Hot Wrestling Takes So BAD They'll MELT Your Brain
7. Eric Bischoff Says That AEW Matches Have No Story
After AEW stopped calling Eric Bischoff in for a cameo - effectively rendering him unemployable, since he made the Deep South Wrestling management team look like 1995 Paul Heyman as 'Executive Director' of SmackDown - he became a hot take guy.
Much like WCW when New Japan had nothing he could borrow, it did not go well. It did for a while - you couldn't go on Twitter a couple of years ago without reading some aggregation of his bad faith criticism - but people eventually stopped feeding the troll.
In 2021, Bischoff infamously buried AEW's ability to tell stories - at a time when they were best-in-class at precisely that. Apparently, they didn't even tell them.
The opposite was true, if anything, The old rankings-driven narrative framework meant that every AEW match had stakes and an indirect, in-built story - you win, you ascend to title contention - and even then, Khan couldn't book a single fixture without some backstage promo interruption or other. Khan was obsessed with giving every match a reason to exist, even if the pretext was unnecessary.
Easy E did backpedal somewhat when Tony Khan pointed out that WCW in its heyday promoted cold, random matches every single week. He had been clamped, but he moved the goalposts (h/t WrestlingNews.co).
"If I've ever given the impression that I thought every match on Nitro had a storyline, forgive me now. It is really about your top matches that don't have sufficient story or structure, or at least a compelling one."
This is especially stupid, considering that AEW for a long disproved the idea that PPV was dead by building several major matches over the long-term that compelled fans to pay for the blow-off. Ironically, since Bischoff is no stranger to a happy ending, he failed to pay any of his big stories off.
Compare Starrcade '97 to Full Gear 2021 and - as with March 26, 2001 - there is no competition.