John Moxley, let's unpack why.

So, let's just say the year for John Moxley, the wrestling year 2025, did not start out so great, right, for him and the Deaf Riders.

In terms of output and in terms of acclaim and in terms of like just viewer apathy in general, the Deaf Rider saga had a bit of a stranglehold on AW.

It wasn't well received whatsoever and the week week-to-week angles and the messaging of

its us trying to rebuild the company's soul was not connecting at the level that A.A.W. would

have liked.

I think this hit Inge Deer in the program with Cope, with Adam Copeland, to where the duo ended up

wrestling one of the most miserable and bleak world title matches I've seen in AW so far.

The program didn't connect on any kind of level and it didn't help of course that over here,

Cope was saying that we want to have this gritty NWA-style world title feud and then they proceeded to wrestle a match

that was more like a mid-2000s W-WE main event. The narrative wasn't right, that work quality

wasn't there, nobody seemed fully locked in and it did not deliver. So for the first quarter of

2025, it seemed like John Moxley was on the verge of maybe having one of the worst

years of his career, certainly since he left WWE and left Mitch the plotted plant behind.

However, from there, things took a pretty dramatic upturn. It really began with Hangman Page

emerging as the guy who was going to defrone Moxley as AEW World

Champion. The guy who was going to finally open that briefcase showed the world the belt they hadn't seen in many, many months and send this evil dude and his gang of jackass is packing.

This of course happened at all in Texas and it was one of the most cathartic match results in recent AEW history.

The image of Moxley choked, choked, sorry, not choked, hanging over the top rope with that belt around his neck as he tapped out and bugly-eyed stared his way to the submission will live long in the memory of everybody

who watched it.

But there's also other elements to this as well because not only did he put a hangman

page over it all in, guess what?

...