Chris Jericho Says AEW Sent WWE NXT "Screaming & Yelling" Away From Wednesday Nights
Chris Jericho holds nothing back in his final take on the Wednesday Night Wars...
On this, the first week without a Wednesday night wrestling ratings war since October 2019, Chris Jericho has claimed AEW sent WWE NXT "screaming and yelling away from Wednesdays."
Le Champion did so in an interview with Forbes' Alfred Konuwa, saying that while AEW were primarily focused on producing their own show with Dynamite, they weren't blind to the competition on the other channel:-
“Of course we’re competitive. Yes, we wanted to beat NXT. Yes, we wanted to drive them screaming and yelling away from Wednesdays and we did that."
NXT's first Tuesday night show went down this week, with WWE's black and gold brand scoring a 0.22 18-49 rating and a viewership of 805,000 in their first unopposed week after leaving Wednesday nights. Though the 18-49 number was unchanged from the previous week, viewership was up by 37,000.
Last night's Dynamite rating will come out at around 4pm EST today.
The Forbes interview also saw Jericho claim that the reason AEW was successful in besting NXT most weeks was because they were more focused on themselves, while WWE was watching Dynamite more intently:-
“Really nothing. We’ve never really worried about what NXT was doing. I know WWE NXT was watching our stuff during their show, but this was not a war that we were ever asking for, we were kind of thrust into it by proxy. The reason why we won it and won it so handily, is we never worried about what anybody else was doing, we just worried about our own show.”
Ultimately, the much-vaunted Wednesday Night War ended up being a squash match, with NXT only finishing above Dynamite in the cable rankings once on head-to-head weeks.