AEW Nixed G-1 Style Owen Hart Tournament Due To Lack Of TV Time

AEW has the brackets set for the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament. The finals will go down at Double or Nothing in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 29th. A lot of fans were hoping for something more like NJPW’s G1 tournament, which runs as a round-robin competition. There is a simple reason Tony Khan opted for the simple bracket-style elimination tournament that we are getting instead.

On the latest Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer talked about the situation. With only three hours of weekly television, AEW would have had to have focused 100% of their time on round-robin-style tournaments. Instead, the promotion was forced to go with a more traditional bracket for the men’s and women’s competition.

“The problem is that they do not have enough shows to do a G1-style tournament, because they don’t have enough shows to have eight fighters do seven matches each. There’s not enough time, so they cannot do a G1-style show.

Even if that’s what his [Tony Khan] original idea was, they just don’t have enough. Even if you put matches on Dark and Dark Elevation and everything, you really can’t pull that off, because your TV show, you could probably put a couple of matches on, but you don’t want a TV show where you’ve got six matches in two hours in the tournament and nothing else.

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You’ve got to build up your pay-per-view card, and the tournament’s only part of your pay-per-view card. The nature of TV and everything like this just doesn’t lend itself to a tournament like that. Maybe he wanted to try it, but again, when you just kind of look at the situation, it’s kind of like, well, it’s not like you can ignore an entire pay-per-view just to build up this tournament. You really can’t. By process of elimination, you either do an elimination or you do a round-robin, and the round-robin, you just really couldn’t do.”

There are still plenty of intriguing matchups and potential showdowns in the Owen Hart tournament. AEW has also built up multiple title bouts and grudge matches for the PPV. It’s no G1, but the single-elimination brackets will add a lot to Double or Nothing’s card, even if they’re not the complete focus.

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