10 Fascinating Backstage Facts From CM Punk's AEW Run

7. A Slower Pace

CM Punk stats
AEW/Scott Lesh

Fact: CM Punk wrestled more matches in his last two-plus months in WWE than he did in his entire AEW run.

During his two-year run, CM Punk stepped between the ropes quite a few times, but it wasn’t as frequent as you might think.

Punk competed in 33 televised matches for AEW, amassing an impressive 27-6 record between September 2021 and August 2023. That barely works out to 1.5 matches per month. Even if you factor in the time he missed due to injury, it doesn’t match the pace Punk kept in WWE.

The last 33 televised matches Punk wrestled for WWE came in the span of 4-1/2 months, a much crisper pace of more than seven matches per month. Once you add in house shows, Punk wrestled his last 33 WWE matches in just over two months.

Obviously, there are numerous factors at play here, with Punk being nearly a decade older and AEW having far fewer TV hours each week to fill than WWE. But it’s impossible to ignore how much more of an attraction he was in AEW.

Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.