WWE reportedly came away with some lessons following Sunday’s AAA and NXT doubleheader in Edinburg, Texas.
AAA Ola de Calor and NXT Heatwave were held back-to-back at the Bert Ogden Arena, with the AAA event taking place first. According to Dave Meltzer of F4WOnline.com, WWE officials viewed the audience’s response to the two shows as an “eye-opener.”
“I heard from even people in the company about that Sunday show, and it was an eye-opener, I would say, because they put NXT second and they put AAA first thinking that we’re in the United States and NXT is bigger than AAA,” Meltzer said. “And all the NXT people, it was pretty tough. A lot of the audience left after the AAA show. It was like a Collision, where people are just leaving after the thing.”
Meltzer added that he was told only around half of the crowd remained by the time the NXT Heatwave main event took place.
“They said that maybe half the people were left for the main event,” he continued. “The Mexicans were all way, way, way more over than the NXT wrestlers, other than Zilla Fatu. They said Zilla Fatu was so over in that building, but nobody else.”
According to Meltzer, several NXT names did not receive the reactions WWE may have expected from the heavily Hispanic audience. He suggested that, in hindsight, WWE likely should have presented NXT before AAA.
“Not Kendal Grey, not Tony D, or Myles Borne or anything like that. Even Nattie, who they figured would be super, super over, and really was not. It was a Mexican audience that came to see lucha libre, and some of them stayed. But the thing is, the learning thing is, if you do this, you should probably put NXT first, rather than put them in three hours into the show.”
