After 12 months of events and multiple pay-per-view shows, Cody gives his grade for AEW.
In AEW's first year, the promotion was able to hold events all over the United States, land a television deal with TNT and recently announced that it has sold more than 100,000 live event tickets. With that being said, Cody gave AEW high marks because of its success and belief that it will progress even more, but admitted that there are things to work on.
“I think if A+ is the top rating and we’re going off just the American standard, I think I would give myself an A rating,” Rhodes says. “I wouldn’t go higher because there’s definitely been some things that I have learned in regards to this. Just so that my rating doesn’t seem braggadocious or arrogant, the reason that I am so confident and optimistic about AEW is because of the fans. It beams across the television set, but if you come to one of these shows, these fans are nuts — in the best of way nuts. It’s a dream come true for a wrestler," Cody told Yahoo Sports.
Unlike WWE, which has seven hours of live, weekly television between Raw, SmackDown and NXT, AEW has only two hours with Dynamite on TNT. In addition, AEW only has a men's, women's and tag team championships, which is far less than the amount of titles WWE has. When talking about the "less is more" approach, Cody said it helps make everything that does end up making television worth something.
“I think a lot of us have pushed back on ‘less is more’ with what we actually do in the ring, but that approach to TV is very true,” Rhodes said. “It creates the feeling that everything we are putting out for you in narrative is really important. Our titles, the fact that we only have the men’s, women’s and tag team championships at this point, we make them the most important thing from the company standard. When you approach it from that, you’re able to put things on a pedestal more and make things mean more from a narrative standpoint," Cody said.
AEW just wrapped up its Homecoming Edition of Dynamite from Jacksonville, Florida. For full results of that show, click this link.
