ROH COO Joe Koff Says Company Hiatus Was A Business Decision

Ring Of Honor shocked the pro wrestling world to its core when it announced that it will undergo a reimagining. This led to the company releasing all of its talents at the same time. It seems the ROH COO revealed why the company went on a hiatus.

ROH Final Battle took place earlier this month and it was truly the end of an era for many fans, as the show had a lot of fanservice for longtime fans. It also featured several memorable moments, including the debut of Braun Strowman.

While speaking on the Ring of Honor Strong Podcast, ROH COO Joe Koff talked about the promotion taking a hiatus and explained the events that eventually led to it. Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic played a part.

“It was really business-oriented. Let’s go back to 2019. We made a decision that in order for us to be as relevant or to be as competitive in the fan’s mind, we needed to have a bigger program, a primetime offering, high production, and high talent. if you’ve ever been in business, and I know a lot of our fans are they come from all walks of life, you don’t make a decision in January and start from March. These things are thought out well in advance. You have to plan, you have to figure out how it’s going to work and what’s the return on those efforts and ideas.

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So back in 2019, nobody could have foreseen what happened in 2020. We were on our road and on our way to being a live event. The distribution point, we always had our own distribution, that was not a problem, we were always looking for different points of distribution, and we built the company around that to sustain us to that level. It meant more people because we were going to go weekly, we were never a weekly promotion. We did weekly television but those weren’t done weekly.

So we go into a weekly mindset, it changes the business dynamic. It wasn’t a big leap, it was the logical step and that’s what we did. So we built our company around 52-week live programming, basically. Well, we were ready to go in July 2020, everything was in order, we were plugging along and then all of a sudden March came of 2020, and the world as we know it stopped.”

The Briscoes are certainly likely to make their way to AEW as even FTR wants to square off against them. It remains to be seen which former ROH talents will sign with AEW.

h/t to Wrestling Inc for the quotes

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