14 Ups & 0 Downs From Last Night's WWE NXT (Oct 16)
No viewers? No problem.
What a time to be wrestling fan. Still.
Chasing their tails and the highs of the first TakeOver-style offering from the first full week on USA Network, NXT have been forced to try and make an awesome product even better to compete with an All Elite Wrestling juggernaut fuelled on novelty as much as nailed-on quality. AEW, with partial justification, also remain the babyfaces in this weekly feud, even though it's the wrestling audience that are served a heroes bounty every Wednesday night.
Actively damaging the credibility of the brand, the wrestling media at large has become so blindly effusive in its praise of the opposition of late that it’s been easy to assume that the “War” is already lost and NXT may as well just cease to exist.
Make no mistake here, WWE are being forced to swallow the consequences of their own actions. AEW’s creative successes and failures would be subject to far more cogent analysis if it wasn’t for the NXT USA move Vince McMahon pushed for. Instead, an expected weekly ratings hammering enhances the exhaustingly cliched criticisms of a very good Full Sail product.
This week in particular, those criticisms would caustically unfounded. This show ruled...