One of the biggest things going with AEW is that wins and losses actually matter. Watching the show and they greet every wrestler with a record of how they are doing in matches and their record in singles wins. They haven’t actually done anything with those records and don’t give it that much attention as of yet but what is in the future?
So when are we going to get wrestlers with losing records? I don’t mean someone who has a few losses on their records, but real losers, the wrestlers with 0-100 type records. The ones that you know are not going to win in the match you are about the see?
It harkens back to jobber matches of the old days. You would get some big star paired up against some skinny guy you have never heard of and the matches were typically short and not very competitive. AEW keeps wanting us to believe everything it says and the company isn’t just Cody Rhodes and his buddies trying to make some money without Vince McMahon. AEW has said that wins and losses matter so much, but I have yet to actually see it matter that much.
What I mean is, if wins and losses matter so much, what is it going to be like when a wrestler is on the shallow end of one of those records? What is it going to look like when one of Cody’s friends goes up against someone with a losing record?
If wins and losses matter so much, then they wouldn’t be giving title matches to these guys. Heck if their records matter so much they wouldn’t be on TV much other than a popcorn match between two losers with the winner maybe getting a televised match on Wednesday night. It brings back memories of the “Battle of the Underdogs” matches from WCW Saturday Night from the early ’90s. Those weren’t exactly epic matches but AEW wants you to believe that winning records mean so much to them, why not have a match between two losers and see how much those records actually matter.
As for who could hold the role of being the perennial loser? That is another issue. Anyone held in that role for a while will have that cloud over them. That is kind of the point of the whole thing. This isn’t the type of role that you can just suddenly announce one week, this is something that needs to be built up. It needs to be established that the guy you are seeing wrestle doesn’t have a great record but tries their best. That kind of thing really doesn’t work out well in this era where it has to be this awesome battle and you have to watch to see what happens.
If AEW is going to do something like that, then they are going to have to get real creative. Make people interested even if they know the guy is going to lose. If wins and losses are going to matter as much as you say it is, then let’s see what it can produce on the lower end of those records and still make it interesting.
Of course, they can do what they have been doing so far and say the guy trained with the Young Bucks in training camp and that is why we should be interested in him.
