>The kept the belt on him waaay too long. The returns were
>more and more diminishing the longer it went on. And
>considering how bungled the ending turned out to be, I think
>it's good that AEW didn't follow that template.
>
>I will 100% grant that even now Jericho is better than Hogan
>was in the late '90s (or mid '90s), but giving him a six-month
>reign to effectively kickstart AEW seems like the right move.
>Wasn't hot-shotted, and it didn't overstay it's welcome.
>
>I certainly don't want a long-term Omega reign either. But I
>can live with it now. It's a matter of personal preference,
>but if you give me a choice of champion who can talk but his
>work is shaky, and one who can work but is shaky on the mic,
>I'll take the latter.
>
>Good thing MJF can do both. And at least we're in agreement on
>that.
>

I worry that they gave Kenny the title to try to ‘save’ him. He’s a killer worker but sadly the US market won’t allow you to just be a good wrestler who wants to be champ..there has to be some extra character-based shit mixed in there somewhere or you may as well be ROH 10 years ago. I agree that he comes off as goofy and the opposite of cool. But I don’t think anyone’s gonna sack up, tell him that, and do anything to ‘fix’ it. Anything with Ibushi would make all of this stuff awesome. Until then, grand worker, shaky other stuff. Oh, another plus, that finisher is good shit.

Folks who love Hogan nWo title runs..I double dog dare anyone to go back and watch him pretend to be horrified of wrestling Warrior/Piper or whoever. And then the resulting match would damn near be the worst title matches on the show. And his tv matches? Openly horrible. And that Sting Starrcade 97 shit was shameful and it set the stage to put WCW out of business. There were good moments, sure. Goldberg/Hogan was really good. Hogan’s last WWE run as a worker was very fun for most of it and I was shocked the whole time. He looked good still and did some really good work and selling. Oh, and he jobbed more than he ever had so there was that too.

Jericho going to AEW was great for the company. I think it will one day land them a really good free agent who is 35 and not 55. Folks will still cry and moan no matter what but I am very glad that some other company exists that doesn’t have the stank of TNA on it or the lack of reach that plagues ROH. I’m guessing if they sell ads and merch, they are fine for a while. They can’t and won’t be or beat WWE anytime soon. This is good because WWE is fucking bloated right now. We’re about to have like 15 hours of wrestling across 4 days and it’s looking like they won’t have anything for Shinsuke Nakamura to do. That’s ridiculous.

I agree that Jericho’s days of carrying the wrestling portion of anything should be done but he can be asked to do 3 or 4 ‘real’ matches a year. He exists right now to get worked by MJF. And he’s gonna do it so that’s cool.