Shawn Michaels Addresses NXT’s Head-To-Head With AEW
For one night only, the Wednesday Night Wars will resurface on a Sunday and Shawn Michaels has given his thoughts on NXT going up against AEW one more time.
NXT television and AEW Dynamite sparked wrestling ratings wars into life once again towards the end of 2019 with the two shows going head-to-head weekly with AEW’s offering handily winning in the ratings almost every week. The so-called war ended in the spring of 2021 when WWE moved its developmental show to Tuesdays.
Now once again there is some form of competition between the two brands as AEW Double Or Nothing will air on pay-per-view at the same time as NXT Battleground on Sunday, May 28th.
Speaking at the pre-NXT Battleground press conference, Shawn Michaels noted that the show going head-to-head with AEW Double Or Nothing was a coincidence to the best of his knowledge:
“To the best of my knowledge, no. For me, and for us, the WWE as a whole, as I’m always honest with you guys, clearly there are people far more important than me that make decisions that they don’t tell me about. For us, this was about a big Memorial Day weekend for WWE. Even though it’s a little switched around, for us, it’s a little bit of a throwback to when we would have joint weekends with NXT on Saturday and WWE pay-per-views on Sunday.
“This is just flip-flopped with Night of Champions on Saturday, especially coming in the afternoon, everyone felt it was a good combination to have NXT on Sunday night and create a big WWE weekend for WWE fans. For me, personally, I would love to have as many standalone weekends on us as we can get.
“No different than having to go up against the (NBA & NHL) playoffs for the last several weeks. As much as I’m a basketball fan or NHL fan, it thrills me when the playoffs are done. The less competition we can get, the better.”
The WWE Hall of Famer also gave his thoughts on two WWE stars who want to leave the company but had their release requests denied.