Chris Jericho: WWE And NXT Lost Their Cool Factor And Were Hurting Their Own Brand Against AEW

The Wednesday Night Wars came to an end in April with NXT moving to Tuesday nights starting on April 13.

Following the end of the war, Triple H noted to Peter Rosenberg that it was an “imaginary war” and that WWE competes against everything.

Chris Jericho isn’t surprised by WWE changing the narrative and finds it funny.

“That’s typical WWE,” said Jericho in an interview with Joseph Staszewski of New York Post. “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. 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? 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? 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.”

AEW Dynamite won 63 of the 75 weeks in terms of viewership against NXT. AEW has benefitted from NXT moving to Tuesday nights, hitting over one million viewers in two of the last three weeks while running unopposed.

“We’ve done a great job of putting on amazing television throughout this pandemic,” Jericho said. “We never took our eyes off the storytelling, which is what it’s all about. And we never lost our cool factor either, which I think NXT and WWE lost a lot of. “They started kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face and just kept holding on and holding on and hurting their own brand and hotshoting everything to get ratings and they just weren’t getting it. So whatever reason they left, good for them, they’re a great company.”

Jericho previously noted that Vince McMahon may have second-guessed himself by having Jericho on Broken Skull Sessions with Steve Austin during WrestleMania week. You can find his full comments by clicking here.

Fightful will have live coverage of NXT beginning at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday and AEW Dynamite beginning at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday.