A reader asked PWInsider’s Dave Scherer if CM Punk is still the person behind keeping Colt Cabana off AEW TV, you know, considering that Cabana got that one match with Chris Jericho a month ago, but that’s been it.
Yeah. Good question there.
I love Scherer’s response: “AEW has had the unintended effect of opening up people’s eyes on who are credible reporters and who aren’t.”
More on that in a minute.
We’ll start with, yeah, we all know why Cabana got the match with Jericho.
Cabana even said himself, on The Work of Wrestling podcast, that he had been told that Jericho had requested him for the Nov. 2 match on AEW “Dynamite.”
“I’m under contract, they tell me to show up, I showed up. They tell me who I’m wrestling, I wrestle. If they want me to wrestle again, I’ll wrestle again. if they want me to agent again, I’ll agent again, whatever,” Cabana said.
The match with Jericho was just his fourth for AEW since way back in March, and his first on “Dynamite” in nearly a year.
Which, at first glance, would seem to corroborate what the somebody or somebodies who planted stories in what passes for the wrestling media casting the blame for Cabana not seeing the light of day on Punk, Cabana’s one-time best friend, were saying there.
The two, you may remember, had a famous falling out after they were sued by WWE for remarks Punk made about his departure from that company on Cabana’s podcast.
The planted stories made it that Punk was using his position as AEW’s top draw to stick it to Cabana.
A look at the data tells another story.
And as it turns out, Cabana was barely getting TV time before Punk signed with AEW.
According to the Internet Wrestling Database, Cabana wrestled on “Dynamite” a total of 13 times in the 46 weeks between March 4, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021, then aside from a brief appearance in a ladder match battle royale at the 2021 “Double or Nothing,” he was relegated to “Dark” and “Dark: Elevation,” the AEW YouTube shows, for the next 36 weeks until he worked a 16-man tag on the Sept. 29, 2021 “Dynamite.”
He was back on “Dynamite” for an eight-man tag on Oct. 27, 2021, then got a singles match with Bryan Danielson on Nov. 24, 2021.
That was his last “Dynamite” match until the Jericho match last month.
IWD has Cabana with a 44-30 career record in AEW. The ledger includes three pay-per-view matches (two battle royales, one eight-man tag), four non-televised matches, 17 “Dynamite” matches and 50 YouTube matches.
In the 76 weeks that Cabana was in AEW before Punk arrived in August 2021, he wrestled on “Dynamite” 13 times – a .171 batting average for ol’ “Boom Boom.”
In the 54 weeks between Punk’s arrival and “All Out” on Sept. 4, Cabana worked three “Dynamite” matches – an .056 average.
In the 13 weeks since “All Out,” we’ve seen Cabana in the one “Dynamite” match – an .077 average.
It looks like, as Scherer wrote, that “Tony Khan was the one keeping Colt off of TV before, and he is the one doing it now.”
But that’s not the narrative that what passes for the wrestling media has been selling us since “All Out.”
The journos told us that it was Punk, behind the scenes, manipulating Khan to do his bidding.
Maybe what’s really going on here is, there were other people – the Young Bucks? Kenny Omega? – behind the scenes manipulating the journos to do their bidding instead.
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Chris Graham
