7 Promises AEW Have Made Since Launching (But Haven't Kept)
1. The Real Sport Feel
The "real sport feel" trumpeted by AEW officials from the moment the promotion was first unveiled in Jacksonville has come in for boatloads of criticism over the past 13 months - and understandably so.
While the company has succeeded in hitting some aspects of this (the win/loss records, booking mechanisms, presentation of guys like Cody and Chris Jericho as prizefighters, etc. definitely help the product feel more like sports than Sports Entertainment), there's a lot that undermines it. An act like The Dark Order can't exist in a real sport. Tag rules are treated with such flippancy that they may as well not exist. Referees and other officials are regularly undermined or made to look foolish. The in-house tag style, as thrilling as its flips and dives can be, isn't always "realistic." Bruisers like Jake Hager and Wardlow (whom you'd fancy to wreck most of the roster in a real combat sports environment) haven't even wrestled yet.
The irony of the situation is that while AEW made this promise in their quest for differentiation, NXT's framework is far closer to a "real sport feel" than theirs at the moment. New Japan, meanwhile, dwarves both.