Last month, we learned that NXT would remain on the USA Network...on Tuesday nights. The show originally made the leap from the WWE Network to compete directly with All Elite Wrestling: Dynamite on Wednesdays, and WWE did a lot to hurt the rival company, including counterprogramming and running shows without commercials.
According to Triple H, though, it was an "imaginary war" between the two shows because WWE views every form of entertainment as competition.
Well, Chris Jericho has something to say about that, and he's not holding back!
"It will be there for the rest of time, it was an ‘imaginary war,’ and if it wasn’t a war why did they take Wednesday night the exact same time that we had?" Le Champion started. "It was there to take away our ratings and for us not to get re-signed. Three months after that started we were re-signed to a hundreds-of millions-of-dollars extension. They failed."
"That’s typical WWE. It’s typical rhetoric. Because I believe that they congratulated us the first week and said, if you remember, ‘It’s a marathon, not a sprint.’ We won the marathon, right? So now it’s an imaginary war," Jericho continued. "Well, then why were they saying it’s a marathon, not a sprint a year-and-a-half ago when our first rating came out?"
AEW has definitely benefited from not facing NXT as the show drew over 1 million viewers during its first two weeks. NXT, meanwhile, is still a long way off from reaching that number, and while the "imaginary war" was taking place, Dynamite won the vast majority of weeks in terms of total viewership and, more importantly, key demographic numbers.