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This article is a follow-up to our article on WWE misbooking their talent. Creative Freedom, Narrative Excess, and the Limits of Decentralized Control If WWE is routinely accused of mis-booking through excessive control, All Elite Wrestling (AEW) faces a different but equally persistent critique: over-booking. Since its launch in 2019, AEW has marketed itself as an alternative to WWE’s centralized creative authority, promising wrestler autonomy, long-term storytelling, and re

Power, Narrative Control, and the Political Economy of Professional Wrestling Before I start, I want to give a shout-out to CovalentTV, which brought this topic up during one of their shows. Give them a listen on YouTube @Covalent_tv. Few debates in contemporary popular culture are as persistent or as emotionally charged as accusations that World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is “mis-booking” its wrestlers. Fans invoke the term to explain stalled careers, abrupt character shi

Quarterback remains the most critical and most vulnerable position in the National Football League. Over the last two decades, the NFL has invested unprecedented cultural and financial capital in the quarterback as the symbolic face of the franchise, the embodiment of leadership, and the primary engine of competitive success. Yet despite rule changes designed to protect passers, an explosion of quarterback-friendly offenses at the collegiate level, and increasingly sophistica

The chant hits before the first lock-up. “Let’s go, Cody. “Cody sucks!” Two sides of the arena fire back and forth, not over who’s the toughest, but over who tells the better story, who sells the emotion, who connects. A decade or two ago, that same crowd might have roared for blood, violence, and “real men” beating each other senseless. Today, the conversation sounds different: more about feelings, identity, and representation; less about who looks like a heavyweight boxer i

"Hidden gem” As an Analytic Category Calling a wrestler a “hidden gem” usually reads like fan shorthand: the performer looks electric, the crowd responds, and yet the company’s larger narrative economy has not fully converted that electricity into sustained centrality. As an analytical category, though, “hidden gem” helps scholars track a recurring tension in contemporary televised wrestling: promotions recruit transnational talent with distinctive styles and branding, but we

Corporate Legitimacy, Discursive Power, and the Normalization of Creative Failure in the Internet Wrestling Community If All Elite Wrestling occupies a no-win position within online wrestling discourse, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) occupies its inverse. Within the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC), WWE frequently benefits from a discursive framework that explains away, rationalizes, or reframes its creative failures as necessary, inevitable, or ultimately strategic. T

College athletics has entered an era of structural contradiction. Universities still market sports as an educational add-on, developmental, character-building, “amateur.” Yet athletic departments now operate like mature entertainment businesses: they monetize media rights, sell data and sponsorship inventory, finance facilities such as commercial real estate, and manage labor markets that are increasingly professional. Into that contradiction walks private equity (PE): patien

Moral Economies, Participatory Fandom, and the Politics of Critique in Contemporary Professional Wrestling Since its founding in 2019, All Elite Wrestling (AEW) has existed in a state of permanent contradiction within online wrestling discourse. Each creative decision, whether conservative or experimental, nostalgic or innovative, successful or flawed, provokes intense criticism from the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC). AEW is accused of being simultaneously too WWE-like  

The Pittsburgh Steelers hired Arthur Smith with the expectation that his experience as a former head coach and offensive coordinator would stabilize and modernize an offense that has struggled to keep pace with the NFL’s evolving schematic landscape. Instead, Smith’s tenure has reinforced the very problems the franchise claims it wants to solve. His offensive philosophy, play-calling tendencies, and personnel usage patterns have produced predictable, inefficient, and often se

Introduction: A Slogan As a Measuring Stick In Pittsburgh, “The Standard is the Standard” functions as more than a coach’s sound bite. It is a cultural claim about continuity: the Steelers will play disciplined football, develop talent, contend for championships, and crucially avoid the organizational drift that defines many NFL franchises. Mike Tomlin has used the phrase to emphasize that injuries, lineup changes, and adversity do not lower expectations; the team refuses to

Professional wrestling occupies a paradoxical cultural position. It presents itself as sport while operating as performance; it claims authenticity while openly staging outcomes; it invites emotional investment while repeatedly reminding audiences of its artificiality. Since at least the early twentieth century, critics, promoters, and fans have debated whether wrestling should be understood as legitimate competition, theatrical spectacle, or something uniquely hybrid. In rec

Professional wrestling has always existed at the intersection of performance, commerce, and audience belief. For much of the twentieth century, the industry depended on kayfabe, the shared understanding that wrestling’s staged outcomes should remain concealed from the audience. Promoters controlled information tightly, performers protected the illusion publicly, and fans accessed the business primarily through mediated channels such as magazines, television broadcasts, and l

For much of the twentieth century, professional wrestling functioned as a uniquely porous form of popular culture. Wrestlers crossed easily into film, television, music, advertising, and political discourse, while non-fans often encountered wrestling characters even if they never watched a weekly broadcast. Figures such as Hulk Hogan , The Rock , and Stone Cold Steve Austin  became cultural shorthand, instantly recognizable personalities whose appeal exceeded the boundaries o

When the College Football Playoff (CFP) expanded from four teams to twelve, it did more than change bracket math. It reshaped how the sport sells and narrates its most valuable product. In March 2024, the CFP and ESPN reached media agreements that keep ESPN as the exclusive worldwide  rightsholder for the playoffs through the 2031–32 season, a package widely reported to be roughly $7.8 billion (about $1.3 billion annually). The same set of agreements also granted ESPN the abi

In the wake of pandemic-era contraction and the post-2010s restructuring of the wrestling economy, independent wrestling in the mid-2020s shows clear signs of renewed momentum though that momentum appears unevenly distributed across regions, promotions, and business models. This article argues that the independent scene has  picked up, and it demonstrates the claim through three measurable indicators: (1) live-event performance (venue scale, sellouts, and ticket distribution)

Few individual performers have exerted as profound an influence on a modern professional wrestling institution as Hiroshi Tanahashi  has on New Japan Pro Wrestling  (NJPW). Emerging during a period of organizational crisis in the early 2000s, Tanahashi did not merely ascend to stardom; he actively reshaped the company’s aesthetic, economic stability, and ideological identity. His career coincided with and in many ways enabled NJPW’s recovery from the so-called “dark age” that

Professional wrestling sells more than athletic outcomes. It sells meaning constructed in advance, performed live, and remembered later through recaps, highlight reels, network documentaries, and nostalgic canon-building. Because wrestling depends on memory as much as on spectacle, the companies that control visibility  (who gets named on-air, whose footage can be used, and which moments get framed as “major history”) also control value. In the contemporary industry, WWE’s ma

Introduction The modern college football calendar no longer effectively serves the sport's athletes, institutions, or audiences. Instead, it reflects a patchwork of historical compromises, media-driven incentives, and governance failures that have accumulated over decades. While conference commissioners frequently acknowledge the strain placed on players, coaches, and academic calendars, they consistently fail to implement meaningful reform. This failure is not accidental. It

Professional wrestling has always depended on two fundamental narrative engines: the ability to tell stories through physical movement and the ability to persuade audiences through emotional performance. Selling arguably the most essential element of in-ring storytelling sits at the crossroads of these two traditions. It is more than acting, more than athleticism, and more than spectacle. It is the medium through which pain, struggle, and risk become legible to the audience.

After AEW's last PPV of 2025, "World's End," questions arose about some moves that seemed unnecessary and very dangerous. Podcasters went on rants about AEW needing to be more proactive in stopping these types of moves. So, I thought, why not write about it? Introduction: Risk, Spectacle, and the Boundaries of Safety Since its launch in 2019, All Elite Wrestling  (AEW) has positioned itself as both an alternative and a corrective to mainstream North American professional wres