This match is everything wrong with NXT in a nice little package. For those of you too hesitant or too smart to mainline the worst match of all time into your veins, this is a fun little starter pack into the horrors of what NXT has become.
Anybody who was a fan of NXT at its peak will immediately feel wrong about this match. Peak NXT was about simple, classic wrestling booking carried out with some of the best talents of a generation mixed in with a healthy helping of developmental projects with a lot of potential. Now, don’t get me wrong. At its deepest, most cynical roots, NXT has always been a rehabilitation project to transform the image of one of the most damaging and ruthless politicians in the industry by placing his name front and center on something that hardcore fans would enjoy. That has always been true about NXT. It’s a shiny storefront that feels less guilty to consume but where the money still funnels its way to the worst family in wrestling history.
NXT at its worst, which it has been this year, fails to live up even to its own deceitful standards. It exposes the hideous underbelly lying beneath and reminds us all that NXT and WWE are all the same thing.
This match is ambitiously bad in how it attempts to capture the worst of both NXT and the WWE.
The WWE aspects of it are obvious enough. The reliance on the name value of someone from outside the industry getting an opportunity that he neither deserves nor can he rise to. Pat McAfee is not some prodigious athlete no matter how many top rope topes and back flips he can pull off. Don’t ever confuse doing spots with being a wrestler. It’s a common enough mistake for people I feel comfortable calling wrestlers let alone some football podcast hack who made up one half of one of the most transparently embarrassing worked shoots in a while (and that’s saying something).
Everything wrong with Pat McAfee happens in between all the big physical moments meant to give him shine. It’s in how he jumps too high to hit a corner stomp and somehow landing with even less impact than normal. It’s in how his movement feels very reserved and closed in despite his bombast. He carries himself very defensively, arms close to himself, never quite emoting or bumping properly. It’s in how he barely completes a vertical leap to hit a low standing dropkick on an already very short Adam Cole while commentary goes wild singing the praises of his natural athletic ability. In short, it’s in how everything he does looks fake and artificial. Philosophically, the archetypical WWE wrestler and yet somehow failing to reach even that bottom of the barrel standard.
Cole is fine in this match in the way that he’s fine in most of his matches. Mechanically decent, of course, but with so much distraction and nonsense surrounding it that it makes his work so very unlikable. We get the NXT staple of lengthy ~DIALOGUE~ throughout a lot of this match as McAfee and Cole together simply don’t have any semblance of subtlety to tell a story with their actions instead of their words. Their attempts to have Significant Narrative Moments that are nonverbal come across as it always does in NXT these days–hammy and over the top. McAfee Cole needs to linger on his knee pad to let us know that McAfee isn’t worth even getting the most brutal form of his knee strike.
From a storytelling aspect, there’s no one to even root for in this match. Cole has spent the better part of two years being the top heel in the promotion and yet we’re just supposed to like him because he’s going up against an even worse, entitled, douchebag heel? Nothing about Cole resounds as heroic and nothing about McAfee comes across as valiant. We’re watching two people, in kayfabe, be horrible to each other and we’re expected to enjoy seeing either of them become winners. I hate it.
You’re going to see a lot of takes online about how McAfee looked great here, was a natural in the ring, and I honestly question whether we saw the same match at all. I don’t understand what pass this hack receives that somehow couldn’t apply to someone like Ronda Rousey who had exponentially more authenticity and natural in-ring charisma than McAfee did.
A horrid match in a horrid year. Stay away.
