Why Eric Bischoff 'Absolutely Loved' CM Punk's AEW Collision Promo

CM Punk officially returned to AEW on Saturday and opened the premiere of "AEW Collision" with his first promo in over nine months. During a bonus episode of "83 Weeks," Eric Bischoff explained why he loved the segment.

"I loved — oh it's so hard to say — I loved it. It was great," Bischoff said. "I almost swallowed my tongue. No, I absolutely loved it. It had the right balance. Again, you cannot ignore the elephant in the room. We can't pretend the last six months didn't happen. If you aggregated every tweet, post, Reddit comment, YouTube clip, whatever, of the scrum and the evisceration of Tony Khan by CM Punk right in front of an audience, you can't pretend that stuff didn't happen."

Bischoff noted AEW has elected to move on from the events of "Brawl Out" and believes that there was balance in Punk's promo of addressing it while moving forward.

"There's a balance there," Bischoff continued. "I think this promo achieved — nothing's perfect in life — but perfect balance of acknowledging, not pretending it didn't happen... But when you acknowledge it in a way, particularly in this case, it was done so well, executed so properly, production wise, on Punk's part, everything else, the audience will move on too and they'll reinvest their curiosity or their opinion of what happened six months ago into what's going on now. I think this promo achieved, from a narrative perspective, an absolutely flawless, almost 100% balance."

Regarding critiques, Bischoff suggested he would've cut out 30 seconds to a minute to make it slightly shorter. He also would've ended it with something more compelling like a call to action or mission statement to bump the promo up from an 8.5 to a 9.5 out of 10 in his eyes.

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit "83 Weeks" with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.