10 Precise Moments Wrestling Bookers Lost Their Minds
9. Delirious
In a cyclical way, Ring of Honor followed the same, strange path laid down by the WWF in 2001: they lost their minds when they'd never been bigger.
The difference is that the peak of the Attitude Era was untenable; ROH had vastly more they could have accomplished.
ROH had grown its business considerably with the Young Bucks and subsequently the Bullet Club Elite at the forefront of the promotion. Every town was up. The buzz could not be ignored, and it was crystallised at Supercard of Honor 2018, at which the promotion drew its biggest ever house for a solo-promoted show: 6,100 fans packed into the UNO Lakefront Arena to watch the Elite implode.
They also watched on as Delirious sh*t the bed.
The show was senselessly, punishingly long to its fateful detriment. The wider wrestling contentsphere was already reaching an event horizon. There was simply too much of it; surely, the play was to broadcast the best possible show, in order to capitalise on the buzz, but to provide the fans with an incentive to return and watch the next round of narrative developments unfold. The sheer, exhausting bloat made that impossible.
Kenny Omega Vs. Cody went 37:15, and the crowd were already knackered by that point, having watched two tag matches that went a combined 43:37. Omega Vs. Cody was the eighth match on a main card where virtually every other attraction went at least three minutes longer than it should have, and the main event between Marty Scurll and a badly injured Dalton Castle went 31:37, inexplicably, and played out to near-total silence. This match time made it feel even longer than it actually was - and it was already stupidly long.
Delirious on the night took a promotion at its hottest, and made everybody who might have given it a chance subsequently never want to see the initials ever again.