Road Dogg claims that NXT and AEW were never in competition when it came to writing the NXT product.
The Wednesday Night Wars was a brief time period where NXT and AEW both ran on Wednesday nights. While the two shows would start off rivalling each other for viewers, Dynamite began to pull away until it was decided NXT would be moved to Tuesday nights.
Road Dogg said on Busted Open Radio that he believed that NXT and AEW were never competition.
“This is how I look at that. I’m trying to calm down a little before I react or respond. I don’t think NXT lost the head-to-head battle. I don’t think it was ever meant to. I think things got out of hand a little bit and USA agreed to a deal for NXT and Vince (McMahon) wanted that to be what it is now. He wanted it to be a total tryout thing. ‘Put these people on TV, we’ll see if they stick, and we’ll get them up here.’ Hunter has a different philosophy. ‘Train them, make sure they’re good to go before you put them on TV.’ It’s two totally different philosophies. Speaking from NXT, and I say this from sitting in every meeting when it was Black & Gold and writing, producing, and directing, we never once thought we were competing with those guys. We looked at ourselves as a developmental program. I hope for AEW they weren’t thinking that beating a developmental program was a notch in their belt because it was people nobody had ever heard of on a Tuesday night against Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley. I always thought that was apples and oranges and you can tell I take I t personally because I worked there. Of course, we wanted to beat them, but we never thought we were in competition or had to write for competition. We just wrote the best show we could,”
Road Dogg on Busted Open Radio
H/T to Fightful for transcription
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