AEW vs NXT

General
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Honestly the AEW crowd seemed a little less excited this week. They did not look super into the women’s match, and chanted against the officiating in the main event.

As to Stunt, him kicking out is a cheap pop in both places but it isn’t a good long term idea.

That is one fear I have about AEW that I think JC is right about, they care about the match being put on in the moment more than they care about the story it is telling overall in many cases. Too many kick outs leads to the audience just expecting it, same with 20 min matches on the regular.

They still have my interest certainly more than WWE main roster does at this point because my criticisms are way more minor for AEW. If I were to try to remark on WWE main roster shows to the same depth it would be super negative at this point.

IF I had to Rank my favorite telivised wrestling shows right now it would be
1.) NXT
2.) AEW

giant gap

3.) Raw
decent gap
4.) Smack Down.

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One thing we all agree on…
Spears looks ridiculous

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You have a point but that crowd will cheer anything. It’s a bit short sighted to just focus on them. Yes it’s important to have a hot crowd. But it has to attract new fans as well.

New fans won’t love seeing a dead crowd. Totally agree. But you don’t need to go overboard Catering to people who love you no matter what you do.

No reason to kick out of that pump handle For instance.

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The replies to this tweet…

Math can do anything when you’ve already picked a side before you’ve seen the numbers.

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Wow. AEW continues to fall win to baseball. Looks like they will only be drawing a million

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Again, for a product most with an educated guess would have thought about 500K this early in their existence… A million regular viewers is huge.

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It keeps dropping. For some reason they didn’t include TruTV numbers. It’s down like 10 percent. That’s coming off good shows.

I am telling you this stuff that the live crowd likes isn’t great for TV

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Can you please explain NXT’s numbers falling?

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No one cares about NXT? It’s minor league.

Meltzer brother in law effect

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AEW and NXT are rather close viewership wise (closer to one another than to main roster and they are within what viewership fluctuates on main roster shows regularly) I think it shows that it is hard to attract and keep people without established stars. AEW gets the non-wwe bump and has more known stars.

NXT also has established viewing habits for many people on the network rather than tuning in on Wednesdays.

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NXT’s numbers stink, 30th in the 18-49 demo .- yeesh

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Here is my scale thus far for nationally televised wrestling shows (no internet only or ROH-Sinclair not national enough)

  1. AEW
  2. NJPW on AXS
  3. Raw
  4. NXT
  5. IMPACT ( It is currently showing reruns. Starting October 29th they will have new shows). I can see them moving up my list when that starts. Impact! Has great wrestling and decent stories. Matthews is good.
    New TV deal, can’t wait.
  6. Smackdown
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In terms of the numbers, NXT isn’t even designed to be mainstream so the numbers for them aren’t really that important. They’re a developmental promotion on TV that target the most hardcore of wrestling fans. But maybe context doesn’t matter, AEW have higher ratings so they’re better. Which must mean SmackDown is the best wrestling show followed by Raw. Context doesn’t matter… The dipping ratings are definitely a bigger issue for AEW, NXT’s ratings dipping won’t affect WWE at all.

In terms of the shows this week, I don’t think there was much to complain about on either show unlike last week where I thought AEW wasn’t that good. Overall I’d say AEW was the better show as they had more going on, giving away a women’s title match and an AEW title match on the show. NXT’s main event was the best match of the 2 shows though. Damian Priest can be a big deal on NXT and on the main roster. The man is a star.

The novelty of AEW being a new show is starting to wear off and they’re gonna have to make their wrestlers a lot more interesting. Only ones doing interesting character work right now are Jericho and Cody. The matches are all starting to become quite similar for both NXT and AEW, everyone’s on the same level and everyone brings out near falls from each other. NXT were better about it this week and had a few quicker matches but there needs to be more variety from both shows.

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Why Raw that far up…?

Both Raw & SmackDown have the potential to be great shows because of the amazing talent they have so hopefully they stop trying to deliver the Attitude Era (which wasn’t that good in terms of matches or angles). SmackDown in 2018 was actually a good show and only started being underwhelming when they started mixing the rosters in the build up to WrestleMania. They’re capable of delivering, they just need to stop doing dumb shit.

In terms of right now though, Raw isn’t very good in my opinion.

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This was my favorite AEW TV show so far. I liked absolutely everything about it, minus couple of issues with the tag matches, as pointed earlier, but I think a lot of you missed one that actually bothered me a lot - during the Lucha Bros match, Phoenix constantly during the match was ambushing Jungle Boy while Pentagon and Marko were the legal guys inside the ring. The cameras did not showed it much, but if you pay attention you’ll see him constantly beating JB outside. How is that not a DQ after a certain point?

Anyway, besides this I had ton of fun with this match. Disappointed fur Luchasaurus, but was really curious to see Marko in a situation like this one and I find myself entertained. Note how all of his offense was tilt-a-something when he was thrown at people, he did not engage in a fist fight or anything, this is why I actually suspended my disbelief and just enjoyed the action and the story. Should he kicked out of that move near the end? Maybe not, but it’s not like he jumped up, made a return and ran rabid after that, rather Lucha Bros got greatly annoyed and just actually killed him. Loved that match.

SCU vs BF was also another really fun tag match to watch, where the story they told made the crowd go crazy - great work from Scorpio Sky here.

The women’s match was clumsy when it started, but Riho has this ability to draw the crowd into it and I see her do this three times now, where a match that is not actually good, for some reason she manages to engage the crowd into it and make them go crazy. Which also translates on TV and I get engaged excited about it. Are there better female wrestlers out there? For goddamn sure, but is she doing her job at the best to her abilities? For GODDAMN sure. According to Meltzer she is over BIG with teenage girls - maybe one of the reasons she is featured on every show too. I personally am OK with just to be excited where there is a match with her, because I know she’ll tell a good story and make the crowd go crazy at the end of her match. What more do you want from a wrestler?

The Cody video package was really, really good, I’d like to see at least couple of those during their shows.

The first loss of PAC came after a great match and a great, simple story that lead to it. It was smart and made sense. That is what I want from my wrestling show.

Main Event was another really good match where it did what it was meant to do - Jericho to make Darbi over. Both of them worked their asses off and it was a flying success at the end.

Only minus of the show - no video packages on the INSANE match between Omega and Jelly Janelly last week. They must hype the hell out of matches like this one on Dark. They must actually tell on TV that this show exists.

I didn’t realized how much of a WWE stink NXT has till I had to see their show stand up against competition. I mean, I am down NXT this entire year now, for some reason it fails to engage me like before and after AEW debuted, I can point to the WWE stench all over it.

Does it have good, matches, promos and packages? Sure, but it lacks… something. When I see who is in the ring I pretty much know who will win because he is this tall, or this big, or having this physique. One of the reasons I just could not care or get into the Dunn/Martinez match. There was NO WAY IN HELL (I thought) Dunn will win this one. Well, I was right. Thus I will not care for the next familiar match they have on their show.

The NXT setting and the Full Sail crowd are not helping me either. If anything - they push me even further from their product. Hopefully next year they’ll start to travel and this part of the show will get fixed. Right now it is embarrassingly laughable listening to 10 people in the crowd scream “FIGHT FOREVER!” during a mediocre match. Meanwhile on the other show I can SEE and FEEL the entire crowd go crazy for the good stuff.

If I have to rate what TV show I like the most at the moment, I’ll go like that:

AEW
NWA POWERRR (such a pleasant surprise this show turned out to be!)
NXT
And way down the drainer are RAW and SD, which I can’t separate still, cause both feel the same.

Maybe I’ll give Impact a third chance (is it next week?), but not sure I’ll have the time to do so. I’m really sorry for ROH, cause I really enjoyed their product couple of years ago, but than something happened with their product too and I almost completely lost interest with them.

Thus said, New Japan keeps holding on the King of Pro-Wrestling title (pun intended) when it comes to big shows for me still - this is a product you must actually watch the in ring to get how the stories are developing, something that lacks big on the US scene.

Sorry for the wall of text, I guess I just had a lot to say.

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Interesting that you complain about predictable outcomes in NXT but not AEW (no way was Jericho losing that main event, Riho wasn’t losing her title either, Lucha Bros were a pretty obvious pick). I felt that Priest was the likely winner because he is newer and they are trying to get him over rather than his body size. I mean look at their champions they are all on the smaller side, by your argument Riddle should have been an obvious pick over Cole for example.

I feel when some fans mention the WWE stink it means that they will be more critical of things on the WWE program because they don’t like the company rather than those things being worse in reality (the obvious victory thing not the show.)

As to AEWs crowd, I don’t know if it is still happening but I have heard that they tell the crowd to make a lot of noise (at least they did the first show) so I am not sure how much I buy things like Riho really engaging the crowd. NXT does this too with the full sail crowd, so I don’t always judge the matches by crowd noise. To me the crowd looked pretty dead during the AEW women’s match visually and I find it difficult to care when they haven’t really built up any of the characters. This week they were both face characters so why was I supposed to care who won? I have no affinity for either of them because AEW hasn’t given me much reason to care.

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With the third hour of Raw being under 2 million, would it be possible that AEW draws something comparable in the next 12 months?

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I would say no based on the current trends, but it isn’t impossible.

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As mentioned by @Breng77, you can’t complain about obvious winners and then give AEW a free pass. It is a noticeable pattern with AEW fans though.

Same thing with the crowds. I’m not a fan of the NXT crowd chanting “Fight forever”, “This is awesome” or the name of the promotion at every small opportunity but the AEW crowd does the same. They were chanting “This is awesome” during matches that were just okay.

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Agree.

The AEW crowd is different.

I’ll be honest I went to All Out and sat ringside in the second row by the entrance ramp with wife - I don’t think I’ll attend another AEW event unless it’s local.

I’ve been to many WWE events locally and travelled to WM etc for reference.

Here was the main reasons I won’t:

A- AEW crowd is mostly men - hardly any women or children. Made my wife a bit uncomfortable. WWE shows have lots of women and kids.

B-I sent pics to my friends from the line and they all asked if I was at an NRA convention. It was basically all white people, a lot of tats, a lot of smokers. WWE shows are way more multicultural.

C-Crowd is hyper into everything to the extent it feels fake. At WM we booed stuff that sucked and that itself was fun. Here no matter what it is you can’t boo it or people stare at you and call you a WWE lover. The mentality is you are going to love it no matter what.

All in all Iiked the show but I felt that I didn’t fit into with the crowd. The guys near me were also POC and we joked if we were getting out alive. It’s a but intimidating of a crowd to be a part of if you aren’t a White male. WWE, while the show isn’t as fun often, at least you don’t feel like a sore thumb in the crowd.

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