ROH COO Talks Stars Leaving Company, Broadcast Plans

Ring of Honor keeps plugging away. No matter what seems to happen, the brand pushes forward. 

With this week’s Death Before Dishonor PPV, ROH tries to emerge from the shadows from NXT, WWE and UFC, which all have huge shows this weekend as well. Even though Ring Of Honor is battling with TNA for a number two spot in American wrestling, ROH COO Joe Koff told Ring Rust Radio that the company doesn’t like to plan for the short term.

“First of all, there is no short-term. Sinclair Broadcasting is a broadcaster and we own 172 television stations in 81 markets. We control programming and content on over 400 channels. This is a part of Sinclair Broadcasting. The short-term is exactly as you see it. The long-term is even better even for the fan. I’m really excited about it because of the company we represent. There are a lot of companies that wait for technology to happen and we’ve always been a company that’s been very innovative. I always liken ourselves as almost a tech incubator. A lot of the things we have done with Ring of Honor have come from inside the company. One of the things technically, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this because I’m not that well-informed enough to talk about it, but there’s going to be a new standard of broadcasting that’s being developed and accepted right now called ATSC 3.0. It’s going to be television transmission on an IP level. It’s going to allow us as a company and anyone else adapting to it to really bring free television platforms anywhere and on any device people are viewing them on. That’s another key to Sinclair is that we are a free television platform company. So Ring of Honor is always available for free. If you can get our signal no matter where you live or get one of these signals from a station that carries us across the country, you can get Ring of Honor for free without paying anything extra for it. That is something we believe dearly in and that says a lot about us,” Koff said.

Last year, Ring of Honor had a short-term television deal with Destination America that barely lasted six months. Even though they no longer have the cable distribution to that level, Koff said during the interview that he saw it as a positive experience that helped out the brand.

“Well I think it was very successful in retrospect. It expanded my brand even for that short period of time that we were on and it allowed more people to see us and more people to experience us. As far as why it didn’t go longer, I think it had to do with the management shift at Destination America which is not uncommon in the programming business. We are all fighting for audience and we are all fighting to do the best thing for our station. Destination America is a programming channel and I think they wanted to go more into the, I don’t want to call it the occult, but shows like Ghost Whisperer and stuff like that. Wrestling as a product has a tendency to be an isolationist product unless you are on a full wrestling channel, which doesn’t exist except in over-the-top with the WWEor on my website or ROH wrestling on demand where you can get tons of videos on demand. It doesn’t lend itself around other products unless you’re a male oriented station or a combat oriented station. I think Destination America just made a programming choice. I was thrilled to have that exposure. With Comet TV, which is a science fiction genre channel, we are in more homes than we were with Destination America so we didn’t lose out on that part,” said Koff.

One of the primary issues that ROH faces, as any smaller company does, is losing talent. Seth Rollins, Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Cesaro, AJ Styles, and others all spent time in ROH before moving on to WWE. Even though the process keeps repeating itself, the Ring of Honor COO says that it’s not a concern, and they actually take pride in it. 

“You can’t worry about what you’re going to lose, you can only focus on what you can build. I think it’s a great draw for us. When you look at the wrestling landscape, and I just want to draw attention to even this conversation, four years ago I don’t think I would be this powerful in this narrative and I think we are there. When you talk about the names that you mentioned, I don’t think they would’ve gotten there without Ring of Honor. Ring of Honor is special and is special to the fans and special to the guys. Because of that I think we have an aspirational promotion to keep bringing in talent that may make it to WWE while some guys, and I say this with a lot of confidence, are very happy to just be in Ring of Honor. That level of talent is still going to be coveted, but may not be obtained. I have no issue with that and I’m proud of that. The guys that have worked for me and are now in WWE, I’d like to think that we played a little part in their success. I can take a lot of solace in that,” said Koff.

You can hear the full interview above. We’ll have full, live coverage of ROH Death Before Dishonor Friday night.