WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff recently took to his 83 Weeks podcast, where he spoke about a number of topics such as how tournaments rarely have any real great story going into it, but this time with the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament it is different because of the CM Punk vs. Samoa Joe Matchup and he thinks this matchup is pretty magical.
Eric Bischoff said:
“Yeah, typically tournaments are a little tough because, by virtue of the fact that it’s a tournament, you very rarely have any real great story going into it. And that can also make it fun, by the way. But in this case, I think they’re doing a great job. Samoa, Joe and CM Punk, they’ve got backstory, they’ve got history. Samoa Joe, I think, is probably more popular now than he has ever been. And sometimes, the absence makes the heart grow fonder. I think that’s the case here with Joe. And I think Joe and Punk together in this tournament format is potentially pretty magical. And I’m anxious to see how it does.”
Eric Bishoff also spoke about AEW Collision and the drop of television ratings from the debut episode to the succeeding episodes.
Eric Bischoff said:
“You mentioned ratings and Jon Alba, and I will cover that in more detail, but, you know, know, they opened it up, I think it was 865, 860,000 viewers or whatever it was, 800 and change. And before the first episode, I predicted that they were going to drop between 25 and 30% and they dropped 27%, which is not unusual. You, you, you should expect that the good news for collision is they opened up stronger than I think most people thought they would, including me. I thought 600,000 viewers would be a great number, a solid number, 800 is a great number. So the fact that they dropped from 800,000 down to whatever it was, five, and changed to 600,000, is not surprising. And actually not too bad. You know, of a drop, you look at WWE SmackDown, when I was executive director there for a cup of coffee, our premier episode on Fox did 3.8 or 3.9 million viewers. Two weeks later, they were down to 3 million or 2.7 million. So the drop off that AEW experience wasn’t as significant as it could have been.”
You can check out Eric Bischoff's full comments in the video below. H/T to WrestlingHeadlines.com for transcribing the above quotes.
