Is the empire crumbling before our eyes?

[Kadaveri]

7 hours ago, El-P said:

Maybe this source red between the lines that Colt Cabana vanishing in thin air once CM Punk got hired

That isn't what happened though is it. Cabana hadn't been on TV for 8 months before Punk showed up, and that was in a 8 man tag. Was anyone at the time really thinking something sinister was behind Cabana not being on TV? No. He just wasn't a prominent act at all, there were loads of guys of the periphery of AEW in 2019-20 who just gradually disappeared onto Dark by 2021 in a similar pattern. The actual unusual thing that happened with Cabana after Punk debuted is he actually reappeared on TV for a while and had 3 matches on Dynamite in September-November 2021, which really doesn't fit the false narrative that Punk arrived and Cabana suddenly vanished.

[Big Pete]

Meltzer was also trying to paint Punk as an out of touch boomer offering prehistoric advice even though members of the locker room were extremely complimentary of his advice.

One story that may have been lost in this is an incident that went down around Comic Con. GiantBomb shared a story where they were set to host a panel/interview some AEW guys only at the last minute for it to be canned as one of the talents was in a foul mood. This all happened around the time Hangman conducted his panel where he basically dismissed needing advice from Sting and Punk.

The Elite for mine are certainly the lesser evil, but they were stirring the pot. From Kenny's bizarre off-air return promo to the even more bizarre pre-show address that leaked to all the other scuttlebutt the situation reflected poorly on them.

[Jmare007]

Punk can tell his side and explain why he felt the way he did once he came back from the foot injury. But nothing justifies what he did, come on now. I don't justify The Elite being morons, specially because they have a management role (even if it's a paper title) but whatever they did will never be enough for me to understand Punk: 1) Burying the top homegrown babyface in the promotion on national TV over a line only Punk and like 30 people understood in a promo that happened months before and everyone watching had forgotten about. 2) Burying his own promotion after knowing he was injured and would be out for a while. He torched everyone but Adam Cole, lol AND made sure he was the story out of a PPV that ended with the return of MJF. 3) Getting a damn fistfight with a group of morons that went to confront them.

For every slight he perceived/believed, he escalated the situation 10 times worse. He basically gave in to the provocations by The Elite and solve a damn thing, he just made things worse. 

And I agree something should be done regarding the Elite and the way they politic but going public and torching the whole place ain't ever the answer to solving that problem.

[El-P]

10 hours ago, Flyin' Brian said:

There’s nothing wrong with Hangman bringing it up when it had absolutely nothing to do with the feud or match, yet when Punk sends a receipt because again nothing was done about it then he is wrong and unprofessional? I’m not saying Punk is 100% in the right at all. I am saying there is a double standard and people are defending the Elite and they are getting a pass when their behavior has been just as wrong. 

It's not a double standard. There's a HUGE difference between taking a shot that may be a low-blow during a promo exchange that is part of building toward a big match and calling out someone who is not even there and who is not supposed to get in the ring at this point and reply. 

[El-P]

4 hours ago, Kadaveri said:

That isn't what happened though is it. 

Precisely my point. People "reading between the lines" doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Whatever the "truth" may be about Cabana's position, whatever it was, being hurt by Punk's arrival, the thing is, we don't really now what happened. Hangman using the line was a good line for a promo, which back then was very much a case of Shawn/Bret in 97, with stiff shots taken that played on backstage stuff. Like I said, Punk had all the right to be pissed about it, whether it was right or wrong. But the way he retaliate was highly unprofesional because it fucked with the program.

What also did not happen as far as "people reading between the lines", is a grand conspiracy by the Elite feeding their friend Meltz who talked about Punk as an "out of touch boomer" (which *never* happened, anyone not hate-listening to Meltz knows that, he never painted Punk that way). It's the same thing as the infamous "Young Bucks are avoiding FTR because they don't want to put them over"... then the Bucks put FTR over on TV in an great match but there's no way to winning that argument anyway, the Elite trigger people for reasons that have nothing to do with anything other than people are pissed at them forever. Even when the "antagonist" is CM Punk, who was the poster boy for being a volatile prick for basically his entire career.

4 hours ago, Jmare007 said:

Punk can tell his side and explain why he felt the way he did once he came back from the foot injury. But nothing justifies what he did, come on now. I don't justify The Elite being morons, specially because they have a management role (even if it's a paper title) but whatever they did will never be enough for me to understand Punk: 1) Burying the top homegrown babyface in the promotion on national TV over a line only Punk and like 30 people understood in a promo that happened months before and everyone watching had forgotten about. 2) Burying his own promotion after knowing he was injured and would be out for a while. He torched everyone but Adam Cole, lol AND made sure he was the story out of a PPV that ended with the return of MJF. 3) Getting a damn fistfight with a group of morons that went to confront them.

This. The entire thing is a  debacle, and the Elite (although the role of Omega isn't clear in term of was he a cool down factor or not) should not have acted the way they did, but in term of strictly business, one guy fucked with the program, one guy totally shit on the company during a press conference and one guy threw a punch. It's the same guy and it's Punk.

And although I'm sure some people around here still paint me as "the Elite stan" and you know what, as far as pro-wrestling goes, sure. But I LOVED Punk's stint until then, and this will deprive me of matches I really though I was gonna get, one of which being Punk vs Omega, so indeed, it's not fun. But at this point, I already moved the fuck on from Punk. His absence really hasn't hurt the company like some people thought it would after the press conference, and although the silence on this from TK gets to the point of being ridiculous (really now, AEW was better than this at first), one thing the company has done pretty well is moved on too in term of booking, which they would have too anyway since Punk got injured.

[Big Pete]

1 hour ago, El-P said:

(which *never* happened, anyone not hate-listening to Meltz knows that, he never painted Punk that way).

September 8th WOR about 20-25 minutes in, Dave goes on a massive tangent and totally does paint Punk that way and even makes comparisons to Bill Watts.

[El-P]

3 hours ago, Big Pete said:

September 8th WOR about 20-25 minutes in, Dave goes on a massive tangent and totally does paint Punk that way and even makes comparisons to Bill Watts.

I had listened to it of course, and I did not take it that way. Listening to it again, he says that Punk was going in with the veteran mindset of wanting to teach a bunch of people the way to do things, and because some of them had been told over and over again that what they do is wrong, despite the fact they have been very successful doing things that way, then it comes off the wrong way to them and therefore they don't want to listen. Then he goes on about he, himself, when he first saw those guys (and really we're talking mostly about the Bucks here I'm guessing), he thought they were doing everything wrong. And he admits he actually had to learn *from* them because it was successful.  From there he goes about on about a broader point about the business changing quickly and tells the story of the interview he did with Watts, which is a story he tells pretty often (with the followup call to Pillman). Then he says that Punk was away from 7 years BUT :

"He does have a lot of experience and some of the things that he says are right, are going to be right, and some of the young talent could learn a lot from his experience. You can always learn from experience. But others, because they have learned from their own experiences more recently (...) when someone tells them something is wrong (...) they are gonna block it out and say we've heard it all before."

So yeah, he did not paint CM Punk as an out of touch boomer offering prehistoric advices, and he did not compare him with Bill Watts either.

Thanks for the timestamp. 

[Big Pete]

Except he did paint that picture when he opened with this supposed exclusive scoop that he'd been rubbing the locker room the wrong way the entire time giving them unsolicited out-dated 7 year advice. Meltzer double-speaking doesn't just completely erase that point or the connection he made to Watts.

It was a very timely exclusive that nobody else to my knowledge has even reported and everything leading up was how helpful Punk had been and how he hadn't big leagued a lot of young talent.

I never said he flat out said it, I said he painted that picture.

If he wanted to simply make the point that Hangman didn't need to take that advice because he was a megastar who didn't need to listen to other talent because others (let's be real, Cornette) gave him bad advice he could have just made that point. Instead he went into a spiel about how Punk had been rubbing the locker room the wrong way and that it wasn't just Elite guys saying that.

[C.S.]

My quick thoughts on the whole situation:

1. More and more, it's becoming apparent that Cody was the only adult in the room. I was practically laughed off of PWO for saying that his departure would be a massive blow to the promotion. It was and continues to be. AEW has fallen apart at the seams without him.

2. Punk had completely valid concerns and made completely valid points, but he expressed them in the absolute worst way possible. 

3. Punk was right about the "wrestling media." Even Meltzer and Ariel Helwani have shown their asses lately by complaining like toddlers about their sudden "lack of access" to private business and legal matters in AEW.

4. Buying out Punk's contract would be absurd. He is more interesting, more dynamic, more entertaining, and more of a star than almost anyone else in AEW - and that includes The Elite, Hangman Page, and MJF. The locker room will always have people who don't get along. Is a buyout going to be the answer every time? Come on...

5. With all of that said, Punk's push should have gone to Bryan Danielson. I cannot believe how badly Danielson has been misused.

[Dav'oh]

Pictured: AEW falling apart at the seams. (Out of frame: the sky falling).

Lots of budding obituary writers in this thread. I be more of a "swings and roundabouts" fella, meself.

[sek69]

I pretty much agree with brother @C.S. on all but a few (minor) points:

 

6 hours ago, C.S. said:

1. More and more, it's becoming apparent that Cody was the only adult in the room. I was practically laughed off of PWO for saying that his departure would be a massive blow to the promotion. It was and continues to be. AEW has fallen apart at the seams without him.

While it does certainly appear that the next time someone asks Cody to reveal the reason he left he can just sorta just gesticulate wildly in the direction of that whole mess, I don't really think that his departure was as bad of a blow as a lot of us feared it could  be. 

Obviously is not great to hand your competition one of your top guys on a platter and let them do a victory lap on you, but Cody's situation was just as untenable on screen as it apparently was backstage. He very clearly had a path he wanted his character to go and he didn't give a shit if the fans wanted to go that way or not. Neither side being willing to give in led to all his segments living in their own reality, so it can be argued that it actually helped the show in the sense of they no longer had to deal with having to fit weird Codyverse segments into the show every week. Hell I'd even argue he probably wasn't the backstage spy WWE might have thought he could be either. By the time he left, Cody was so removed from what everyone else's ideas were the only thing WWE could have learned from him is what bank AEW uses for their payroll.

 

6 hours ago, C.S. said:

5. With all of that said, Punk's push should have gone to Bryan Danielson. I cannot believe how badly Danielson has been misused.

I do, because  it's 100% how Danielson wants it. He did the same thing in WWE too, he's made it abundantly clear that he feels at this point his best use is to get as many people over as he can.  I seem to recall their being stores of when Bryan was wanting to put over guys like Gulak, even Vince at one point was like "Really?"

[NintendoLogic]

On 10/22/2022 at 7:05 PM, Timbo Slice said:

My point with this is regarding sourcing than anything else: Dave’s word is getting taken as gospel here due to access and familiarity of product but he is biased towards the people who get him info. It’s always been his biggest criticism. Which is why ANYTIME you hear anything from him, you have to take it with a grain of salt, especially when patterns emerge.

 

The specific pattern here is a ton of stuff painting Punk in the wrong regardless. He absolutely has brought up what happened from the Elite’s side but it’s not given nearly as much ink as Punk. And that’s by design. That isn’t a bias against the Elite. It’s scrutiny towards sourcing in an industry that has always had a huge access problem. It’s also why it’s been easy to see so many writers get led astray in the weeks following the incident, getting fed red herrings that get refuted almost immediately. It’s makes Dave look better by comparison, but it doesn’t make him the source of truth. 
 

That’s why I don’t really care what has happened until we either get some decently sourced info from Punk’s side or from Punk himself, which will eventually happen. To sit here and just say “Punk’s an asshole, therefore it’s his fault” is just an easy explanation for a complicated situation, not the right one.

The thing is, the facts not in dispute are the ones that are the most damning for Punk. There's no need to speculate about whether he made the company's top homegrown star look like a chump by delivering an unscripted receipt because it happened on live TV. There's also no need to speculate about whether he disparaged the company's executives because it happened in a room full of reporters. And even the sources closest to Punk concede he threw the first punch in the backstage fight.

20 hours ago, C.S. said:

5. With all of that said, Punk's push should have gone to Bryan Danielson. I cannot believe how badly Danielson has been misused.

With all due respect, this is a bunch of malarkey.

There's no reason to think Danielson would have done that kind of business with a similar push. And on the off chance they manage to patch things up, Punk/Omega would do much bigger business than anything Danielson could ever dream of.

[C.S.]

2 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

With all due respect, this is a bunch of malarkey.

Your reply is some real AtariLogic. 

At no point did I ever suggest that Punk wasn't a draw, but I hope you enjoyed arguing with yourself?

  

16 hours ago, sek69 said:

Cody's situation was just as untenable on screen as it apparently was backstage. He very clearly had a path he wanted his character to go and he didn't give a shit if the fans wanted to go that way or not. Neither side being willing to give in led to all his segments living in their own reality, so it can be argued that it actually helped the show in the sense of they no longer had to deal with having to fit weird Codyverse segments into the show every week.  

I do, because  it's 100% how Danielson wants it. He did the same thing in WWE too, he's made it abundantly clear that he feels at this point his best use is to get as many people over as he can.  I seem to recall their being stores of when Bryan was wanting to put over guys like Gulak, even Vince at one point was like "Really?"

The Codyverse segments were tiresome by the end. Being hamstrung by the no World Title shot stip didn't have to necessitate a heel turn. Obviously, we'd have to rewind the clock here and undo six months to a year's worth of bad angles, but this is where strong leadership comes in. Let's say, for the sake of example, the jingoistic Ogogo promo was the turning point. Before that, there could have been a million ways for a red hot babyface Cody to get a World Title shot. Instead, Tony apparently took too much of a backseat - just as he did at the CM Punk media scrum and just as he's doing now with Bryan.

What Danielson wants is irrelevant. Did Vince let him job to Gulak? No. Tony needs to do the same thing and put his foot down. Imagine a red hot Danielson coming in with Punk's push, instead of what we did get. I know Atari will argue otherwise, but Danielson is a bigger star and better wrestler in every conceivable metric. 

[NintendoLogic]

Danielson may be a better worker than Punk (I think Punk is a superior in-ring storyteller, but that's neither here nor there), but there is no universe in which he is a bigger star. The Yes chants at sporting events were eight years ago, which is an eternity in pop culture terms.

[strobogo]

Punk has thought of himself as a locker room leader vet giving out unsolicited advice and annoying people since the IWA MS days.

[C.S.]

39 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

Danielson may be a better worker than Punk (I think Punk is a superior in-ring storyteller, but that's neither here nor there), but there is no universe in which he is a bigger star. The Yes chants at sporting events were eight years ago, which is an eternity in pop culture terms.

And Punk's peak years were even longer ago than that, so what's your point exactly?

[Embrodak]

6 hours ago, strobogo said:

Punk has thought of himself as a locker room leader vet giving out unsolicited advice and annoying people since the IWA MS days.

Love ya, stro, but your personal dislike of CM Punk is, frankly, a lot stronger than most of his stans' love of him. Been following you since the GAF and Legit Shook days, and you talked shit about things he was *right* about, like the lawsuit he won against the WWE doctor, arguing that he was complaining about behaviors that any big company would have engaged in. Right or wrong, I don't think there's a world where you would have given him a fair hearing in all of this.

 

On-topic: I'm sorry, but no matter how much Punk's Bret Hart-gumming annoyed anybody on a personal or aesthetic level, the notion that AEW is better off with Moxley, Jericho, the Bucks, and Omega as the tastemakers and advice-givers is fucking ludicrous. Every one of them but Moxley is operating off of a perception of wrestling that is two or three years passe at this point, and Moxley is basically just doing shitty Terry Funk - which is to say, doing basically the same thing CM Punk is doing, just with a different icon as the locus of his imitation game. The proof anyone needs that AEW is not a serious company with long-term potential is that literally no major promotion in history with even half a mind toward its own aggrandizement and growth would want to kick CM Punk out over the shit that transpired at All Out. Put him on a tighter leash, sure. Give him less dates, maybe. Spend millions buying his contract out? That's something you can literally only do if you have a billionaire daddy who just wants to see you happy and playing with your inheritance before he dies. I don't care how "wrong" he is, an unwillingness or inability to make money off of all this is a Deadly Carny Sin. That's setting aside how silly it is to create a locker room where your creative vision and business strategy holds basically no water with people as compared to their personal relationships with a coterie of insiders.

[sek69]

Or......and hear me out here, he's  still the same grumbling irritant he's always been and what flew in the past doesn't really fly today. No matter how much you might side with team Punk, choosing one guy who despite being your top draw is rapidly falling apart physically on top of everything else, would be the worst business move. As was stated before, if nothing happened after the show he still would have been gone for over half a year. Who's to say Tony just saw Punk as a sunk cost and decided to cut bait instead of running the risk of perhaps multiple people getting fed up and leaving.

What's was the best possible outcome for this Punk run realistically? Maybe another year of him being the top guy before he either is forced to retire due to injury or at best a John Cena occasional appearance role? If he was causing discord in the locker room I'd take the short term hit over alienating guys that could be your foundation for the next 10+ years. 

[Dale Wolfe]

I think the AEW roster was in much better state before they started to take on the WWE offcut bloat, to be honest. 

I can see the merit to Danielson, to Moxley, even Punk for all his faults (and i did quite like his grumpy old man character) but its still old ideas and faces who didn't exactly set the world alight in WWE 

They would have been much better trying to be the fresh promotion that didnt have all the WWE rejects. Would have saved them all this bother, too. Danielson's huge lack of ego is causing them problems as well, really. Big money deal to basically get a high quality mid-card worker

[Gramsci]

I’m not really interested on who is a bigger draw between Punk and Danielson, nowadays it’s probably Punk but it’s a tough comparison on every metric because they haven’t been booked the same way. CM Punk was out of the business for 7 years, he sells good looking merchandise (by wrestling standards) while Bryan is not interested in selling t-shirts and his designs are not good. Punk has had hot feuds in every PPV, while Bryan has only faced ex-WWE wrestlers like Miro, Mox and Jericho (which is really disappointing if you think about it), while Punk has wrestled Darby Allin, Eddie Kingston, MJF in probably the best feud in AEW history, and has wrestled for the world title on a PPV. There's also the novelty factor in all of that.

Danielson has lost all the momentum, he came to AEW like a star, he looked better than he has ever looked before, and had the best run I’ve ever seen between September and December. The feud between Danielson and The Elite was the real draw in September (As a curious note, Danielson vs. Bullet Club was the feud planned in NJPW around 2018 if WWE hadn’t cleared Bryan), one of its segments was the most watched in AEW Dynamite history with 1.5M viewers, but instead of keeping that feud going, after Grand Slam he was wrestling Rocky Romero, Anthony Bowens and Bobby Fish, which was great for me, but from a business standpoint I guess it was not. After this year’s Grand Slam ratings, Meltzer noticed the importance of last year’s Danielson vs. Omega, and I think they should have continued that feud. I know that they had the Hangman situation, and Omega was fucked up, but I don’t know, they could have done something like Danielson and Punk vs The Young Bucks, and both vs Adam Cole. Instead, Punk was wrestling Hobbs, Sydal and Danny Garcia, and Danielson was having his first PPV match against Miro (I guess the plan was Danielson vs Mox, but still…). 

I don’t care if Danielson is so stupid that he doesn’t know when he can or can’t lose a match, he is the guy that came back from a tragic retirement, after being the most over babyface of the last 15 years, and had to turn heel 5 months later, and maybe it wasn’t just WWE’s fault, because his feud with The Miz had his fingerprints all over it.

I think Tony has a problem with being too conservative sometimes, while at the same time he throws big matches on paper with zero build. How many big Cody Rhodes and CM Punk matches have we missed?
 

[Jmare007]

I think Tony's biggest issue is listening too much to his biggest stars. Every time I listen to Jericho it seems that doesn't matter what he proposes to Tony, he gets the OK and can run with his idea for waay too long. Wouldn't shock that's what happens with every big star they have -hell, Mox was the one behind beating Punk two weeks before the PPV just so they could get pop a rating and a big reaction for a nearfall at All Out- so that kinda explains why he's ok with having the highest paid JTTS in the business in Danielson.

I also think it's pretty evident Punk is a bigger draw. But the thing is, he's never been that much bigger of a draw so I've always been puzzled about arguing about it when it comes to those two. If we scale it from 1 to 10, Dragon might be a 6 and Punk a 7. Neither is worth much of a discussion.

[KawadaSmile]

Why is Cesaro working against QT Marshall at Dark Elevation? 

[Matt D]

18 minutes ago, KawadaSmile said:

Why is Cesaro working against QT Marshall at Dark Elevation? 

So the live crowd who paid for tickets got to see him wrestle. He was booked for the live Rampage a couple of days later (and had been on the previous week’s live Rampage) but it was a different crowd. Both he and QT got great reactions.

It’s a feature, not a bug.

[NintendoLogic]

The fact that UFC brought Punk in for a second fight even after his first one made it clear he was nowhere near a UFC-caliber fighter should tell you everything you need to know about his drawing power, especially in Chicago.

[KawadaSmile]

2 hours ago, Matt D said:

So the live crowd who paid for tickets got to see him wrestle. He was booked for the live Rampage a couple of days later (and had been on the previous week’s live Rampage) but it was a different crowd. Both he and QT got great reactions.

It’s a feature, not a bug.

Makes sense. It strikes me as odd seeing him working the C show, but giving the fans something is good. Thought it was more of a "we got no plans for you" thing.

1 hour ago, NintendoLogic said:

The fact that UFC brought Punk in for a second fight even after his first one made it clear he was nowhere near a UFC-caliber fighter should tell you everything you need to know about his drawing power, especially in Chicago.

I'd argue he was the main draw of his first card. That event had no business doing nearly half a million buys.