Ranking Of The Ring

It's a big AEW show! We get briefly sidetracked talking about that John Cena heel turn before giving our predictions for the stacked card for Revolution 2025. Is it time to end this whole Death Rider Moxley reign of terror? Maybe! Or perhaps we're just hopped up on Copium here.

Hot off the heels of one of the most surprising Royal Rumble finishes ever, we give our thoughts on what happened at the 2025 Rumble, walk through our predictions which are...lacking...but that doesn't stop us from trying to guess what lies ahead on the road to Wrestlemania.

What's this beneath our feet? Why it's the first step on the road to Wrestlemania! But which of Stu & Graham can predict that road? We go head to head to guess who wins the matches on the upcoming WWE Royal Rumble card and anything else that we think might happen. Guaranteed to be at least as accurate as shaking a magic 8-ball.

When war begins in the psyche, and sanity struggles with lunacy, does that make for a good wrestling match? Or is it better to have a guy with his hands in his pockets taking on a very happy woman in front of a tiny crowd? These are the questions we try to answer as we dive into Shawn Michaels' WWF championship defence against Mick Foley at Mind Games 1996, and follow it up with a refreshing glass of freshly squeezed Orange Cassidy and Smiley Kylie Rae battling it out in Beyond Wrestling. Did you know one of these people used to be an ant or something idk.

Is modern wrestling capable of great storytelling? We dive in to what many consider to be the best feud AEW has built in its five-year lifetime, and a high water mark for how even in the reality era, committing to character work and using real history can blur the lines and make fans hungry for a showdown between two of the best in the world™. Join us through the war of words, backstory and blood that is MJF vs CM Punk as we walk through their months-long journey to a bloody and brutal dog collar match, and how it all went wrong afterwards meaning we'll likely never see the true payoff for this epic program.

We're hitting two very different ends of the wrestling spectrum this episode. We start with a trip back to the very underground early days of 1995 ECW with Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko in their farewell encounter, closing out their series with a classic best 2 of 3 falls match. Then we move on to see what happens two of the biggest icons of pro wrestling and pop culture in general go face to face on the grandest stage of all. That's right, it's Hollywood Hulk Hogan vs The Rock from 2002's WWF Wrestlemania X8, the show that asks the fans: Watcha gonna do when a dastardly heel invades the roster and tries to full on murder your favourite star? Give him one of the unrelentingly loudest babyface reactions in history, apparently.

Limber up those neck muscles and dust off your jumping boots because we've got some high flying, hard hitting action to cover. Up first, it's a dream match on a grand stage as we chart the journey that brought Will Ospreay and Kenny Omega to pretending to be their favourite video game characters in NJPW's biggest show of the year. Then we wind the clock back to look at two pioneers of this whole fast jumpy kicky flippy style with Rob Van Dam vs Jerry Lynn from the glory days of confusingly-booked ECW. Can either of these matches el-elevate itself to the top of our list?

We go Double Or Nothing on this reviewing-historic-PPVs concept and jump in to the background and formation of All Elite Wrestling, and their first* show. This episode has it all! Flips! Japanese women going 'aaahh!' Inexplicable Queen references! And what turns out to be a modern classic Cody vs Dustin Rhodes match with more blood than you can shake a missing turnbuckle pad at. And as for the ranking, we ask is AEW's first outing better than that Survivor Series 1998 show we did last episode? The answer may shock you (but probably won't).

In our first deep dive into a classic show we shoot straight for peak Attitude era with WWF Survivor Series 1998. It's the show that begs the question: what kind of tournament is filled with corporate shenanigans and 15 competitors all vying for the screwiest finish to a match? Why, the deadliest damn game in town!

It's our inaugural brawl...of wrestling matches! We pit four contenders against each other, and only one will come out on top. This episode we walk through the builds and dive deep into the matches of: Mankind vs The Rock in an I Quit match from WWF Royal Rumble 1999; Samoa Joe vs AJ Styles vs Christopher Daniels in a triple threat from TNA Unbroken 2005; Kevin Steen vs El Generico in Ladder War IV from RoH Final Battle 2012; and Brock Lesnar vs Daniel Bryan from WWE Survivor Series 2018. Find out which match will triumph in our first ever Ranking Of The Ring!