Select Answers: Forbidden Door Elimination, Prichard-JR, AEW TV, Original All In

Welcome to Select Answers, a short feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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What’s the story with the tag title match being announced as an elimination match and then not being one? Why didn’t The Hurt Syndicate wind up not putting a single team over during their title run?

It was supposed to be an elimination match, and based on everything I've heard, Hurt Syndicate didn't want it to be one. It wasn't an error that it was listed as an Elimination match. It was treated as such all the way up until the day of the show.

I don't even dislike how Hurt Syndicate is booked. There should be big, dominant teams, but it came at the expense of the match and the division. It didn't make any sense.

Has JBL taken over Bruce Prichard's podcast permanently?

Well, semi-permanently. Bruce Prichard naturally wasn't going to be around as much when he rejoined WWE in February 2019, but he still tried to make it work for a long time. JBL was brought in to fill in for him, with the idea that Bruce Prichard would return when he was able to.

WWE doesn't want Prichard talking about current wrestling on the show anyway, which is a hurdle that JBL doesn't have. Conrad Thompson indicated recently that Prichard would return to the show, but I didn't hear when.

When is the next AEW tv deal up for negotiation?

Well, any time. In negotiating their current deal with WDB, they regained their exclusivity. Prior to that, all AEW content was on WBD properties and channels. Now, they have the ability to negotiate wherever they want for upcoming shows, whether it be Ring of Honor or AEW. If you mean for Dynamite and Collision, they are signed through 2027, and WBD has an option for the 2028 year. The money escalates every year during the deal.

So this is going seem like an outta nowhere question. The first All In who paid the wrestlers ? Was it Cody and the bucks or the companies they worked for at the time?

I reached out to a ton of people that worked the show. A number of people told me that Cody Rhodes directly paid them, just like an independent promoter.