Embrodak

Bron is so fucking young and green, there’s no way he’s taking the title from Roman unless they want to do like a four-year reign.

Babyface/babyface is a meh dynamic most of the time, though. If they’re gonna push Darby to the title outside a tournament context, I’d imagine it’ll be after MJF wins the title, let Darby get his win back from their last feud. MJF has to be fuming, him vs Punk redux was a money feud compared to him vs some random tournament winner.

I remember the usual timeline people were floating for a pec tear plus surgery was shorter than 9 months, with 9 months being an especially long recovery time. I assumed they padded the projected recovery time so that it would seem like Cody was a superhero for coming back early.

It’s not even clear that Big E will be able to return to wrestling.

With Kingston, you can maybe say he’s a little old and a little volatile backstage to give the push he seemed to merit after the Punk feud and the Player’s Tribune article. And unless he was willing to wrestle like a scrappy babyface instead of a wannabe strong styler, I can’t say for sure that the push would even have gone well. But with Darby, I think it’s just that Tony just cannot call audibles and change his plans except when circumstances compel him.

Cody was over as fuck when he came back to WWE and is made for life after that HIAC match. He’s the guy. The Codyverse stuff was bizarre, but with a few people to tell him no, he’s been doing great stuff.

I kinda love Darby, he’s like Jeff Hardy with Shawn Michaels’ selling and charisma, but he is very tiny even for AEW. Tony referencing Corny in his Tweet promoting Rampage is really weird, considering Corny doesn’t watch Rampage and like 80% of his online audience wants to do a Moxley promo to the guy.

One thing people haven’t mentioned Re: the crowd at All Out being kind of cold is that they had Dynamite and Rampage there like five days earlier. Between that and the heavy weekend of wrestling, it’s less surprising to me that they weren’t too engaged, especially given how long everyone knew it was going to be.

See this is really weird to me, because I don’t remember Punk being “anti-veteran” in any kind of programmatic sense. He spoke absolutely reverentially about Eddie Guerrero when he was at his peak, in that doc WWE made. He specifically disliked the Kliq, and Vince’s physique fetishization, and WWE’s rigid corporate structure and rules, but he never worked or talked like he didn’t value the legacy of wrestling, or those who had proven themselves quality performers. It feels like people are operating off a kind of ossified sense of who they think or thought Punk was when he was last active, or retrofitting a long-standing distaste for him into some cutout of hypocrisy that, to me, seems ill-fitting. For better or worse, this CM Punk is acting exactly congruently with *my* memory of him since at least the pipe bomb, so I’m not sure what people are getting at with this stuff.

To be clear, if I recall correctly, he said the EVPs couldn’t manage a Target, and he said Adam Page had never done anything in the business. I don’t think he meant to conflate those two sets of claims, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Adam Page, however over he was at any given time, was pretty ancillary to any success they had.

Punk having the heel John Cena run we never got would actually be the only way I could see him coming back and not feeling awkward, but I can’t imagine Tony ever wants to put his title on him again, if only for the questionable state of his musculoskeletal functioning. And I guess Roman is kinda sorta having that run already, idk.

8 month recovery time if Punk has a torn tricep, oof. They should not have brought Danhausen in, he is not good at aiming his curses apparently. Bad, bad year for this company.

Danielson was kept out intentionally longer than protocol because of his history with concussions, though. Punk had a terrible foot injury, was out three months, came back, wrestled one and a half matches, and now has a pectoral tear that will have him out for at least several weeks, if it’s minor, or many months following a surgery, if it’s major. He just turned a significant chunk of the audience and the locker room against him, and nobody else in the promotion other than FTR is really getting on board with “Let’s try to wrestle like it’s the mid 90s again”, however much I wish they would. I love what Punk has done in AEW so far, I’m sympathetic to him in all this fracas (and as was said by someone in the other thread, the fact that Parek saw what happened and both Punk and Steel seem not to be headed for a firing as of right now suggests that their version of events is not total bullshit), but at this point, if his mission was to come in and steer the promotion toward a more mainstream audience and more classical style of wrestling, that’s pretty clearly been a failure. Also, I actually do think there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s responsible to keep booking Danielson in a promotion where they’re constantly doing hardcore matches and people have a nasty habit of dropping people on their heads and necks.

Gotta say, if I’m Punk and potentially staring down another surgery, I’m thinking about just hanging it up. Whether it’s just too many accumulated bumps, bad training, decades of insomnia, or too many muffins, a major injury in your first real match back from the previous injury feels a lot like a “wheels falling off” moment. Hard to have legitimacy in the fans’ eyes going forward, even if they forgive you for all this bullshit or accept you as a heel, when they perceive you as held together with chewing gum and duct tape.

I mean I don’t care about the guy at all at this point, he was a bad champion, very often dresses like shit in a manner not keeping with his character, went into business for himself when it wasn’t called for, and agrees to do too much silly and melodramatic stuff. But I do think an extremely cryptic reference to backstage nonsense that wasn’t all that diegetically different to Eddie Kingston’s promo is a minor offense in and of itself.

I mean what he did was a little shitty, but not the biggest deal in the world. 2 or 3 weeks in the cooler, then in a crowded tourney for the pointless and ice cold trios titles seems about right, idk.

I think Page kinda got punished for the thing he actually did wrong by being relegated to purgatory until a few weeks before the Trios tournament.

Does it seem like both Punk *and* The Elite are kind of hard to bring back after this?

AEW feels like the wheels are coming off right as WWE gets the shot in the arm people have been awaiting for years.

Megha Parek was apparently there as well, just a full on basketball team of management coming to chew the guy out.

Also, Punk is an asshole, but he’s actually there. I don’t know why people assume he couldn’t have info suggesting the Bucks were the *cause* of the leaks, even if they weren’t the ones directly talking to Meltz and Sapp.

Punk is a sloppy worker, but the show would absolutely benefit from more people wrestling *like* him, albeit in a more coordinated manner.

Only if god is real. But they believe He is, so who’s to say. Was Ace hitting Nick with a chair a callback to a kid in preschool throwing the timeout chair at him?

If the Bucks kicked the door down, it A) makes Punk look a little more sympathetic if he jumped to violence, and 2) continues the trend of literally every detail that comes out being funnier than the last.

The last thing we saw from MJF was him cussing out Tony Khan, him playing a voice mail from Tony Khan begging him to come back on exactly his terms is perfectly in keeping with MJF’s character. Actually MJF being in cahoots with Hathaway is filling in the question of why all these midcard guys would get on board with this nobody manager.