The Cincy experiment is a head-scratcher
If you were hoping for a quiet week in professional wrestling, you clearly aren't paying attention to the script. The latest spoilers coming out of the AEW Collision tapings in Cincinnati are a bizarre mix of absolute brilliance and 'what were they thinking' booking. We are officially in that phase of the year where the mid-card talent is being thrown into a meat grinder to see who comes out with their heat intact.
The Cincy crowd is usually a barometer for whether a show is actually cooking or just reheating leftovers. When you look at the matches laid out for the upcoming broadcast, it feels like Tony Khan grabbed a handful of random action figures and just smashed them together. We have former champions being pushed down the card while guys we haven't seen in months are getting spotlight segments.
The Collision identity crisis continues
Let's look at the actual nuts and bolts of what went down. The pacing of these tapings suggests that management is still struggling to define exactly what Collision is supposed to be. It isn't the prestige powerhouse booking of Dynamite, and it isn't the developmental testing ground of Rampage either. It occupies this weird, purgatory-like space that feels like a Tuesday night D-league game disguised as a primetime broadcast.
We are seeing too many multi-man tags that essentially function as a buffer for the actual main event. It reminds me of those early 2000s shows where the opener was a 15-minute masterpiece and everything until the final bell was just filler material meant to kill time before the pyro went off. That 3-on-3 tag match featured enough moving parts that it became nearly impossible to track the actual narrative thread.
Missing the mark on roster management
I cannot ignore the fact that the booking here feels disjointed. When you have a talent roster this deep, leaving some of your most reliable workhorses to handle low-stakes mid-card squashes is a waste of capital. It makes sense why fans get frustrated when they see a main-event level personality working a throwaway match for a secondary title that hasn't changed hands in 6 months.
If you want to understand how we got to this point of creative frustration, recent reports regarding the Cincy tapings confirm that the creative direction is leaning heavily on established stars rather than building new ones. It’s a safe bet, but it makes for stale television. As I've noted before, TNA is already playing a dangerous game with their own transition elsewhere, and AEW is flirting with similar levels of inconsistency.
Where does Collision go from here?
We are entering a season where the product needs to be focused. Fans are savvy; they know when they are being sold a bag of goods that doesn't advance a single major storyline. Watching the taped sequences from Cincy, you can see the effort from the performers is top-tier, but the booking team is giving them nothing to work with. It feels like throwing a Ferrari into a school zone.
Maybe we need a total overhaul of how Thursday and Saturday nights are structured. If Collision is meant to be the place where the wrestling happens, stop interrupting the flow with backstage vignettes that lead to nowhere. Give me 20 minutes of high-stakes, bell-to-bell action and leave the soap opera drama for the other side of the week. Otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels in the mud.
