Wrestling Thread 7: FTR Baldhausen • Page 1145

i dont think its a rampage specific problem, at least right now its not. nothing in the company feels all that important. there's too many titles, very few stakes attached to anything, too many stories and characters that get dropped from tv just to randomly appear weeks later. i feel pretty strongly that a lot of these things stem from the fact that they signed too many people.

aew signs 50 guys, well what should they do? they need a belt to fight for, so here's the all atlantic title and some tv time

tony buys roh and is seemingly going to be using a ton of those guys, well gotta keep the brand relevant. here's all the roh titles and they get a ton of tv time. oh and most of that tv time is just going to be jericho and his goons

well shit, we have a ton of 3 person groups in the company but nothing to fight over, here's the trios titles and some tv time.

damn, just signed bandido, sorry ricky starks and wardlow, no more tv time for you for a few weeks, gotta get bandido and ar fox on tv for a little bit, but they won't do anything meaningful

the company is very frustrating because it refuses to commit to any focus at all and thinks new people creates excitement

 

FTR has defended each of those titles only a few times, and they’ve had the AAA titles for over a year now. Those titles haven’t secured them regular TV time wrestling as a tag team.

 

FTR is underutilized most likely because of injuries

 

Dax was injured but they never really stopped working outside of AEW so I don’t think that’s it.

 

I only know what happened on Ramapge due to Alvarez doing a report on it, it sounded like the worst fucking Rampage they ever booked so that tracks with lowest viewership

 

The Lumberjack Match from Rampage led to some hilarious footage on this week's BTE, so I'll take it. Haha.

 

Oh shit I gotta watch BTE

 

I agree with a lot of this, and I think you kinda touched on a key complaint of mine when you mentioned that Jericho and his goons get too much time. Not that they are my specific complaint, but rather that with an unbelievably stacked (and unfortunately bloated) roster, they still bring out the same handful of guys every single week. You pretty much get members of BCC, JAS, The Elite, The Death Triangle, The Acclaimed, Best Friends, and sprinkle in handfuls of other wrestlers every week. On the women's side, it's probably Jade, Britt/Jamie/Rebel, and now Saraya. They don't need to have every single pushed star on TV every single week. By spreading them out, it works in their favor two ways. It builds intrigue for the ones you haven't seen in a week or two, and it opens up more time to shine a little light on members of the roster that you don't see every week. I feel like in the beginning of Dynamite they were pretty good about this, but lately they've been failing there and it's unfortunately showing.

 

It's hard to book wrestling promotions to be consistently strong, i'd say impossible. Every promotion ever has had peaks and valleys, I could argue AEW's valleys are some of the highest valleys we have ever seen.

They will figure it out, I wish wrestling could be hot as fuck 24/7/365 but it's not.

 

Oh don't get me wrong, I still tune in weekly and still enjoy the product overall (for the most part). I just feel like there are things they could stand to work on to make it even better and a little more consistent.

 

Yup, you're right. There are some odd choices being made that go beyond bad booking decisions and for that I really chalk it up as a young promotion still. Final Battle is at 3 pm on saturday? 40 bucks with a half assed card?

Fucking weird.

 

As we discussed the other day regarding show start times, 3 PM on a Saturday is PERFECT lol

plus I’m going! First live wrestling since January 2020! That rules!

 

Lol yeah I ain't doing shit at 3 PM on a saturday, I guess most wrestling geeks aren't either.

 

Bro this Cutler footage of the lumberjack match is amazing

 

I only watched for the Lumberjack match and I thought it was pretty damn fun. Plus the HoB beat down was awesome. I don't know if it's been mentioned much, but I noticed that when they were attacking everyone they specifically didn't go after Ortiz. Not sure if that means anything or that's just me wanting to see him and Eddie in eyeliner lol.

 

I was confused by that because Malakai stopped Buddy and Brody from attacking Ortiz, but then I thought that's who Malakai was attacking outside of the ring shortly after that.

EDIT: Just went back to check. He does him give a quick boot, but then quickly moves on to Private Party so who knows?

 

This seems bad - hoping for the best

 

idk man, my figure fed was pretty much always fire back in the day

had scorpion from mortal kombat as my undefeated champion

 

Prob covid

 

I watched it...fun episode, but as miss-able an episode of TV as possible. Like, no world where OC was losing to THE jobber of AEW. The Darby match was fun. The rest...genuinely cant understand any of it. Athena's heel character SUCKS and why are we building a JJ/Lethal tag team?

Love me some Samoa Joe, but he's in exactly the same category of those guys as "doesnt move ratings, doesnt sell tickets, can put out an entertaining segment, but is mostly just taking TV time from someone younger/more interesting".

Give me a 1000 Joe matches before I have to pretend to care about a JJ match or a Dan Lambert promo, but, he's very much a guy I wish would go back to WWE to do enhancement work.

 

I already forgot about Athena

 

AEW has 26 signings in 2022...I can see 8 that were actually worth it, and that includes Yuta (who was already a part of AEW before 2022), and Regal/Renee (who are both non-wrestlers)

Might be more actively bad signings than good ones (Jake Atlas, JJ, PVZ, Jeff Hardy, Rush, Boudreaux, Juice...)

 

I know she's not great on the mic, but, her ring-work is solid...and she actually has a unique look...so weird to me to think that she's only been well used for like a 1yr period in NXT