Eric Bischoff Says Aspect Of AEW Is ‘Flatter Than Piss On A Plate’

Eric Bischoff thinks AEW's ratings have plateaued.

On a recent episode of his Strictly Business podcast, Bischoff was asked about WWE's reported flirtation with returning to TV-14 programming, after a decade-plus of more family-friendly TV-PG shows. While his co-host hypothesizes that the move was a reaction to AEW's recent popularity, Bischoff doesn't see it that way.

"It's not like WWE is losing audience to AEW," Bischoff said, "AEW is flatter than piss on a plate in terms of television ratings." AEW's flagship program "Dynamite" has averaged around 950,000 viewers thus far this year. The show averaged 891,810 viewers per episode in 2021.

With WWE's viewership for "Raw" and "SmackDown" regularly averaging more than 1.5 million viewers, Bischoff feels that anyone that sees AEW as a legitimate threat to WWE is "delusional, and has taken 'fanboyism' to a terminal level."

"It is what it is and WWE is not losing market share to AEW," Bischoff continued, "so why would they react to something that's not affecting them?"

WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon said back in 2019 that he didn't see TNT tolerating the "blood & guts" of AEW's programming, a comment which then spun into AEW's popular Blood & Guts match, based on the War Games matches popularized by WCW, and later adopted by WWE's "NXT" brand. TNT's parent company Warner Bros. Discovery is currently promoting its annual Shark Week event through an upcoming Barbed Wire Everywhere Death Match between Eddie Kingston and Chris Jericho.

Bischoff also posits that if the viewers for "Dynamite" are not WWE viewers, then at the very least they are aware of WWE.

"I'm guessing there are probably some viewers who are exclusively watching AEW," Bischoff concluded, "but I doubt that it matters."

News of WWE moving to TV-14 broke yesterday, but later updates revealed that the plans were much less concrete than initially reported.