That can be your primary catchphrase. The Undertaker said “rest in peace” nearly every promo. But he didn’t say it a dozen times each time you saw him.
For that matter, everyone in WWE and AEW and elsewhere needs to stop with this idea that they do their entrance taunt when they first come out on the stage, then they walk to the ring and do the same exact taunt inside the ring. You can’t think of a second thing to do?
Likewise (and this is not just an AEW thing) people need to stop calling their finishers just their own names or the like. Remember when Andrade was nicknamed El Idolo and his entrance theme started with that, and then, if he hit his finisher, the commentary team would say he hit El Idolo for the win? Stupid and unoriginal to not even have variations of the ideas (and no, “El Idolo Slam” or “El Idolo Bomb” doesn’t count)
Keep Signing Talent
The roster is getting stacked, but since AEW is dealing with a lot of unknown entities, it doesn’t hurt to have a reserve of talent to work with.
Lots of these men and women are young and still learning. Some of them may never get any better than what they are right now. If that’s the case, I think a good quarter of the roster, if not half, just doesn’t have what it takes to move the needle in any significant fashion.
That means AEW has to continue to experiment. People should be brought in from the indies as well as from WWE when their contracts expire. There has to be young talent who can grow and provide a fresh outlook on things as well as veterans they can learn from who can hold down the fort.
For the most part, AEW has done a great job doing this. This isn’t so much a resolution of what to fix, but more so what to continue to do and try to improve even more on.
At some point, the bubble will burst and there won’t be enough money to go around for all these contracts. Then, it’s time to cut the ones who didn’t prove their value. That sounds harsh, but it’s a business, after all, and not everyone can be on the top.
In particular, the women’s division can use many more stars who are better off than the ones currently relied upon. There’s some serious talent on the AEW roster, but I think the bulk of the women’s division is rather lackluster and I’d like to see some more seasoned performers come in to fill in the blanks, rather than relying on 80% of the people being those who are still learning some of the more basics.
Stop Relying on Pure Match Interest
Both AEW and WWE are guilty of sometimes not bothering to concoct a feud or a story and simply making a whole feud revolve around “the fans want to see the match” and nothing more.
That’s perfectly fine for a match if it’s not an elongated wait. For instance, fans wanted to see FTR against The Young Bucks so much that if that had been announced a few weeks after FTR joined the company, it wouldn’t have needed any proper story.
However, don’t drag that out. Don’t just turn this into waiting a month or two of saying “This match will be great, won’t it? Tune in!” Put some effort into it. (Also, logical effort. Not whatever happened with Matt and Nick Jackson turning heel like that.)
As much as I don’t want to see Miro feuding with Moxley over a broken video game, I also don’t want to be pitched that the only interesting thing worth holding onto is hoping they do something different when the match actually happens and that I’ll have to wait weeks/months to get to that point while just being reminded of how it’s coming in the future.
Again, WWE does this, too. That’s basically all that happened with AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura and that ended up being a mess that they turned into a terrible feud after they had that “dream match” at WrestleMania.
Dream matches can sell, but the more they’re hinging entirely on the value of seeing two people in the ring opposite each other and nothing else, the more it seems watching the television episodes leading up to that point is a waste of time.
Those are my suggestions, but what ideas do you have in mind, particularly for the wrestlers who didn’t make my list? Do you have any resolutions for yourself this year? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!
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