Should AEW Have a Split Roster Draft? (Monday Morning Q&A)

Welcome back to another Monday Morning Q&A where I toss out some questions to get a feel of how you guys and gals are feeling about certain topics.

So here are 5 questions I’d like to toss out for this week. I’ll give my answers, too, but the key here is that I want to know what YOU think! So make sure you chime in!

1) Would you be interested in an AEW roster split? If so, how would you balance things out between Dark, Dark: Elevation, Dynamite, Rampage and this potential Saturday show?

I wouldn’t be opposed to a brand split if AEW had a better television structure. The way it is right now, though, I think that would be nothing but a problem.

Think of it this way: the benefit of a brand split is supposed to be that more people get more screen time, right? But if you have the same amount of television time, you can just choose to allocate your roster and spread the names. You don’t HAVE to put the same people on all the shows. And I’m of the opinion AEW is already clunky with television as-is, with the split Dark shows and with Ring of Honor on top of it all. I don’t need 7-8 hours per week of AEW AND 8-9 per week of WWE. That’s overkill.

Plus, would Roster A have Dynamite while Roster B has 1 hour on Rampage and 1 hour on Saturday’s show? That’s weird, isn’t it? I’d rather them, in that scenario, move Rampage to Saturday and just make it a 2-hour edition of Rampage without creating a third name (on top of the Dark and Dark: Elevation, which I think should be merged to 1 show per week anyway).

If the only benefit is keeping The Elite away from FTR and CM Punk, then you have bigger problems that shouldn’t be “fixed” by just separating people temporarily.

But…in the interest of playing into the fun “what if” of it all, I’ll be doing a podcast or article at some point this week to try to see if I could hypothetically balance out a 3-way AEW 1 vs AEW 2 vs ROH roster split. I like having this number of belts, though, and I don’t think I’d want to see a second world championship diminishing what MJF is doing right now. My vote would 100% go to “no roster split”—at least, not right now.

2) John Morrison just beat Epic Meal Time’s Harley Morenstein in a boxing fight. Are there any other pro wrestlers you would like to see get into boxing or MMA?

I’m not a follower of any of that. I only knew about this fight after it had happened and watched a Twitter clip of the final few seconds. I’d be totally down for wrestlers who are not currently wrestling for AEW or WWE (or, at least, not wrestling in prominent roles) to get in the mix for all that if they’re interested, though.

For instance, I wouldn’t want this UFC merger to lead to someone like Seth Rollins trying to juggle being a WWE Superstar and an MMA fighter. Stick to WWE. But if a guy like Akira Tozawa wanted to do that, well, he’s not getting pushed any time soon in WWE, so that would be neat. The same goes for wrestlers competing on the indies, like a Simon Gotch or whatever. If they’re down, I’ll potentially check out their fights.

3) Rumor mill says LA Knight could be winning Money in the Bank. What do you think?

I think we hear these rumors all the time in the months leading up to Money in the Bank, and they’re often wrong. However, LA Knight is definitely someone I could see doing a great job with that gimmick and responsibility.

One major problem I have with all this, though, is that I think WWE is in another holding pattern situation with Roman Reigns holding the two titles. If there isn’t a belt-split with the draft, and/or if Reigns doesn’t drop the championship by the time we get around to Money in the Bank, then what’s the point? That will mean he assuredly will keep the championships until WrestleMania, and nobody in the world will be thinking LA Knight or anyone holding MITB will be able to successfully cash in. Just look at what happened to Austin Theory. So if the plan is to just waste the briefcase for yet another year (which has been the scenario more often than not in the past decade, unfortunately), then I don’t think I want to see LA Knight win it just to be a laughing stock, lose perpetually with the MITB curse, and then, fails his cash-in. I’d rather them waste it on someone else, then, if that’s the case, while Knight can win the United States Championship or something.

4) When would you pull the trigger on Becky Lynch vs. Trish Stratus?

I don’t this this feud has the legs to stretch to SummerSlam. That event is in Detroit, too, which has nothing to do with either of them. It’s not like Trish wrestling in Canada a few years back, where that made sense.

Do it straight at Backlash. Get it over with. At the very least, Night of Champions, but since I would rather that event focus on championships like it is supposed to, I don’t think it’d be worth dragging this out a few more weeks just to have Becky vs. Trish take place in Saudi Arabia.

5) Jeff Hardy returned to TV this week on Dynamite. What are your expectations, hopes and fears now that he’s back?

Realistically, this is a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation. I can count a handful of “this time, things are different” stints in Hardy’s career that I no longer believe things will change. As much as I hope that’s the case and he’ll never have another setback, I’m expecting a few months of some lackluster creative (I haven’t liked anything Matt Hardy’s been doing in AEW, and I doubt Jeff being involved is going to turn that all around 180 degrees) followed by another arrest or something a year or two from now. Boy do I hope I’m wrong this time.

As far as what I would hope for beyond that, I’m mostly just hoping Tony Khan stops trying to put Matt Hardy and Private Party in different random collections of people. All those stables continually fail. The Firm started out interesting and quickly derailed. The whole Hardy/Andrade Family Office thing was a disaster. Let’s just have The Hardy Boyz wrestling every so often in tag team contests (sporadically; keep them from getting too banged up) and teaming with Private Party as their mentors, and that’s it. I’d rather them not even get into storylines. Just do some matches.

Let us know your thoughts about these questions by answering them in the comments!

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