Tony Khan Argues Why Samoa Joe Vacating ROH TV Title Made Sense

Samoa Joe is a highly skilled and accomplished professional wrestler, who has competed all over the world over the past couple of decades. His physically imposing presence instantly made him a big deal in AEW. He was also a record-setting ROH TV Champion but randomly vacated the title. Now Tony Khan argued why Joe vacating the title made sense.

Samoa Joe’s remarkable journey as the ROH TV Champion began on April 13, 2022, when he defeated Minoru Suzuki to claim the ROH World TV Championship. From that moment, Samoa Joe was utterly unstoppable as the champion.

However, The Samoan Submission Machine would end up vacating the ROH World TV Championship on the November 8th episode of AEW Dynamite – a decision that got a lot of backlash for making no sense whatsoever.

While speaking to Bill Pritchard of WrestleZone, AEW President Tony Khan talked about Samoa Joe vacating the ROH TV Championship. Khan defended the decision, stating that it made perfect sense to have someone like Joe on AEW television more going forward.

“The TV Title has been such a consistent focus on the TV show and Samoa Joe has defended it many times. Given the nature of a TV Title, it will be good to have a champion who will participate consistently on ROH TV and be a fighting champion. Samoa Joe has been such an incredible champion, was the longest-reigning champion of all time, and made such an incredible list of defenses. If you look back at all the great wrestlers Samoa Joe fought for the ROH TV Title in the over one-year reign, it was incredible. I also think now, with AEW, Samoa Joe has become a huge focus of AEW promotional consideration, and definitely for Samoa Joe, I do think it made a lot of sense for him to be a focus because he’s such a huge star for AEW, there are a lot of commercial benefits to have a huge star of Samoa Joe’s stature on AEW television every week. It felt like as big as Samoa Joe’s presence on AEW has become, it had become challenging for him to defend the championship. Relinquishing it, at that point, did make some sense. To him, personally, it made sense, because he had accomplished everything he had set out to. He became the longest-reigning, most dominant champion and set his sights on a new goal, which is for AEW Worlds End.”

The Samoan Submission Machine is set to square off against MJF for the AEW World Championship at the Worlds Event pay-per-view on December 30th. We will have to wait and see who will end up winning at the event.

What’s your opinion on what Tony Khan said? Do you feel Samoa Joe should have vacated the title? Let us know in the comments!