AEW’s Tony Khan just upped the ante for this Friday. WWE announced last week that the Oct. 15 episode of Friday Night SmackDown, which has been bumped FS1, will be a “Supersized SmackDown” with an additional 30 commercial-free minutes added to the end and a main event between Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks. The news that SmackDown would be running head-to-head with a live edition of AEW Rampage prompted a fiery response from AEW president Tony Khan — “I saw you’re doing a half hour head-to-head with us. I can’t wait to finally beat your main show head-to-head. It’s been a long time coming. See you next Friday for #AEWRampage on @AEWonTNT!”
Khan then appeared on WFAN on Tuesday to announce that Rampage will have a special one-long Buy-In special live on the AEW YouTube channel one hour before Rampage begins (going head-to-head with the second hour of SmackDown). He confirmed both Bryan Danielson and AEW’s newest signing, Bobby Fish, will both wrestle on the special ahead of their match on Saturday’s edition of AEW Dynamite.
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The Rampage episode will include CM Punk vs. Matt Sydal, a six-man tag match pitting The Inner Circle against The Men of the Year and former UFC Heavyweight Champion Junior dos Santos and Ruby Soho vs. The Bunny.
In a separate interview with DAZN, Khan talked about how he believes WWE views AEW as their competition despite company officials publicly denying it.
“I can’t say for sure what’s on their minds,” Khan said. “SummerSlam is a big deal for those guys over there so maybe they had it long in their plans that it would be the place that Brock and Becky returned. We’ve got to keep doing what we’ve been doing so far and that’s trying to give people, our fans, the best possible wrestling product we can. That’s what drives us. We can’t base our product on what WWE are doing. How can that ever work?
“Do they see us as rivals or competition? They say we’re not, but I’ve heard that AEW shows are on monitors in the Gorilla position over there, so I take that as a compliment if they’re watching us whilst trying to run their own show,” he added. “I also admire them for that because trying to run a show whilst watching another show is something else. I put everything into producing our shows so there’s no way I’d be watching something else whilst trying to get on with things.”
