AEW superstar and Executive VP Cody Rhodes took part in today’s media call to promote Saturday’s Double or Nothing pay per view from Daily Plaza in Jacksonville. The American Nightmare will be battling Lance Archer in the tournament finals to crown the first ever TNT champion.
Speaking of the championship…Rhodes clarified that the new title will not be involved with AEW’s ranking system, as the system is only for the world, women’s, and tag championships. He further adds that because the TNT belt is brand new to the company, they’d like to see what becomes of it before making any decisions.
To answer your question about the TNT Championship—when we got to the semifinals of the tournament, Tony Khan addressed everyone individually. The way it’s currently looking, the TNT Champion will not be ranked. He will be listed as a champion, where Jon Moxley is the World Champion, the TNT Champion will not be ranked. So those titles, we’re not going to look at them as ‘1 and 2’ and that’s because we want to see what becomes of the TNT title. The only way we can do that, we can’t tell you here and now, ‘hey it’s going to be a workhorse title’ and we can’t tell you it’s going to be a midcard title. We can’t say any of those things because we’ve never seen it before. I’ve literally never seen the belt so it will grow into an entity of its own but I can say as far as the rankings go, the top five will all be non-champions. The TNT Champion and the World Champion will be unranked individuals. The top five does tend to skew towards ‘number one will wrestle for the World Championship’ but we’ll see how Tony takes that a step further as someone who is a firm believer in the sports-based ladder system that is involved with rankings, quality of wins, things of that nature. We’ll see where it goes but the TNT Champion will not be ranked.
(H/T and transcribed by WrestleZone)