Daniel Bryan Praises AEW’s Kenny Omega Wrestling Creativity

It’s not often that WWE fans get hear one of the company’s top stars praise the work of somebody completely outside of the company. But that’s exactly what happened when Daniel Bryan sat down with Barstool Sports‘ Robbie Fox earlier this week. Fox was walking Bryan through some of his most memorable pre-WWE matches when the conversation eventually turned to his bout with Kenny Omega in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. That bout is most famously known for the pair’s hilarious rendition of “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” which Omega apparently came up with and had to convince Bryan to do. Bryan then talked about his respect for the AEW World Champion’s in-ring creativity.

“I have a lot of respect for Kenny Omega, and it’s not just the great matches he puts on. It’s also that he looks at wrestling differently than anybody else. Like, when you look at, say [the] Young Bucks, who you would think of in a similar vein; you can see where the Young Bucks take on wrestling. It’s like a take off of, a genius take off of the wrestling they loved when they were younger and mimicking it but also evolving from the takes from that. That’s why it resonates with so many people, the way that they wrestle. [With] Kenny you don’t, it doesn’t have a previous evolution point. It’s just these completely new things that have entered his head that he’s daring to try.”

Bryan was on the losing end of a Universal Championship match with Roman Reigns on this week’s SmackDown. Omega, meanwhile, made history earlier in the week by winning his third consecutive world championship, defeating Rich Swann for the Impact World Championship at Impact’s Rebellion event.

Bryan gave a new update on his WWE status in an interview with TV Line this week, confirming that he’s dealing with a neck injury on top of his contract expiring soon.

“I had a tag team match on SmackDown (recently) and it was a lot of fun,” Bryan said. “But my neck was just wrecked. I’m going to be 40 in May and my daughter likes to get on my shoulders to pick leaves from a Japanese maple in front of our house. You get to that point where it’s like, how long can I do this full-time and still be able to do those kinds of things with my daughter? What’s the right balance between part-time and that sort of thing? It may be that it’s just every once in a while when the urge strikes, or maybe like a schedule where it’s like eight months on, these months off. One of the coolest things about wrestling, and just be being an independent contractor in general, is that you can say, ‘Well, I really only want to do this amount of work.’ What that amount of work is, I have no idea yet. I still have to figure it out.”