During his 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff talked about AEW television viewership since CM Punk debuted with the company:
“Great anticipation about CM Punk right? I put it over, I was excited about it. And I’ve never met CM Punk, I’ve never had a conversation with Punk but I’m well aware of the equity and value in that character and the way it was teased and the anticipation that was created, I was so excited about that. It was the first time in a long time that I’ve seen a real orchestrated controlled build that really created the anticipation that I think is such a big part of what makes wrestling work. Since that time, they’re right back down to 500,00-600,000 viewers. Tony [Khan] says ‘Well, they decided they were going to go head to head with us and I was going to put Punk and Sydal,’ and this is not negative to either but what did it do? Not much arguably but what did happen, and this is the art of war part of this, is WWE forced by doing that overlap into AEWs time slot, forced a situation where now CM Punk is opening up the show.”
“Punk hasn’t delivered. Punk was the guy that came out and his first comments were ‘The addition of this talent was more significant than Scott Hall and Kevin Nash,’ constantly making references to WCW because they want to be the company that WCW was back in the mid-90s. There’s these constant references to WCW. When Scott Hall and Kevin Nash came in, we took off. Punk, you came in and you s**t the bed, in terms of ratings. It ain’t there and there’s nothing in reality to suggest otherwise. You just need to be careful about what you say until you’re delivering. That comment that Punk made about these guys being more significant than Hall and Nash in 96 and then two weeks after Punk made his big arrival the ratings dropped by 40-50%.”
“This is what lit my fuse, I wasn’t going to comment on any of this until Punk came out and said ‘It’s going to take five years for the effect of this talent to really show up significantly in the ratings,’ are you f***ing kidding me? Does anybody other than an uninformed wrestling fan who loves CM Punk, is anybody going to believe that nonsense? It’s going to take five years? Dude, you’re going to be getting AARP mail, because it happens soon as you start getting close to 50 they start pounding you with this s**t. I let that one go but then to come out a couple weeks later, after in my opinion he should be embarrassed, and for the ratings to take the dive the way they did after his debut, suggests to me that he ain’t as hot as he’s trying to make people think he is. If he was, the numbers would be much bigger.”
