Happy Anniversary To Eric Bischoff Making The WORST Wrestling Prediction Ever (AEW News)

For those who like to keep track of these things, it's been one year since former WCW head honcho Eric Bischoff made quite the bold claim about TNA and AEW.

Yes, it's one year since Bischoff appeared on The Ariel Helwani Show, where he predicted that, "by this time next year", TNA would've surpassed AEW to become the second-biggest wrestling company in terms of "television ratings" and "popularity".

Now, Eazy E did have the caveat that this claim was dependent on what sort of TV deal TNA lands, of course. On that front, the Anthem outlet landed itself a deal with AMC that kicked in at the start of this year. Since then, ratings have been fairly solid for TNA, with last week's iMPACT, per Wrestlenomics, bringing in 286,000 viewers and the show having a four-week average of 220,000. For those looking for a ratings comparison, last week's AEW Dynamite scored 786,000, and this past weekend's AEW Collision picked up 399,000. As for WWE, SmackDown has been around the 1.2 million mark for the past couple of weeks, whereas Raw ratings aren't available since the Monday night flagship moved to Netflix nearly 18 months ago.

At the time of that appearance with Ariel Helwani, Eric Bischoff praised TNA for "producing a show for the mainstream wrestling audience", while lambasting AEW for targetting the "10% hardcore sicko that everybody thinks is a cool demo".

Eric would famously make a handful of appearances in AEW through 2020 and 2021, and he also had a four-year stint with TNA from 2010 to 2014, some of which has recently been documented in Dark Side of the Ring.