Ring Of Honor COO Joe Koff Interview: ROH 500, Product Relaunch, Maintaining Talent, More

Would we have seen this format of ROH TV eventually or are we only seeing it now because it's a matter of making the most of a bad situation?

Koff: I think it's more of the latter. It wasn't a bad situation, and I think the pandemic was a bad situation, but it was really opportunistic to us because it challenged us to use all of our assets differently and to keep creating original content. Part of that 500th episode, and if you're a TV guy or a TV person, you know that 100 episodes in the industry is huge. 500 episodes are unheard of. These are still 500 original episodes. This is not 500 episodes of TV that had reruns in it. We continued to create original content throughout the pandemic. We weren't live matches that everyone was able to see, but what we were able to provide was a very, very personal look at our talent.

To me, it's one of the joys of Ring of Honor and also one of the keys thing of Ring of Honor: how authentic and how real our people are and how respected they are as human beings and as athletes. I think those series of shows before we started the Pure Tournament allowed a very intimidate, nice, personal look at the wrestler, and I really like the way we put those together. We started thinking, how do we make this more sports-centric? It's always been something I wanted to have in our production because we treat wrestling as a sport.

Our guys are athletes, serious about their craft, and I wanted that sports-centric feel. I wanted it to look like a little bit differently and we had the chance to do that. One of the incredible things is that we were able to present TV without spoilers, which we were never able to do before. People watching weekly ROH TV now are actually able to watch it for the first time without knowing what happens on it.

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