What Could Have Been: What If Jay White Won The AEW World Title At Full Gear 2023?

With this year's AEW Full Gear approaching, one starts to look back at the events of yore and the very different possibilities if things were just the slightest bit different. For example, Samoa Joe walks into this event challenging for "Hangman" Adam Page's AEW World Championship for the second time — but it was at Full Gear 2023 that he was offering to partner with AEW World Champion and ROH Tag Team Champion MJF against the threat of Jay White and the Gunns respectively. That partnership worked in that MJF got to retain the ROH tag titles over the Gunns and eventually defeated Jay White in the main event after a show-long running injury angle, but it eventually saw Joe wrest the world title from MJF at Worlds End 2023.  White has since tried and failed to capture any gold aside from an 83-day stint alongside the Gunns as World Trios Champions, and two years after his last main event, one gets to thinking about what could have been if he was crowned on that night. 

MJF officially crossed the 365-day mark with the defense, and did so having also defended the ROH tag titles in the pre-show, got attacked after the bout, supposedly taken from the venue and unavailable to defend the title, only to then return in the main event to beat White. And it was quite damning for the "Switchblade" to have lost after MJF had been through so much. What if the seeming path of least resistance had been taken? Let's try and answer that question, look over what could have been if White had actually won the World Championship at Full Gear 2023. 

Given the circumstances that White would be taking the world title under it would only make sense for his feud with MJF, and Adam Cole by proxy, to continue. Given that the injured Cole eventually went on to become The Devil, heading the Undisputed Kingdom comprised originally from Cole, Mike Bennett, Matt Taven, Roderick Strong, and Wardlow, maybe it would have been better for White to have been either the one pulling the strings all along instead of or alongside of Cole. 

At the very least, White being the active hand of Cole, winning the title because of a betrayal or "Oh how did that happen?" inadvertence, surely would have been a little better than an injured Cole leading a faction of people that go on to do relatively nothing and eventually get repackaged. Joe winning the title took the tangible sense of stakes away from The Devil storyline, as well as the fact that afterwards MJF himself also took some well-earned time off. 

If White had won the title from MJF at Full Gear, perhaps the story can get started and wrapped up before MJF takes that time off. It would also have made sense within the story between the characters, given that Cole was the man who introduced White to AEW when he was still with NJPW, through their respective ties to Bullet Club, and had played on that insecurity between him and MJF heading into their match. White and Cole having worked together to con MJF out of both the World and ROH Tag Team Championships would have been a statement of intent for the new faction and would have given some immediate steam behind The Devil and the Undisputed Kingdom. But that would just be the start of this fantasy booked reign. 

White being both the AEW World Champion and Cole's avatar in "The Devil" storyline might have been a great way for White to renew his acquaintance with Kenny Omega. 

At Full Gear 2023, Omega was teaming with Chris Jericho to defeat the Young Bucks and earn a future World Tag Team title shot opportunity – that opportunity never came, with Omega wrestling his last match in December before being sidelined with diverticulitis until this year. That only provides a small window for them to feud, but given Omega had already challenged MJF for the World Championship in the months before it wouldn't be too farfetched an idea that they have one match and a brief interaction. 

That also puts White and Cole in the picture as potential catalysts for the dissent between Omega and the Bucks at the time. What that would have meant is a mystery but that could have been interesting on account of the respective relationships between Cole, White, and the Bucks stemming back to their time in ROH and NJPW. And when that was all said and done, there would be another member of The Elite waiting in the wings to pick up their saga: "Hangman" Adam Page. 

Page and White actually clashed at Full Gear in 2024, with Page getting his first singles victory over him that night. White had beaten him on "AEW Dynamite: Title Tuesday" in 2023, so perhaps Page would have come calling for vengeance sooner if the title had been at stake. Maybe White could have factored into Page's feud with Swerve Strickland much in the same way Joe had at Revolution 2024, and perhaps that would have set about an entirely different situation when it came to the World title change at Dynasty 2024.