Every AEW Title Reign Ranked From Worst To Best
A wrestling champion can't just be booked as a champion.
All Elite Wrestling isn't just a name or a pun.
The idea is to create a perfect pro wrestling promotion. It's the only chance any major promotion has of competing with the promotion so dominant that it's a synonym of professional wrestling.
"What, that WWE stuff?" is the question AEW really wants to change.
It just so happens that this is to be achieved by running through the Don't Do What Donny WWE Does checklist: no f*ck finishes, no scripted promos, no endless rematches, no homogenised in-ring style, no general, stilted weirdness. To become Elite, AEW is attempting to restore that on which pro wrestling was built, leaving no cornerstone unturned.
Key to this - since pro wrestling, reduced, is a star-making business - is that the champions must feel like champions. The idea is to make titles feel like titles, and not props. AEW's entire business model is predicated on everything feeling premium, prestigious, worthy. There are four pay-per-views per year, and the more significant revenue stream of episodic TV functions to sell them.
The big title fight is nothing if the champ is a tentative experiment, an office favourite, or just a plain bust.
So are AEW changing that question?
8. Nyla Rose - Women's Title
A reign absolutely knackered by lockdown, people don't like excuses - particularly when those people are weirdly keen to over-exaggerate every minor flaw on AEW programming - but "literally not able to be physically present you stunningly thick d*ckheads" isn't an excuse.
The Women's division was trending upwards when Rose captured the title from Riho on February 12 in a match so fantastic, and so well-built, that the sight of Riho smashing Rose with a series of snap dragons didn't feel remotely preposterous. The very witty Rose had the potential (and range) to play babyface-leaning tweener in her scheduled mini-programme with Bea Priestley and subsequently pivot to either extreme opposite the fantastically obnoxious Britt Baker and the enchanting Yuka Sakazki. Riho, Hikaru Shida and Kris Statlander formed the rest of a diverse and strong nucleus.
But even before everything changed, and no less than four of the division's key figures were stranded in Japan or seriously injured, it was still apparent that Rose, great in a certain genre, wasn't the Ace needed to elevate all around her. Her ambitious Revolution defence opposite Statlander fell apart completely.
AEW operated with less than half of the roster for no less than five weeks in QT Marshall's training school. Rose, locked down, could not be there.
The reign ended (on a real high) because it was felt, seemingly, that Hikaru Shida - as the far better worker - stood the best chance of playing the rising tide...