AEW Dynamite officially premiered on TNT in October of 2019, and NXT went live on Wednesday nights on USA Network just a few weeks before.
The two shows have been going head to head for over a year now, and Jim Ross addressed WWE’s decision to put NXT up against AEW during a recent episode of his Grilling JR podcast.
Ross noted that he believes Vince McMahon’s plan was to push AEW to see if the promotion would stumble and fall, but that’s not what happened.
“How’s that working? How’s that brilliant evil strategy? Going head to head is good in a boardroom, it’s good in a rah-rah meeting, but at the end of the day, you bring more people to a television set that are wrestling fans at 8 o’ clock eastern time on Wednesday night because you’ve got two brands now that the audience can sample.”
“They can watch one, they can DVR one, they can switch back and forth, whatever the hell you do. But to think it’s going to cripple it? Look at the bigger picture. It’s been the excuse in wrestling forever. Unscrupulous, unethical situations are always justified by saying ‘it’s just business’. Well, it’s just business that we’re kicking your a** every [Wednesday] night.”
For the vast majority of the Wednesday Night Wars AEW has come out ahead of NXT in the ratings. It was rumored a few months ago that WWE officials were discussing the idea of moving NXT to a different night, but so far nothing has come of those discussions.
H/T Wrestling Inc.
