Eric Bischoff had a lot to say about AEW on the latest “83 Weeks” podcast.
Eric Bischoff on his critique of AEW:
“People are sensitive and they don’t think. Critical thinking is history, in a lot of respects, particularly in social media. If you really listen to what I have to say, and I’m not encouraging people to spend more time listening to me. I sometimes get sick of hearing the sound of my own voice, but my criticisms, my critiques, my explanations for my reactions to things good and bad are there for everybody to see. It’s not emotion. There’s no hate. There’s no jealousy. There’s no resentment. There is a lack of respect and an honest opinion. Now, sometimes my opinion gets to be colorful, but it’s just who I am. It’s not coming from a place of wishing anybody would fail. Why would I wish he fails? I got no dog in the hunt as they say. The exact opposite is true. Anybody that knows me knows if there’s anything that I’ll react to emotionally, is seeing someone blow opportunities because opportunities as I’ve said a million times on this show, are so hard to come by, and not maximize those opportunities, it hurts.”
Bischoff on Tony Khan announcing AEW will be going back to presenting rankings on TV:
“It can be effective. It can also see you painting yourself into a corner that you’ll never get out of. That’s probably why it didn’t work out the first time because you’ve got to really do a great job of merging creative and math because those two things generally don’t go together. Usually good creative is kind of void of good math. Good math isn’t very creative, but it can be done.”
“It’s a big risk because if it’s not going well, if there’s a flaw in your system, your audience is going to see it and they’re going to let you know and they’re going to lose faith so fast. I liked the idea of doing it. I think it’s one of the things that I was excited about back in 2019 when I heard that this was going to be one of the things, this was going to be the unique selling proposition for those of you who have spent, I don’t know, 45 minutes in a marketing 101 class in junior college. That was the one thing that to me made AEW potentially feel different than WWE, but they abandoned it pretty quickly.”
“One of the dots that created the pattern that I began to see early on is you make a promise to your audience when you launch a brand, your branding statement, your mission statement, call whatever the f**k you want. ‘We are going to be different because we’re doing this’ then you get everybody to rally behind you, and then you don’t do this. You do the same thing they’re doing. It’s a big dent. It’s a big dent on the side of that brand new shiny AEW car. Big dent. You kicked the door in yourself. Let’s see. It can be done, but it’s really fu**ing hard. Really hard.”
“I’m concerned that since there’s been a severe lack of creative horsepower in AEW, inconsistent all over the map, non-existent more often than not in terms of real story. I should say a compelling story, meaning a story that actually matters. The void comes to creative that I’ve seen out of AEW for the last two years doesn’t suggest to me that there’s a lot of hope that they’re going to figure out that formula.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit AdFreeShows.com with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. Quotes were transcribed by Jim for WrestlingNews.co.
