wrong and just looking for trouble strikes me as working backward from a conclusion about the guy. Even if they weren’t the direct leakers, were they responsible for spreading the rumors throughout the locker room? Was it someone friendly to or aligned with them that talked to the Sheetz, even if it wasn’t them, themselves, assuming the wresting journalists in question are telling the truth? He’s actually in that locker room, he may just be being paranoid or he may have a better insight into the social dynamics at play there than we as people reliant on a drip feed of info from the wrestling press. There’s no question that Punk was being an unprofessional asshole throughout much of this, but it’s unclear to me why there is no critical evaluation of the other side going on here. We have extensive oral histories of how cliques and backstage politicking shape locker room environments in wrestling companies, it seems reasonable to me to assume the same forces are at play here.

It’s moreso I’m unclear why people would be so repulsed by an association with Jim Cornette that they would reflexively hate FTR because of theirs but not be as openly condemnatory of the Republican-friendly politics of at least some people near the top of the AEW ladder. Or Kenny having Don Callis manage him with whatever skeletons he has in his closet, for that matter. I’m not saying there aren’t a million valid reasons to hate Corny, I think litigating him as a dude would honestly require a book-length treatise at this point, moreso I’m befuddled by moral principles that seem contingent on how much someone helps or hinders the ability to watch a postmodern wrestling program.

I am genuinely surprised they didn’t have Best Friends win the Trios belts considering PAC already has a belt and has more frequent absences from the show than a lot of the wrestlers.

Okay, but is he donating money to any Republican politicians *at all* right now? Because I think pretending there’s a difference between supporting even Mitt Romney and supporting Trump is the most translucent fig leaf imaginable at this point. He might not support Trump qua Trump because of his particular biographical details, but the only functional difference between (most of) Trump’s presidency and a normal Republican presidency is that people got more mad at business owners and major companies for donating to him. If he donated a bunch of money to Trump *as* a generic Republican, then he supports Trump, even if he’s not a self-identified “Trump supporter”. Re: the Bucks, I could swear there were right-wing likes and retweets from the Obama years.

At this point, with everything that’s come out, I don’t know why people feel so strongly that Punk is leaving. Nothing that’s come out has made Punk look *better* for going off at the scrum, but The Young Bucks, Kenny Omega, Cutler, Nakazawa, Pat Buck, and Christopher Daniel’s have *all* been suspended. And Megha Parek was there, too! 6-7 people coming into his locker room with his dog and his friend’s injured wife, uninvited, possibly even forcing the door open? On what planet is that not “fighting words”, in terms of the image it projects, especially if Megha wasn’t in the initial group? And on what planet do executives grab their doofus buddies, the talent relations guy, and the top lawyer in the company to go and confront the top star while the boss is *still in the middle of a press conference*? Do people think WBD is going to be inclined to raise their TV licensing rate if they’re doing dumb backstage antics that push out their top star out of nowhere, after giving them a Friday night slot that they’ve pissed away the viewership of and when Dynamite viewership dropped nearly a third from start of program to conclusion this week? I get that there is heat on Punk in the locker room, but if Tony Khan is really a wrestling promoter and not a money mark, I don’t think you can justify giving Punk the boot to keep The Elite from walking. And frankly, if they’re dumb enough to put Tony in a position where he has to consider giving Punk the boot for any investigation result other than “Punk is an unhinged maniac and a persistent danger to the locker room”, they’re not any kind of executives.

That is literally the only excuse for how they’ve booked him, at this point. When you have to go the “high drama” route to explain wrestling stories, though, you are pretty much inherently running cover for lousy booking.

Fell down a surreal Twitter rabbit hole of people that wish FTR ill will every time they’re booked because they’re friendly to Cornette. I get hating the guy for a variety of reasons, but I don’t get why Jericho or the Bucks get a pass for their politics. Or Tony Khan’s company being *financed* by a Trump supporter, for that matter.

So many ways that could go wrong, though. He’s a prodigy, but putting the world title on a guy with like a year of experience is begging for trouble, especially if you’re giving him underlings that are also, frankly, pretty green, even if also very impressive and promising. I get why people would be not into Cody, but his work in WWE so far has totally washed the odd flavor of the Codyverse out of my mouth. And given what we’re seeing in AEW these days, it doesn’t seem impossible to me that some of the bullshit stemmed from backstage intrigue we won’t hear about for another decade.

More bizarre than Bobby Fish’s behavior is the choice to still do the UE beating up The Young Bucks angle when he was on his way out, Adam Cole was injured, and Kyle O’Reilly was also injured and having a potentially career-ending neck surgery shortly thereafter.