Rules in wrestling vary depending on the company and the story you want to get across. But rules remain an important part of all sports because without them, every league would be the NFL.
In AEW, Aubrey Edwards and Tony Khan felt it was important to have rules written down for the wrestlers and fans to know.
"I heard Tony Khan say, 'We should have our rules be public, we're like a sports company,'" recalled Aubrey Edwards on Talk Is Jericho. "I started writing everything down and realized there are all these holes of like, 'what happens if an illegal person hits a legal person, how do we treat that?' I had the rules printed out and we're talking about it and Hangman [Page] comes over and is like, 'Oh, ref meeting, you guys talking about rules?' 'Actually, we are.' We talked about things and figured out how we wanted to treat the situations. I got the thumbs up from [Tony Khan] and hopefully, that will come out soon. One big question was 'how do you treat four-way tag matches?' because typically, anything more than a singles [triple threat or above] is no DQ, by default, but why do you have the structure of a tag team match? It doesn't make sense. Why is somebody waiting to tag if it's no DQ? Rick Knox had the idea of, 'if one guy is DQ'd, that team is eliminated and the match continues.' It's probably something we're going to use once, if ever, but just having that understanding. I also personally pushed for 'intentional groin shots are illegal,' independent of gender, because it's important to us to have diversity. Ultimately, it shouldn't matter what's in your pants. It hurts when I get kicked in the box. It should be legal. Figuring out what's a five-count, what's an immediate disqualification. WWE, for instance, blatant chokes are illegal. Do we care about that? Nah, we'll just do a five-count."
Chris Jericho noted that he pushed for a DQ finish just to establish that it can happen in AEW. AEW did a DQ fall in the PAC vs. Kenny Omega Iron Man Match match to help establish the rule.
Elsewhere during the podcast, Edwards discussed why she wouldn't be successful in WWE. You can find her full comments by clicking here.
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