AEW Collision 7/22/23: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Welcome to Wrestling Inc.'s review of "AEW Collision," the show that many people continue to insist is noticeably distinct from "AEW Dynamite!" We're coming off the finals of the women's Owen Hart Foundation Tournament, the finals of the men's Owen Hart Foundation Tournament, and also possibly the best match in company history, top five at least, no big deal. This week, we were promised a Trios Championship match between the reigning champions and another team in no way affiliated with the person the reigning champions are feuding with, as well as the possibility of some kind of explanation for Ricky Starks' inexplicable heel turn last week. Exciting stuff!

Our live coverage has everything you need if you want the bare bones facts of the matter. If you want to know what parts of Saturday's show were actually good (according to 100% personal and subjective criteria, strap in for three things we hated and three things we loved about the 7/22/23 episode of "AEW Collision."

We've been hearing a lot of talk recently about how "AEW Dynamite" feels more like the company's "sports entertainment" show, while "Collision" has the feel of a "wrestling" show. Personally, we find this an entirely nonsensical concept, since "sports entertainment" is just a phrase Vince McMahon invented because he's ashamed of being a wrestling promoter, but leaving that aside, we found it objectively hilarious that this week's "Collision" opened with a classic McMahon promo parade setting up a tag team match in the main event. Just the funniest thing ever.

Anyway, both the promo parade and the ensuing match — CM Punk and Darby Allin vs. Ricky Starks and Christian Cage — continued the trend of everything involving Punk being fine, but that's about it. None of the performers did anything wrong, either in the ring or on the mic. It's just that recent booking decisions really made it difficult for the entire narrative here to be successful. Starks did his best to cut a heel promo, emphasizing his money and elitist taste in tried-and-true fashion, but the crowd wasn't really having it. They clearly wanted to cheer him, and they damn sure wanted to boo Punk when he came out. It's almost like Punk should have turned heel and Starks should have stayed babyface, just a thought. We also have a hard time getting excited for Darby Allin's latest TNT title feud, considering how many times he's already won that title. The most interesting part of this entire thing continues to be Christian and his blatant insistence on referring to himself as TNT Champion, and that insistence getting him locked into the tag match, which he didn't necessarily want to be involved in, was the best thing the main event had going for it from a story perspective. Also, his line about how people shouldn't walk around wearing titles they didn't actually win was possibly the greatest one-liner in AEW history.

In the end, after a solid but unmemorable match, Starks pinned Allin after once again grabbing the second rope. Swell. Almost five months after he pinned Chris Jericho clean at Revolution as a white-hot babyface, Ricky Starks is now a cheating heel who brags about his Louis Vuitton. Great job, everyone. AEW out here making stars.

Even after their absolutely incredible match with FTR last week, it still seems weird to have Jay White and Juice Robinson continue working as a tag team after they inducted former AEW World Tag Team Champions The Gunns into Bullet Club Gold. That have been said ... what are we gonna do, complain about it?

White and Robinson continued their improbable run of tag success this week, defeating Action Andretti and Darius Martin. Andretti is a suitably fun Top Flight replacement, and the requisite high-flying hijinks were performed, but ultimately this was about the Bang Bang Gang establishing dominance. We particularly enjoyed the finish, where Robinson probably could have gotten the pin after a pair of devastating moves, but tagged out to White, who delivered a Blade Runner just for the hell of it. Also, unlike last week, the Gunns were having fun with taunts and trash talk at ringside, which proved to be an entertaining part of the act.

This is far from a unique observation, but six episodes in, Bullet Club Gold are indisputably the early stars of "Collision," and despite our confusion surrounding a stable composed of two tag teams, we love that last week wasn't the end for Jay and Juice, and that their performance in a legitimate Match of the Year candidate was legitimized win a subsequent dominant win.

As for the other participants in the aforementioned Match of the Year candidate ... oof. It's theoretically possible that FTR has already figured out they're the heels in any match against MJF and Adam Cole — they certainly admitted their opponents are popular — but this in-ring promo sounded more like the opposite of Ricky Starks' attempt from earlier in the evening: They want to be babyfaces, but we're not having it. How can you purport to be a babyface when you try to turn Adam Cole against his best friend, MJF? How can you expect anyone to cheer for you when you come out against comedy segments and in-ring dance-offs? Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler are phenomenal tag team wrestlers and we can't praise their ring work highly enough, but their babyface personalities are boring and zero fun, and they just come across like people who take this too seriously. This has been the case basically since they turned, but it took a team like MJF and Cole to make us all realize it.

We really, really need these two sticks in the mud to lose the tag team titles next week. We don't think that's the reaction they were going for, but that's what we need.

For the first time in the history of this column, we have basically no complaints about the AEW women's division beyond "there should be more of it." This week's "Collision" match between Taya Valkyrie and Skye Blue slapped. No, there are still no stories for women on AEW programming, but the difference in size and style between Blue and Valkyrie was basically all the story we needed to make a compelling match. What's more, the right person went over, as Valkyrie scored a challenging but decisive win. We love Skye Blue and think she has an awesome future ahead of her, but right now, you're misusing Taya if you're having her constantly putting over the up-and-comers. Despite the fact that we've lost count of how many championship matches she's lost at this point, she still could and should be a major force in the division, and she looked like it Saturday night.

At this point, we're going to go ahead and assume that "Outcasts vs. Originals" is dead as a storyline, at least until Tony Khan decides to randomly jump into it again when Jaime Hayter comes back. Frankly, we hope he doesn't. It's kind of like the mythical Keith Lee/Swerve Strickland match — it's been so long at this point and been treated with such overall disinterest that we can't imagine caring about it down the road. Better at this point to just let it die and move on to other things, and you could do a lot worse than having La Wera Loca challenge Britt Baker to a match on "Dynamite." Hopefully they get more than a minute.

Throwing a Trios Championship match between the House of Black and the Acclaimed onto a random episode of "Collision" while HoB are in the middle of a feud with Andrade was a truly bizarre choice, but we loved pretty much everything about the match, from Buddy Matthews interrupting Max Caster's rap with a flying knee to Malaki Black whispering "retire, b****" into Billy Gunn's ear. The two teams are well-balanced in a weird way, with Gunn and Brody King providing their respective teams with larger size and more muscle in comparison to their partners' comparatively leaner builds, and the result is that there's pretty much always a fun combination in the ring. We also thought Black was absolutely on point Saturday night — his strikes looked absolutely beautiful, and his body language while talking to Gunn on the mat after the match was everything it should have been: creepy, but also deferential, as though Black was delivering a painful truth that he didn't want to say out loud, but that he was duty-bound to pass along.

We're not convinced Gunn is actually hanging up his boots — considering the House's past history, any number of things could be going on — but if he is, he's had an amazing career that any wrestler should be proud of. Farewell, "Scissor me, Daddy Ass" catchphrase. We shall not see your like again.

As much as we enjoyed the Trios title match this week, we have to ask one question regarding the House of Black/Andrade feud, and that question is "Who the f*** is booking this s*** and what drugs are they on?"

Seriously, what is going on here? House of Black steals Andrade's mask, he spent like two or three weeks being mad about it while Malaki teased a deeper level of the feud with his "I am, trying to free you from the shackles of your past or whatever" speech. Last week, Black and King had a match against some jobbers. At one point, Andrade approached the ring trying to attack them, but was stopped by security. As a result of this heinous action that wrestlers perform all the time, on every wrestling show, Andrade isn't allowed in the building this week, so he can't interfere in the Trios match. Then, after the Trios match but before the end of the show, AEW announces there will be a ladder match for the mask next week between Andrade and Buddy Matthews, with House of Black banned from ringside.

...what?

So Andrade has been mad about the mask thing for a couple weeks, the two parties have been almost entirely kept apart during that time, the have been no backstage confrontations, no in-ring confrontations, no further promo segments, no further matches, no further interfering in each other's matches, no nothing. Nope, we're apparently going straight from "sorry sir, we can't in good conscience allow to interfere in a match for our sixth-most important championship" to "LADDER MATCH." Against the least important member of HoB. Who Andrade already beat clean on the first episode of this show. How did this come about? Did Black agree to this? Are they actually just dragging this out because when they started they thought they would be re-signing Rush and now they're not sure? Because we sure as hell figured Andrade would have a couple partners right now.

Anyway, this feud has gone completely off the rails and as such is just no longer compelling at all. It's a shame considering how it started, but that's what bad booking does to you. They're putting this ladder match on the same card as MJF/Adam Cole vs. FTR, and that should tell you all you need to know. You get as much investment from something as you put into it, Tony. Better luck next time.