12 Exact Moments AEW Booking Stopped Making Sense

7. The Full Gear 2023 Show-Long Angle (November 18, 2023)

There’s a lot to unpack here.

MJF and Adam Cole became friends in the late spring of 2023. They formed the skit-loving team Better Than You Bay-Bay, the most succinct way of describing which is “just about entertaining and charming enough to get away with itself”.

That was the peak. The decline was astonishingly bad.

Adam Cole shattered his ankle at Grand Slam in September ‘23, which somehow didn’t necessitate a TV write-off. This injury was so bad that Cole ended up missing over a year of action. The injury was so bad and complex that a dead man’s bone was inserted into his foot via experimental surgery.

AEW was and is meant to be the vaguely sports-oriented promotion in the U.S. mainstream. At a minimum, its “world” should make sense in the context of a sport. Typically, football players with destroyed legs are not allowed to enter the field.

On the Full Gear pre-show, MJF was attacked by the Gunns and, in a hook, was sent away in an ambulance. With his knee in agony, he couldn’t defend his title against Jay White! Who stepped up?

The even more injured Adam Cole. The even more injured Adam Cole who A) was even more injured than MJF, B) under no circumstances would ever get cleared to compete by a conscientious, fit-for-purpose medical team, and C) was plotting to betray MJF, and had no idea that MJF would make his heroic return just in time for the main event.

Illogical barely captures how overthought this whole thing was - and that wasn’t the worst of it…