12 Exact Moments AEW Booking Stopped Making Sense

10. The Early Days Of The Death Riders (October 30, 2024)

The Death Riders stable, ultimately, was a major success. In this era, the booking draws more heat than any fictional heel. The idea of Hangman Page finally putting a stop to hokey crime sprees and relentless heat angles drove the smash success of All In: Texas. (It helps and should not go unmentioned that Jon Moxley finally realised his potential as a top heel with a couple of months to spare). Bad and or repetitive booking with a great payoff is the new long-term storytelling.

Initially, the stable was abysmal and nonsensical. Here’s an example, one that thwarted the early promise of an overarching, interconnected plot designed to restore “the feeling”.

Jon Moxley broke Zay’s hand because he was disgusted that the Private Party member had stagnated in the same spot. Zay was everything wrong with AEW: a company that itself was languishing.

Zay together with Marq Quen very quickly - too quickly - dethroned World Tag Team champions the Young Bucks. Surely, Private Party should have cut a promo on the Death Riders, telling them they had not forgotten about Mox’s violent attack. They should have asked the Death Riders to call them stagnant now. Private Party should have then feuded with Claudio Castagnoli and Wheeler YUTA over the belts. Nope: this thread was dropped. Instead, the two squads simply ignored one another.

Daniel Garcia, another early defender of AEW, won the TNT title, and didn’t do a great deal with it. Shouldn’t this have drawn the ire of PAC? Shouldn’t Garcia have asked PAC, who in his mind was superior to anybody else in AEW, where his singles title was?

It was as if Private Party and Daniel Garcia skulked away, defending their titles in random matches. Neither reign, unsurprisingly, was particularly good.

This was haphazard in the extreme. Nothing fit together.