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wrestlingisfake · 3 years

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AEW Fake Rankings, 5/16/2021

Men's singles division - babyfaces

Darby Allin

Cody Rhodes

Orange Cassidy

PAC

Hangman Page

Christian Cage

Lance Archer

Sammy Guevara

Dustin Rhodes

Jake Hager

Men's singles division - heels

Kenny Omega (AEW men's world champion, Impact world champion, AAA mega champion)

MJF

Miro (AEW TNT champion)

Brian Cage (FTW champion)

Matt Hardy

Shawn Spears

Anthony Ogogo

QT Marshall

Powerhouse Hobbs

Nick Comorotto

Unranked: Alex Reynolds, Christopher Daniels, Colt Cabana, Danny Limelight, Dante Martin, Frankie Kazarian, Lee Johnson, MT Nakazawa, Wardlow

It feels premature to rank Darby Allin so highly. But given that Chris Jericho's hurt, Kenny Omega's a heel, and Jon Moxley's chasing the tag title, I can't argue any other babyface is ahead of him. Cody's clout and presentation goes a long way, but that only goes so far when he's been barely been on TV and feuding with QT's band of trainees. AEW deserves a lot of credit for giving Allin the ball and letting him run with it. Even though he just lost the TNT title to Miro, his chase to get it back ought to be even hotter than his run as champion.

A lot of the key fueds right now involve factions--Cody's Nightmare Family vs. QT's The Factory, Jericho's Inner Circle vs. MJF's The Pinnacle, and the Hardy Family Office vs. the Dark Order, Orange's buddies vs. Pac's Death Triangle--not to mention Team Taz and Kenny Omega's group running around. As a New Japan fan I dig it, but it does make it kind of tough to decide where one faction's minions rank relative to another's.

Men's tag team division - babyfaces

Jon Moxley (IWGP United Stats champion) & Eddie Kingston

Santana & Ortiz

Best Friends - Chuck Taylor & Trent Beretta

Lucha Bros. - Penta El 0M & Rey Fenix

Jurassic Express - Luchasaurus & Jungle Boy & Marko Stunt

Evil Uno & Stu Grayson

Varsity Blondes - Griff Garrison & Brian Pillman Jr.

The Gunn Club - Billy Gunn & Austin Gunn & Colten Gunn

Matt Sydal & Mike Sydal

Alan Angels & Preston Vance

Men's tag team division - heels

The Young Bucks - Nick Jackson & Matt Jackson (AEW tag team champions)

FTR - Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler

Scorpio Sky & Ethan Page

The Acclaimed - Max Caster & Anthony Bowens

Private Party & Marq Quen & Isiah Kassidy

The Butcher & The Blade

TH2 - Jack Evans & Angelico

Chaos Project - Luther & Serpentico

Cezar Bononi & Ryan Nemeth

Unranked: Sonny Kiss & Joey Janela

(Names not listed on the AEW website's roster are noted in italics.)

With Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian disbanding their team, the top title contenders on AEW's official rankings are Garrison and Pillman. However, the team that's actually getting a title shot at the May 30 pay-per-view is Moxley and Kingston, because they trashed the champs' dressing room. Just in case you were wondering why I bother doing this when AEW does it every week.

Women's singles division - babyfaces

Hikaru Shida (AEW women's world champion)

Thunder Rosa

Tay Conti

Kris Statlander

Ryo Mizunami

Big Swole

Red Velvet

Leyla Hirsch

KiLynn King

Women's singles division - heels

Britt Baker

Nyla Rose

Jade Cargill

Abadon

Penelope Ford

Diamante

The Bunny

A year ago I was griping that AEW wasn't doing enough with the women's division. They're still not giving them enough time on the main show, but it definitely feels like Shida, Baker, and Statlander are more important to the product now than they were back then. I wanted them to bring in more women and give them a chance, and that paid off big time with Thunder Rosa. Swole, Conti, Abadon, and Velvet feel underutilized, but I'm confident that will change. Cargill is going to be great once they decide she's ready for more than simple squash matches. Granted, There are others on this list that seem to be just...there. But it's amazing how much less frustrating that is when more than two women on the roster are getting pushed.

No matches in over 30 days: Awesome Kong, Emi Sukara, Karl Anderson, Leva Bates, Doc Gallows, Mel, Peter Avalon, Riho, Shanna, Shawn Dean, Serena Deeb (NWA women's world champion), Yuka Sakazaki

Same old story with Riho, Shanna, Sukara, and Sakazaki (travel restrictions), and with Kong and Mel (no idea). Deeb is booked for the May 19 show, which is probably a relief for the NWA, since they can finally book some title matches again.

When the AEW/Impact storyline started, I expected a lot more Impact wrestlers to appear on AEW programming than just Gallows and Anderson. As it turns out, even Gallows and Anderson haven't wrestled much on AEW lately. I'm really starting to wonder what the point is for all of this.

Part-time/semi-retired: Dasha Gonzalez, Paul Wight, Rebel not Reba, Sting, Tully Blanchard

I feel weird having Tully here but hell, he's probably had more ring time in 2021 than everybody else in this list put together.

Inactive

Anna Jay (right shoulder - dislocation)

Brandon Cutler (orbital bone - unspecified injury)

Brandi Rhodes (pregnancy)

Chris Jericho (right elbow - dislocation)

Kip Sabian (right arm - storyline injury?)

John Silver (right shoulder - dislocation)

Ricky Starks (neck - fractured vertebrae)

Darius Martin (knee - unspecified ACL injury)

Miro "injured" Sabian's arm recently, and Sabian announced on Twitter that he's getting surgery. So is he just playing into the storyline on social media, or is the storyline designed to cover for an actual injury? Either way I don't expect him back in the ring for a while.

In contrast, Jericho's arm injury is legit but he's still appearing on TV and trying to get a match like it's no big deal. MJF challenged Jericho to a Stadium Stampede match two weeks from now, but Jericho reportedly needs 4-6 weeks to recover. So either the reports are overestimating how hurt he is, or Jericho's going to have to creatively avoid doing anything physical...or they'll have to postpone the match right after setting the date. I'm not sure what they're thinking with this one. (Maybe Jericho could call his new buddy Mike Tyson?)

#aew #fake rankings

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wrestlingisfake · 3 years

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AEW Fake Rankings, 12/12/2020

Men’s singles division - babyfaces

Jon Moxley

Cody Rhodes

Darby Allin (AEW TNT champion)

Orange Cassidy

Hangman Page

Lance Archer

PAC

Dustin Rhodes

Scorpio Sky

Matt Sydal

Men’s singles division - heels

Kenny Omega (AEW men’s world champion, AAA mega champion)

MJF

Brian Cage (FTW champion)

Ricky Starks

Eddie Kingston

Sammy Guevara

Powerhouse Hobbs

Matt Hardy

Shawn Spears

Wardlow

Unranked: Brandon Cutler, Colt Cabana, Michael Nakazawa, Peter Avalon

One of the things I like about AEW is that they’ve got so many guys in the mix and I usually know off the top of my head what any of them is up to. Granted, some of these guys aren’t doing very much, but I at least have a sense of their character and storyline while they’re on the back burner. I used to like that about WWE, years ago. But somewhere around 2000 they lost the ability to focus on more than a handful of characters at any given time, which is a big problem when you have a hundred performers on your roster.

As a result, it feels more organic to me when guys like Eddie Kingston and Team Taz jump out of the undercard into the AEW title picture. On Raw, these guys would be random nobodies in R-Truth skits until Vince McMahon suddenly decided to present them as killer threats to Drew McIntyre, and then they’d lose the title match and be nobodies again. In AEW, there’s a better flow between “beating jobbers on Dark” and “beating name guys on Dynamite” and “punking out a champion to disrupt the rankings” and “recovering from a big loss by beating midcarders.” That’s something I haven’t seen in US wrestling for so long, I forgot how much I missed it.

PROTIP FOR TONY KHAN: Try doing that with the women sometime, kthx

Men’s tag team division - babyfaces

The Young Bucks - Matt Jackson & Nick Jackson (AEW tag team champions)

Christopher Daniels & Frankie Kazarian

Best Friends - Chuck Taylor & Trent Beretta

Lucha Bros. - Penta El 0M & Rey Fenix

Jurassic Express - Luchasaurus & Jungle Boy & Marko Stunt

Private Party - Marq Quen & Isiah Kassidy

Joey Janela & Sonny Kiss

The Gunn Club - Billy Gunn & Austin Gunn & Colten Gunn

The Varsity Blondes - Brian Pillman Jr. & Griff Garrison

Top Flight - Darius Martin & Daunte Martin

Men‘s tag team division - heels

FTR - Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler

Chris Jericho & Jake Hager

Miro & Kip Sabian

The Butcher & The Blade

Evil Uno & Stu Grayson

John Silver & Alex Reynolds

The Hybrid2 - Jack Evans & Angelico

The Acclaimed - Anthony Bowen & Max Caster

Chaos Project - Luther & Serpentico

Alan Angels & Preston Vance

This has to be the deepest tag team division I’ve ever seen in pro wrestling. I suppose maybe some group in Mexico might have more teams. But 20 active teams is practically unheard of for a major-league US promotion. Even New Japan could only find 10 teams for World Tag League, and half of them were one-off combinations.

One caveat is that the “Jericho and Hager focus on tag wrestling” thing may or may not be a long-term direction. And Colten, Pillman, Garrison, and Serpentico are not (to my knowledge) under contract. But that’s balanced out a bit by the tandems that haven’t competed in the last 30 days (Dustin Rhodes & QT Marshall, Santana & Ortiz), and the potential for other alliances to be full-time dedicated tag teams (MJF & Wardlow, Team Taz).

The advantage of having this many teams is that you get booking in the tag division like you’d see in the singles divisions of most promotions. You can actually have four or five teams on hot streaks, because there are plenty of lesser teams to put them over, so they don’t have to go 50-50 with each other. You can actually have a group of teams acting as a midcard, that lose to the top guys but can beat anybody else. And there are maybe six teams here that I’d call jobber teams, but they still win sometimes because they beat each other, or the freelancers on AEW Dark. It’s a good ecosystem.

Women’s singles division - babyfaces

Hikaru Shida (AEW women’s world champion)

Big Swole

Serena Deeb (NWA women’s world champion)

Thunder Rosa

Leva Bates

Shanna

Leyla Hirsch

Red Velvet

KiLynn King

Women’s singles division - heels

Nyla Rose

Britt Baker

Abadon

Anna Jay

Penelope Ford

Diamante

Ivelisse

The AEW women’s division suffered a lot this spring from injuries and travel restrictions, but I’d say they’ve mostly recovered from those setbacks. Most of the women listed above weren’t even in the company before March. Collaborating with the NWA (Thunder Rosa) and pushing freelancers (Diamante, Ivelisse, Hirsch, Velvet, and King) has yielded a deeper roster than they had in 2019.

That being said, TV time is still an egregious problem for this division. AEW is clearly wary about chasing viewers off to NXT if they run too many women’s segments on Dynamite. If feels like they’re waiting for something that’ll make it the right time to actually push the division. But the perfect moment will never come, so they might as well go with the hand they have.

It looks like the brewing Brandi Rhodes vs. Jade Cargill feud is going to expand to include (at least) Nyla, Swole, Deeb, Velvet, Diamante, and Ivelisse. So if we see various matchups among those women for a few weeks (alongside Shida vs. Abadon and Baker vs. Rosa), then great! If it just means one multi-woman tag on Dynamite, then it doesn’t really address the problem.

No matches in the last 30 days: Emi Sukara, Jade Cargill, Mel, Santana, Ortiz, QT Marshall, Riho, Tay Conti, The Bunny, Yuka Sakazawi

At some point CIMA and T-Hawk were quietly removed from the roster on AEW’s website. With Shanna and PAC back in Jacksonville, that only leaves Sukara, Riho, and Sakazawi as the contracted performers out of action because of the pandemic.

Part-timers: Awesome Kong, Dallas Page, Dasha, Rebel, Sting

Kong has been out for nearly a year with no explanation besides a kayfabe injury. My understanding was that she would be taking time off to film GLOW, but then the show was canceled, so I don’t know if she’s healing from real injuries or taking time off or what. DDP is 64 and the last time I saw him on AEW programming he was mentoring QT Marshall from inside his house, so I’m pretty sure he won’t be back until after the pandemic. Dasha and Rebel aren’t listed by AEW as wrestlers but they’ve each had matches this year.

Interestingly, Sting is listed on the official roster as a competitor with a 0-0 record in the promotion. That seems like the surest sign yet that AEW plans to book him in a match. He’s 61, but I suppose DDP wrestled this year at 63 years old. He was forced into retirement with spinal stenosis, but I suppose Edge came back from that after a lot of rest and for a lot of money.

Inactive

Brodie Lee (ankle - undisclosed injury)

Brandi Rhodes (arm - storyline injury)

Kris Statlander (left knee - ACL tear)

I’m kinda surprised there aren’t more people on the shelf than this. (And technically Brandi isn’t really hurt and probably won’t be selling it much longer.) It feels like AEW has had a lot of injury problems this year, but I suppose they’ve managed to avoid a lot of major surgeries.

#aew #fake rankings

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