BRM Reviews the 2/26/2020 Dynamite (very bad)
Posted: Feb 26th, '20, 20:58
30-MINUTE IRONMAN MATCH: Pac vs. Kenny Omega (w/the Young Bucks)- 8/10
JR points out that Kenny’s tag team championship partner Adam Page isn’t at ringside with him, but their challengers in three days, the Young Bucks, are at ringside with Kenny. This was a good thing to point out based on the angle, but I’m wondering where Michael Nakazawa is, considering that he is Kenny’s best friend and Pac apparently beat the sh*t out of him off screen TWICE.
I know this is a very minor nit to pick, but the font they used for their scoreboard was a poor choice. The zeros look sideways. Either that or they accidentally used “o” instead of “0.” Like I said, it’s a minor nit, but once the scoreboard popped up, I couldn’t not see it.
As a wrestling match I thought this was awesome. From a booking point of view, however, it was a total clusterf*ck. What’s worse is that all of the problems revolved around the inexplicable decision to make this an Ironman match.
To start off with the smallest thing, if you’re going to have a “thirty second rest period” then Paul Turner needs to check on the wrestlers within that thirty seconds. By the time Turner was asking them if they were ready to continue, fifteen seconds had already ticked off the clock after it paused for thirty.
Now for the actual booking. Last week I praised AEW for having the guts to not put an escape the cage stipulation on the main event. If Cody has to beat Warlow in a cage in order to get his match with MJF, then Cody needs to actually BEAT the guy, no matter how temping it might be to throw in a stipulation that lefts Cody still win but lets you keep touting Wardlow has having never been pinned or made to submit.
I hereby revoke that praise. If you’re going to do an Ironman match, you need to f*cking BEAT both wrestlers. Several times. Or else what’s the point of the stip? What they gave us here was a two out of three falls match with a tease of a disappointing draw in the middle. And they wouldn’t even beat either guy for the first fall. Instead they took the cheap way out by having Pac get DQed on purpose with a chairshot, then using the damage from the chairshot to pin Kenny to tie things up pretty much immediately afterwards, so neither guy really got beat until the final fall… which begs the question why they didn’t just do a singles match. And just to make this worse, doing this threw away the very first DQ in AEW history in this pointless spot where it had zero impact.
If you don’t do the Ironman match we also don’t run into the following problems: After our thirty minutes of wrestling we had a tie. Pac punched the referee because he was angry, so I hope he’ll be getting suspended. That’s what happened to Nyla Rose, after all.
And moments after the referee was knocked out by a punch from Pac, Justin Roberts told us that the match would continue under sudden death rules and ordered the timekeeper to ring the bell, even though we had no conscious referee. Aubrey Edwards ran down to ringside to take over for Paul Turner, which is fine in a vacuum, but problematic when you remember that less than fifteen minutes ago we had a ref bump and no one came out to take over for the downed referee.
Kenny hits this huge knee, then hits a huge ripcord knee… and the fans are all chanting for the f*cking referee! He’s setting up for the Kamagoye… and the fans are still chanting for Aubrey Edwards. I don’t get it (you might say it’s not fair of me to blame dumb fan chants on AEW, but this isn’t the first time fans have reacted to her like she’s some sort of superstar who they chant for, so they had to know this was a possibility).
Every last one of these problems would have been avoided if they had just had a singles match, which is what would make the most sense anyway because there was no build of any sort towards an Ironman stipulation… but they had to do the Ironman stip because STIPULATION MAKE THE SHOW BIGGER, DAMMIT! And now what? Pac is going to complain that he wasn’t ready for the bell to ring for sudden death (I don’t think he was even facing Kenny when he did) and so he’s going to complain and want another match with Kenny, and we’ll be right back where we started?
TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS PAC- I’m not going to lie… I, too, thought it came off like Tony was rubbing Pac’s loss in his face more than trying to get an answer to a real question. Then Orange Cassidy wandered out onto the stage and got in Pac’s face, so Pac punched him in the face and stomped his head into the stage. Security came out to save Orange Cassidy.
JURASSIC EXPRESS vs. THE INNER CIRCLE (Sammy Guevara & Proud & Powerful)- 6/10
A spotfest. Darby Allin helped the babyfaces win by stopping the heels from cheating. He backdropped Guevara over the top rope after the match.
MJF VS. CODY VIDEO PACKAGE- long
THE BUTCHER & THE BLADE (w/the Bunny) vs. BEST FRIENDS (w/Orange Cassidy)- 2.5/10
Orange Cassidy is apparently just fine after getting his head stomped in. Why even do the f*cking angle, then?
A tag team match happened and was interrupted for dumb Orange Cassidy shenanigans, because that’s important in AEW. Seriously. If Orange Cassidy and The Bunny are the only two people in the ring, that means that the legal man for both teams is on the floor, but instead of applying a count, Bryce Remsburg just stands there and watches the dumbf*ckery. Once Goofball McGoofington got his spots in, we went immediately to the babyfaces hitting their finisher and winning.
Orange Cassidy is the problem with wrestling nowadays. There. I said it. Call me a Jim Cornette if you want, but if we want fans to not react to Kenny Omega teasing Kota Ibushi’s finisher in the sudden death portion of an Ironman match that has been built for weeks by chanting for the f*cking referee, we need to start reeducating fans right away, and step one is taking away the goofball horse sh*t.
(For those wondering, step two is putting a moratorium on all table spots until fans stop chanting “WE WANT TABLES!” Every time there is a “WE WANT TABLES!” chant, every wrestler in the industry should agree to not do a table bump for a week. And if it happens in a match that has DQs, it should be two weeks.)
TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS BEST FRIENDS & ORANGE CASSIDY- terrible
He also announced that Orange Cassidy will wrestle Pac at Revolution. Yeah. They’re really wasting a PPV spot with Orange Cassidy. None of the wrestlers took this announced match with a dangerous opponent who had attacked Orange Cassidy less than an hour ago seriously in any way.
YUKA SAKAZAKI vs. BIG SWOLE vs. HIKARU SHIDA vs. SHANNA- 4/10
We’ve got four women in this match, and three of them are in cosplay gear. That’s too many people in one promotionwearing cosplay gear, never mind in one match. The match came off as very choreographed and spotty. The spot that broke me was someone running around a pin so she could hit a sliding lariat to the person making the pin instead of just running into the pin to break it up.
DARK ORDER PROMO- fine
They’re going to show SCU “the true might of the Dark Order” at the PPV. They said Daniels would learn that he is now “obsolete.” Hmmm…
JR’S SIT-DOWN INTERVIEW WITH THE YOUNG BUCKS, ADAM PAGE, & KENNY OMEGA- meh
The last minute or so was good, but it took WAY too long to get there. I’m also pretty sure that this was the first time that Page leaving the Elite was addressed by the wrestlers themselves in the several months since the extremely poor decision was made to separate him from the group. What they did with this whole thing was pulled a Russo: They broke Page off from the stable for no good reason, only to keep him constantly involved with the stable so that they could shoot a break-up angle!
JERICHO/MOXLEY WEIGH-IN- hated it
1. Why are we having a weigh-in when there is no weight limit, either upper or lower?
2. Even if there were a weight-limit, doing a weigh-in THREE DAYS BEFORE THE FIGHT is pretty f*cking worthless.
We’ve got scantily-clad ring girls. There goes all of that woke cred that AEW is so fond of. Also, Gary Michael Capetta was not only involved in this, but was also given his own introduction. Taz told us that GMC had many years of “legitimate ring announcing experience.” As opposed to what? Fake ring announcing where he’s just standing there in the ring lip-synching?
GMC appears to have forgotten the name of the PPV. Not a good look.
Jericho grand-standed a bunch. Moxley attacked Jericho for no reason whatsoever, so the Inner Circle beat him up. Dustin Rhodes ran in to fight Hager and they brawled away. Darby Allin came in because he’s feuding with Sammy and got beaten up and had a skateboard broken over his head. Jericho hit Moxley with a low blow, then his own finisher, then hit Moxley with Moxley’s own finisher on the scale so Moxley bled a lot.
This probably sounds like a good go-home angle to you, but let me remind you that JERICHO STABBED MOXLEY IN THE EYE LAST MONTH. This is a come-down from that.
My main problem with this whole thing, though, was how contrived it felt. It felt like they realized that they wanted to get some heat on Jericho and Sammy going into the PPV so they booked a segment that had zero logical reason to occur and had Moxley start a fight just to start a fight so that he could get laid out by Jericho, had Dustin run in to plug his match with Hager, and had Darby run in so Sammy could get his heat back on him.
I thought this was a pretty bad show in general (especially once the Pac vs. Omega match was over), but as a go-home show in particular I think it was bad… but not for the usual reasons. I think the problem with this show as a go-home show was that most of what they were doing peaked last week, making this week feel like either a bunch of lesser angles or stuff that felt like it was being done specifically to get some last-minute heat because they didn’t know what else to do. Whatever the reason, though, this was a bad show, and putting Pac vs. Orange Cassidy on a PPV has me questioning AEW’s judgment.
JR points out that Kenny’s tag team championship partner Adam Page isn’t at ringside with him, but their challengers in three days, the Young Bucks, are at ringside with Kenny. This was a good thing to point out based on the angle, but I’m wondering where Michael Nakazawa is, considering that he is Kenny’s best friend and Pac apparently beat the sh*t out of him off screen TWICE.
I know this is a very minor nit to pick, but the font they used for their scoreboard was a poor choice. The zeros look sideways. Either that or they accidentally used “o” instead of “0.” Like I said, it’s a minor nit, but once the scoreboard popped up, I couldn’t not see it.
As a wrestling match I thought this was awesome. From a booking point of view, however, it was a total clusterf*ck. What’s worse is that all of the problems revolved around the inexplicable decision to make this an Ironman match.
To start off with the smallest thing, if you’re going to have a “thirty second rest period” then Paul Turner needs to check on the wrestlers within that thirty seconds. By the time Turner was asking them if they were ready to continue, fifteen seconds had already ticked off the clock after it paused for thirty.
Now for the actual booking. Last week I praised AEW for having the guts to not put an escape the cage stipulation on the main event. If Cody has to beat Warlow in a cage in order to get his match with MJF, then Cody needs to actually BEAT the guy, no matter how temping it might be to throw in a stipulation that lefts Cody still win but lets you keep touting Wardlow has having never been pinned or made to submit.
I hereby revoke that praise. If you’re going to do an Ironman match, you need to f*cking BEAT both wrestlers. Several times. Or else what’s the point of the stip? What they gave us here was a two out of three falls match with a tease of a disappointing draw in the middle. And they wouldn’t even beat either guy for the first fall. Instead they took the cheap way out by having Pac get DQed on purpose with a chairshot, then using the damage from the chairshot to pin Kenny to tie things up pretty much immediately afterwards, so neither guy really got beat until the final fall… which begs the question why they didn’t just do a singles match. And just to make this worse, doing this threw away the very first DQ in AEW history in this pointless spot where it had zero impact.
If you don’t do the Ironman match we also don’t run into the following problems: After our thirty minutes of wrestling we had a tie. Pac punched the referee because he was angry, so I hope he’ll be getting suspended. That’s what happened to Nyla Rose, after all.
And moments after the referee was knocked out by a punch from Pac, Justin Roberts told us that the match would continue under sudden death rules and ordered the timekeeper to ring the bell, even though we had no conscious referee. Aubrey Edwards ran down to ringside to take over for Paul Turner, which is fine in a vacuum, but problematic when you remember that less than fifteen minutes ago we had a ref bump and no one came out to take over for the downed referee.
Kenny hits this huge knee, then hits a huge ripcord knee… and the fans are all chanting for the f*cking referee! He’s setting up for the Kamagoye… and the fans are still chanting for Aubrey Edwards. I don’t get it (you might say it’s not fair of me to blame dumb fan chants on AEW, but this isn’t the first time fans have reacted to her like she’s some sort of superstar who they chant for, so they had to know this was a possibility).
Every last one of these problems would have been avoided if they had just had a singles match, which is what would make the most sense anyway because there was no build of any sort towards an Ironman stipulation… but they had to do the Ironman stip because STIPULATION MAKE THE SHOW BIGGER, DAMMIT! And now what? Pac is going to complain that he wasn’t ready for the bell to ring for sudden death (I don’t think he was even facing Kenny when he did) and so he’s going to complain and want another match with Kenny, and we’ll be right back where we started?
TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS PAC- I’m not going to lie… I, too, thought it came off like Tony was rubbing Pac’s loss in his face more than trying to get an answer to a real question. Then Orange Cassidy wandered out onto the stage and got in Pac’s face, so Pac punched him in the face and stomped his head into the stage. Security came out to save Orange Cassidy.
JURASSIC EXPRESS vs. THE INNER CIRCLE (Sammy Guevara & Proud & Powerful)- 6/10
A spotfest. Darby Allin helped the babyfaces win by stopping the heels from cheating. He backdropped Guevara over the top rope after the match.
MJF VS. CODY VIDEO PACKAGE- long
THE BUTCHER & THE BLADE (w/the Bunny) vs. BEST FRIENDS (w/Orange Cassidy)- 2.5/10
Orange Cassidy is apparently just fine after getting his head stomped in. Why even do the f*cking angle, then?
A tag team match happened and was interrupted for dumb Orange Cassidy shenanigans, because that’s important in AEW. Seriously. If Orange Cassidy and The Bunny are the only two people in the ring, that means that the legal man for both teams is on the floor, but instead of applying a count, Bryce Remsburg just stands there and watches the dumbf*ckery. Once Goofball McGoofington got his spots in, we went immediately to the babyfaces hitting their finisher and winning.
Orange Cassidy is the problem with wrestling nowadays. There. I said it. Call me a Jim Cornette if you want, but if we want fans to not react to Kenny Omega teasing Kota Ibushi’s finisher in the sudden death portion of an Ironman match that has been built for weeks by chanting for the f*cking referee, we need to start reeducating fans right away, and step one is taking away the goofball horse sh*t.
(For those wondering, step two is putting a moratorium on all table spots until fans stop chanting “WE WANT TABLES!” Every time there is a “WE WANT TABLES!” chant, every wrestler in the industry should agree to not do a table bump for a week. And if it happens in a match that has DQs, it should be two weeks.)
TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS BEST FRIENDS & ORANGE CASSIDY- terrible
He also announced that Orange Cassidy will wrestle Pac at Revolution. Yeah. They’re really wasting a PPV spot with Orange Cassidy. None of the wrestlers took this announced match with a dangerous opponent who had attacked Orange Cassidy less than an hour ago seriously in any way.
YUKA SAKAZAKI vs. BIG SWOLE vs. HIKARU SHIDA vs. SHANNA- 4/10
We’ve got four women in this match, and three of them are in cosplay gear. That’s too many people in one promotionwearing cosplay gear, never mind in one match. The match came off as very choreographed and spotty. The spot that broke me was someone running around a pin so she could hit a sliding lariat to the person making the pin instead of just running into the pin to break it up.
DARK ORDER PROMO- fine
They’re going to show SCU “the true might of the Dark Order” at the PPV. They said Daniels would learn that he is now “obsolete.” Hmmm…
JR’S SIT-DOWN INTERVIEW WITH THE YOUNG BUCKS, ADAM PAGE, & KENNY OMEGA- meh
The last minute or so was good, but it took WAY too long to get there. I’m also pretty sure that this was the first time that Page leaving the Elite was addressed by the wrestlers themselves in the several months since the extremely poor decision was made to separate him from the group. What they did with this whole thing was pulled a Russo: They broke Page off from the stable for no good reason, only to keep him constantly involved with the stable so that they could shoot a break-up angle!
JERICHO/MOXLEY WEIGH-IN- hated it
1. Why are we having a weigh-in when there is no weight limit, either upper or lower?
2. Even if there were a weight-limit, doing a weigh-in THREE DAYS BEFORE THE FIGHT is pretty f*cking worthless.
We’ve got scantily-clad ring girls. There goes all of that woke cred that AEW is so fond of. Also, Gary Michael Capetta was not only involved in this, but was also given his own introduction. Taz told us that GMC had many years of “legitimate ring announcing experience.” As opposed to what? Fake ring announcing where he’s just standing there in the ring lip-synching?
GMC appears to have forgotten the name of the PPV. Not a good look.
Jericho grand-standed a bunch. Moxley attacked Jericho for no reason whatsoever, so the Inner Circle beat him up. Dustin Rhodes ran in to fight Hager and they brawled away. Darby Allin came in because he’s feuding with Sammy and got beaten up and had a skateboard broken over his head. Jericho hit Moxley with a low blow, then his own finisher, then hit Moxley with Moxley’s own finisher on the scale so Moxley bled a lot.
This probably sounds like a good go-home angle to you, but let me remind you that JERICHO STABBED MOXLEY IN THE EYE LAST MONTH. This is a come-down from that.
My main problem with this whole thing, though, was how contrived it felt. It felt like they realized that they wanted to get some heat on Jericho and Sammy going into the PPV so they booked a segment that had zero logical reason to occur and had Moxley start a fight just to start a fight so that he could get laid out by Jericho, had Dustin run in to plug his match with Hager, and had Darby run in so Sammy could get his heat back on him.
I thought this was a pretty bad show in general (especially once the Pac vs. Omega match was over), but as a go-home show in particular I think it was bad… but not for the usual reasons. I think the problem with this show as a go-home show was that most of what they were doing peaked last week, making this week feel like either a bunch of lesser angles or stuff that felt like it was being done specifically to get some last-minute heat because they didn’t know what else to do. Whatever the reason, though, this was a bad show, and putting Pac vs. Orange Cassidy on a PPV has me questioning AEW’s judgment.