With or without Sasha Banks/Mercedes, AEW needs this 2023 resolution
An unspoken quota of 1 women's wrestling match per Dynamite was always lame, but the excuses are clearly gone now
Late in 2022, I asked some Twitter wrestling luminaries a question that eluded me: did AEW ever run multiple women’s wrestling matches on episodes of Dynamite?
Personally, I couldn’t recall any. Each week, it felt like there was an unspoken quota: one women’s wrestling match, often without “much build.” Then, the rest of the division would battle for scraps (a.k.a. short interviews/promo videos). Each week’s Rampage B-show would usually include a single women’s match, often (but not always) an inessential squash.
Technically, my memories were incorrect. But only technically.
Granted, a match that would max out at five minutes plus another match still feels pretty minimal. But it counts. Maybe the best example included the debuts of Jade Cargill and … Shaq?
If you scroll through the most troll-inhabited sewers of Wrestling Twitter, you’ll be bombarded with a lot of bad faith (or just bad) takes about AEW. Some of them might even be the work of bots.
One of the more annoying take formats revolves around AEW booking wrestling matches “just for the sake of wrestling.” I have zero interest dragging out that dead horse for more flogging, but even AEW enjoyers such as myself will admit that there are matches that simply happen without an obvious story attached to it. Often, they deliver great moments — kind of why we tune in — and sometimes they can turn nothing into something, story-wise.
But the point is that AEW’s willing to throw ideas at the wall … yet that “idea” basically never is “maybe we should trot out more than one women’s match per Dynamite.”
Frankly, this was always a dismal strategy, but it became borderline negligent in 2022. Just considering recent developments, some gripes:
Athena was gaining steam, and won the ROH women’s title. She’s been sparsely seen since. That’s a shame for a number of reasons, ranging from the momentum she’s been building to my opinion that she’s a consistently entertaining performer.
We’ve barely seen anything of Toni Storm since she did thankless work of being a workhorse “interim” women’s world champion.
Could probably give Dr. Britt Baker more to chew on than brief interview segments most weeks, maybe? More Jade Cargill on Dynamite seems like a no-brainer, even if those matches border closer to squashes.
Personally, I wonder if the unspoken quota of one women’s match per week (per show, if you count Rampage) may also leave AEW less spry with that division than others. This is my own feeling, but it seemed like Jamie Hayter’s ascent was slowed ever so slightly because there were only “enough” segments for then-champion Toni Storm. It also felt like Thunder Rosa was crowned champion a few beats after she really got red-hot.
(They seemed a bit slow to capitalize on the Baker - Rosa “lights out match,” at least in my feeble memory.)
To reiterate: it was already glaring that AEW needs to devote more time to its women’s division in 2022. But, if Sasha Banks/Mercedes Varnado ends up signing in AEW, will Tony Khan even have a choice?
Of all the criticisms lobbed at AEW, its flawed promotion of women’s wrestling has been the one that stuck with me the most — at times to the point where it actually annoyed me. Just about every gripe was something where I’d simply say/think “I could see that, but it doesn’t really hamper my enjoyment.”
(OK, there are exceptions … looking at you, Jeff Jarrett and Jay Lethal.)
It’s sad that it would take possibly signing a star of Banks/Varnado’s stature to finally get AEW to better embrace its women’s division, but if that’s what is needed, then it would be legit welcome.
