The Rhodes to AEW: "The Road to Fyter Fest" Episode 3 Breakdown

-The first segment is Brandi Rhodes announcing that All Out sold out in 15 minutes and 137,600 people tried to buy tickets which is pretty impressive even if it is mostly ticket seller bots buying the tickets. Bots aren't buying up New Japan tickets in those numbers, for whatever it's worth. Brandi also announces that the AEW Women's Championship will be unveiled at All Out--interestingly, she didn't say a champion will be crowned at All Out which makes sense considering the AEW champion wouldn't even be crowned yet if they did that. Should be very interesting to see whose names start being brought up for the women's title. Of course you have to think Awesome Kong, Nyla Rose, Britt Baker, and Kylie Rae are at the top of the list. Riho and Yuka Sakazaki might well be in the conversation depending how their match with Nyla goes at Fyter Fest. Brandi also has a match with Allie at Fight for the Fallen two weeks later so expect to see their names in the mix. Now that I'm looking at it, that's eight names right there--just enough for a small tournament!

-Next is a feature on CEO owner and founder Alex Jebailey. I started out kind of ambivalent toward this until I realized that the purpose of this--beyond selling people on CEO with some history as well as introducing Jebailey and his personal story--is to hype Jebailey's hardcore match with Michael Nakazawa on the preshow of Fyter Fest. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the owner of CEO being on the card to promote the partnership between AEW and CEO but they did some interesting stuff about his training and fighting through a ruptured achilles tendon to get ready for this match so I'm definitely open to seeing how the match plays out before passing judgment.

-Next we get a nice, succinct backstory of the relationship between Christopher Daniels and Cima to promote their match at Fyter Fest. Nothing particularly inspired here but a good piece to put over Cima and his importance and legacy in Japanese wrestling and generate some interest in the match by setting him up as a sort of measuring stick for Christopher Daniels to gauge whether he can still hack it as a singles wrestler. Definitely looking forward to their bout. 

-This week's episode closes with a lengthy backstory video with a tag team I've never heard of called Private Party which was great and definitely accomplished the goal of not only putting these guys on my radar but making me interested to see what they can do in AEW both as wrestlers and characters. A couple particularly effective moments were hearing them put over their trainer, Amazing Red--who is one of those guys I always heard a lot of hype about during his days in Ring of Honor but never actually got to see wrestle and it makes me wonder if they're putting this much effort into putting him over here, might he be making an appearance in AEW at some point, perhaps even as a competitor?--and also the moments of them talking about their connection and heaping praise on each other. They clearly have great chemistry together and a really good relationship that seems, in some important way, unique from the toxic masculinity of typical male tag team relationships as well as of their upbringing in Brooklyn--at least based on how they describe it. Very much looking forward to more from Private Party.