Jeff Jarrett doesn’t think wrestlers disappearing from AEW television for months necessarily means there’s a problem. With the amount of talent Tony Khan has available, Jarrett believes someone can vanish for a while and AEW still has another five, 10 or even 15 wrestlers good enough to fill that spot.
While speaking on the My World podcast, Jeff Jarrett discussed the depth of the current AEW and WWE rosters with Conrad Thompson. For Jarrett, though, “diverse” might be a better word than simply calling them loaded. He pointed to wrestlers such as Konosuke Takeshita, Kazuchika Okada, Mistico and Will Ospreay as examples of just how international the talent pool has become.
“When I get asked and doing the rounds of media and I have the right—I’ll say the right—but you have a disc jockey, interviewer, who is a—I don’t want to say just a fan—someone who kind of knows the history. ‘Hey Jeff, what’s the difference nowadays?’ And I just say right out of the gate, never, ever, ever in the history of the business has there been a more—and I don’t want to just say loaded—but I’m going to say a diverse roster. And they’re all at the highest level. Takeshita, Okada, do we need to—like mega stars from Japan, Mistico, we can name three or four other luchas. Ospreay’s British, we could name Germans, but I’m talking about from a global presence, male and female.”
That eventually brought Jarrett to one of the biggest complaints surrounding AEW: wrestlers disappearing from television for extended stretches. Jarrett understands why people notice it. He just doesn’t think those absences hurt nearly as much when there are so many other talented wrestlers taking their place.
“And people are like, ‘Oh, we hadn’t seen this guy in months.’ And you’re right because it’s not like you hadn’t seen this guy in months, and I’ll say this diplomatically, that we missed him. No, because you’ve got five to 10 to 15 other talent that are super good that are on TV.”
Jarrett believes the size of AEW’s roster makes considerably more sense when looking at everything Tony Khan has to book throughout an entire year. With roughly 11 pay-per-view events to fill alongside weekly television, Jarrett argued that having an extremely deep roster isn’t just a luxury. It’s practically required.
“You can see Tony’s vision and psychology if you take a—and not take one step back. If you just go way back and don’t look at 10,000, 20, maybe 30, maybe 50,000 feet and go, okay, he’s got to fill 11 PLE a year or whatever. How do you do that? You better have a deep, deep roster. You just—you better have it. It’s no other way. It’s impossible.”
Jarrett has also seen the other side of that problem firsthand. He recalled sitting in WWE writing rooms and trying to build television around a fixed number of available wrestlers. Eventually, he realized booking could become almost like a math problem: there are only so many different combinations available when the talent pool stays the same.
“Like, we have a piece of paper here and you have a defined, decided X amount of talent. Like, you can’t make much more with 30 names or whatever it may be. Like, the math is what you got to go with. When you add the depth of the roster, the equations change.”
AEW having so many wrestlers inevitably means some of them are going to disappear from television from time to time. Jarrett clearly doesn’t see that as proof the roster is too big—he sees all those extra names as what gives Tony Khan enough pieces to keep changing things throughout the year.
What do you make of Jeff Jarrett’s take on AEW’s massive roster? Let us know in the comments.
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