Starting in October 2019, AEW and NXT went head-to-head almost every Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET with NXT airing on USA Network and AEW Dynamite airing on TNT.
The famed Wednesday Night Wars was a one-sided affair in the ratings with AEW winning the demo 74-1 and the viewership 63-10-1. NXT eventually moved to Tuesday nights in April 2021.
Road Dogg was part of NXT at the time as a producer for the brand, and he never viewed AEW as the competition.
"This is how I look at that. I'm trying to calm down a little before I react or respond. I don't think NXT lost the head-to-head battle. I don't think it was ever meant to. I think things got out of hand a little bit and USA agreed to a deal for NXT and Vince (McMahon) wanted that to be what it is now. He wanted it to be a total tryout thing. 'Put these people on TV, we'll see if they stick, and we'll get them up here.' Hunter has a different philosophy. 'Train them, make sure they're good to go before you put them on TV.' It's two totally different philosophies. Speaking from NXT, and I say this from sitting in every meeting when it was Black & Gold and writing, producing, and directing, we never once thought we were competing with those guys. We looked at ourselves as a developmental program. I hope for AEW they weren't thinking that beating a developmental program was a notch in their belt because it was people nobody had ever heard of on a Tuesday night against Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley. I always thought that was apples and oranges and you can tell I take I t personally because I worked there. Of course, we wanted to beat them, but we never thought we were in competition or had to write for competition. We just wrote the best show we could," Dogg said on Busted Open Radio.
Dogg noted that AEW's fans made a difference, saying AEW has great fans and if they shot the show at the WWE Performance Center, it wouldn't be half the show it is.
Elsewhere during the interview, Dogg revealed that he's been "begging" Tony Khan for a job. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
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