10 Things That Didn't Go The Way AEW Wanted

The late, great Mr. Brodie Lee will forever stand as a key player in the history of All Elite Wrestling, with him correcting the course of the doomed Dark Order, bringing a rarely-seen level of brutality to the company that legitimised the TNT Title, and his tragic passing and the handling of that sad situation being pivotal in CM Punk and Bryan Danielson signing with AEW.

While it was entirely out of everybody's hands, the AEW debut of Brodie didn't go how anybody in AEW had envisioned it.

That debut was meticulously planned to happen in the Rochester, New York hometown of the real-life Jon Huber on the 18 March 2020 episode of AEW Dynamite. Mr. Brodie would indeed debut as the Exalted One on that Dynamite outing, but this unfortunately took place in a completely empty Daily's Place in Jacksonville, Florida.

Of course, the initial plans for the big hometown debut of Mr. Brodie Lee were scuppered by the COVID-19 pandemic. By wretched coincidence, Lee's debut fell on the first Dynamite episode to take place in an entirely empty venue. The world was in shock and uncertainty about the unravelling pandemic, and AEW was left with no choice but to either a) completely cancel all future programming, or b) continue on but have to perform in front of zero fans at Daily's Place.