Road Dogg Claims NXT Was Never Competing With AEW

WWE NXT and AEW’s Wednesday Night War started in October 2019 as AEW Dynamite and NXT went head-to-head every week in order to see who would come out the better show. AEW Dynamite would win in the ratings war for the majority of the time. The Wars finally came to an end in April last year after NXT moved to Tuesday nights. People like Jim Ross believed it was a cop-out.

For 76 weeks, the war between the two brands raged on, and only on one occasion did AEW lose in the key 18-49 demographic rating against NXT. This was seen as a shock to many, but AEW bounced back.

While speaking on Busted Open Radio, WWE Hall Of Famer Road Dogg talked about the Wednesday Night Wars. He claimed that no one in NXT thought they were ever competing with AEW.

“This is how I look at that. I’m trying to calm down a little before I react or respond. I don’t think NXT lost the head-to-head battle. I don’t think it was ever meant to. I think things got out of hand a little bit and USA agreed to a deal for NXT and Vince (McMahon) wanted that to be what it is now. He wanted it to be a total tryout thing. ‘Put these people on TV, we’ll see if they stick, and we’ll get them up here.’ Hunter has a different philosophy. ‘Train them, make sure they’re good to go before you put them on TV.’

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It’s two totally different philosophies. Speaking from NXT, and I say this from sitting in every meeting when it was Black & Gold and writing, producing, and directing, we never once thought we were competing with those guys. We looked at ourselves as a developmental program. I hope for AEW they weren’t thinking that beating a developmental program was a notch in their belt because it was people nobody had ever heard of on a Tuesday night against Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley. I always thought that was apples and oranges and you can tell I take I t personally because I worked there. Of course, we wanted to beat them, but we never thought we were in competition or had to write for competition. We just wrote the best show we could.”

NXT 2.0 so far has received mixed reception so far, so it remains to be seen whether the product will improve in good time or not. Regardless, both NXT and AEW are busy with their own products and that’s all that matters right now.

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