"Don’t want to acknowledge that" – Former WWE personality says Tony Khan and AEW's rating win is "not real"
Eric Bischoff slammed AEW and Tony Khan for celebrating Rampage's ratings win over WWE SmackDown, claiming the victory was "not real."
AEW Rampage marginally beat WWE SuperSized SmackDown, which aired on FS1 (15 October 2021). This was the first time WWE SmackDown went head-to-head with AEW Rampage as the two overlapped for 30 minutes.
The victory wasn't in the overall viewers but the 18-49 demographic. Nevertheless, Tony Khan was elated.
We're obtained a new key ratings detail on Friday: #AEW #Rampage beat #WWESmackdown in head-to-head 30 minutes in the most coveted 18-49 demo - 328,000 to 285,000. Rampage led with Punk match, Smackdown featured Becky-Sasha and Lesnar. More details here:
pwtorch.com/site/2021/10/1…
On the 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff stated that WWE delivered more viewers, which leads to higher subsequent sales in merchandise, pay-per-view, etc.
The WWE Hall of Famer stated that AEW and Tony Khan don't want to acknowledge that WWE outperformed them.
“WWE delivered more viewers, which affects everything. Pay-per-view, merchandise, ticket sales, all the other metrics you want to identify. WWE delivered more viewers than AEW on a third or fourth tier cable outlet than AEW did with one their highest profile pieces and new fresh talent."
Bischoff continued:
"If you don’t want to acknowledge that, and you want to shift everybody on the internet’s focus to a key demo for a 30-minute period of time, hurrah for you. It’s not real, not when it comes to context. My point in this diatribe is that Vince caused you to make a big move that, in my opinion, was less than flattering,” said Eric Bischoff. (h/t: WrestlingInc)
Eric Bischoff says Tony Khan lost despite CM Punk opening AEW Rampage
Eric Bischoff believes that Tony Khan is manipulating the data to make AEW seem like competition for WWE cultaholic.com/posts/eric-bis…
CM Punk's debut in Chicago got AEW Rampage a rating of over 1.1 million but, since then, AEW Rampage has been falling off.
Eric Bischoff said that despite putting the Second City Saint on AEW Rampage, Tony Khan was unable to win.
“WWE made a move that was the catalyst for Tony Khan to take his highest profile piece of talent, arguably, and put him in that time slot, and the show did less than a million viewers. How is that a f***ing win? Burning up talent, putting someone into a match with no storyline, with no angle. It was definitely an in-delicious move, but you’re burning up resources and you walked away with less than a million viewers?”
AEW Rampage saw another fall this week as the show recorded 533,000 viewers, down from last week's 578,000 viewers with a 0.22 rating in the key 18-49 demographic, down from last week's 0.24.