It’s almost 2022, you know what that means!

It’s time to look back at 2021. What went wrong & went right. This time, with a non-WWE slant, as I’m told that WWE is huge and everything else is a mess. Pretty sure Greg told me that at some point. In any event, here’s a look back at what I thought would be the top 5 non-WWE stories in 2021.

5. Can Impact Capitalize off of AEW Involvement?

Impact Wrestling is in a better position than they’ve been in a long time. They’ve made some good decisions and produced some solid stuff, but the best move they made in 2019 was getting All Elite Wrestling to do some business with them. Most of us know the story: Impact executive Don Callis showed up at Full Gear to do some commentary on his buddy Kenny Omega’s match, which led to his being invited back for Omega’s AEW Championship match against Jon Moxley. Callis’ evil plan went into action there, as he assisted Omega’s victory & got the new AEW Champion to make his first statement on the next week’s Impact Wrestling.

Since then, Kenny’s reunited with his old friends from Japan & current Impact Tag Team Champions, Doc Gallows & Karl Anderson. They & the Young Bucks stood tall at the end of last week’s AEW Dynamite. Tony Khan’s response to all this has been to purchase advertising time on Impact Wrestling to hype Dynamite & mock Kenny, Don & Impact. It’s made for some interesting times, and things look to pick up even further in 2021. Will Impact be able to use this exposure to their advantage?

What Happened: They got a really good 18-49 rating off of Kenny Omega. That’s what I’m told! What they didn’t get was a satisfying end to Kenny’s reign with the Impact World Championship, though we can’t really blame Coach Tony for that. Tony did hot-shot a title change from Kenny to Christian Cage to try and build up his Rampage show. That in itself was fine. Then Impact booked Christian to lose the title to Josh Alexander at Bound For Glory, which was also fine. Then Impact booked Moose to beat Alexander within a minute after that happened, wiping away any rub Impact would have gotten from their champion beating an AEW guy. But they got some HEAT!

As much as I like Impact’s show for various reasons, they didn’t gain much from opening the Forbidden Door.

4. New Japan TV?

New Japan hasn’t been on American television since their deal with AXS TV ended in 2019. Losing that deal didn’t exactly help their plan to expand their presence in America, nor did the pandemic. They’re not giving up on it though, NJPW in America is still a thing with an online show & apparently they’re close to a deal with an unnamed network.

Viceland could be that unnamed network, as it’s been reported that they’ve been in talks with New Japan. Considering that Dark Side of the Ring is their most popular show, I see why Viceland would be interesting. It’s not the most visible network out there, but it’s definitely better than nothing. As somebody that likes having wrestling on TV, I hope something develops on this front sooner rather than later.

What Happened: Pretty much nothing. New Japan didn’t manage to hold any North American interest, outside of those NJPW Strong shows on NJPW World that I’m told people cared about but I never heard from any of them. NJPW did get some footage up on the Roku channel, but as a person with a Roku box that does nothing for me. Maybe Tony Sly will tell me I’m wrong. But as far as I can tell, New Japan is less of a player in the US market than they’ve been in the last several years. This might change whenever we solve this pandemic issue. Until then, probably not.

3. How many belts will Kenny Omega hold?

Kenny Omega has recently talked about wanting to collect championship belts. He’s not going to buy them online like many of you do, he plans on defeating the champions. He currently holds the AEW World Championship & the AAA Mega Championship, and seems to have his eyes on the Impact World Championship. He’d certainly be the favorite if Don Callis wanted to book him against Rich Swann.

Maybe it was just a throwaway line on an Impact promo, but could there be more to this story? Will Kenny find other titles to add to his collection? It feels important to note that Kota Ibushi currently holds the IWGP Heavyweight & Intercontinental Championships, but those might be off limits to Kenny unless somebody can figure out how to open the Forbidden Door. I mean, he could ask Jon Moxley how to get over there, but those two aren’t on the best of terms these days.

What Happened: Kenny ended up holding the AEW, AAA & Impact championships. I feel like this storyline would have been better in a day where travel was more of a thing, but one person getting those three titles at one time is nothing to sneeze at. We’re spoiled by pictures of Ultimo Dragon with eight belts draped on him. I imagine in a non-COVID world Kenny could have talked a few indy feds into giving him belts to duplicate that Ultimo Dragon picture, but things were what they were.

2. Can AEW expand their viewership?

I know, we’re all sick of ratings talk. We also have to throw out the last couple weeks of ratings for AEW, the Brodie Lee tribute was always going to do a big number, and there was a pretty big news event going on this past Wednesday that put wrestling on the backburner for the non-diehards.

AEW’s doing well. When there isn’t news events going on, they’re almost always in the top ten in the demo. There is one concern I have, and maybe it’s not as big a deal as I might think, but one can’t help but notice that there’s a bit of a ceiling on AEW’s viewership. Can AEW get Dynamite up over 1,000,000 viewers on a regular basis? Or will they remain in their current range?

What Happened: AEW viewership expanded a little bit, but nowhere near what people that weren’t biased against AEW would have hoped. Especially once NXT got taken out of the picture. We thought that NXT was the main competiton for AEW, but not so much. News, NBA, college football & other sports entertainment were AEW’s main competition. Which became obvious once NXT moved to Tuesday and died off in the ratings.

AEW got over that million mark more often in 2021 than in 2020. There’s still work to be done.

1. What does independent wrestling look like post-pandemic?

I’m still operating under the assumption that the pandemic will cool down at some point in 2021 due to vaccinations, and people will be able to attend live events again. Hopefully I’m not being too optimistic, but for the purposes of these articles that’s what I’m assuming. When we do start attending live events again, it’s going to be interesting to see what independent wrestling looks like.

For one thing, what will attendance be like? Will everybody be excited to run back out and support their local indy fed? Or will they be more likely to stay at home? It’s been hard enough for indy feds to keep relevance during a long period of inactivity, if they can’t draw at the same levels they did pre-pandemic, it’d be a pretty big problem for a lot of promoters.

I’m going to be optimistic and say that wrestling fans will be excited to attend shows again. As long as they have the disposable income for it, they’ll be out at the arenas & gyms. Those feds that do bang-up jobs of planning their returns will do well.

What Happened: As I expected, some indies that planned well thrived. GCW would be the main example there. They used names like Matt Cardona & Nick Gage to draw, then they got access to other names like the Briscoe Brothers & Jonathan Gresham. That was due to Ring of Honor trying to actually be safe, which people like me appreciated but most folks didn’t. I’m shocked I didn’t mention ROH in this column last year, as their void opens up a lot of things for 2022.

Thanks for reading! Next week, we’ll look at what’s coming in 2022!