AEW read the room wrong on The Acclaimed vs. Swerve in our Glory

Sometimes, a booker gets it wrong. They decide Brock Lesnar should break The Undertaker’s streak, that John Cena should beat Wade Barrett and the Nexus, and that Shawn Michaels should defeat Bret Hart with a sharpshooter even if the “Best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be” didn’t actually tap, and fans have to debate the call for years to come. AEW, to its credit, doesn’t have very many of these moments in its almost four years of operation, with the Dark Order beatdown in 2019, the Cody Rhodes’ US vs. UK bout at Double or Nothing 2021, and the CM Punk-Jon Moxley match on the penultimate edition of Dynamite before All Out serving as key exceptions to that rule.

Well, unfortunately for Tony Khan, he can add another black spot to his booking report card, as a section of fans will forever remember All Out 2022 as the night The Acclaimed should have beaten Swerve in our Glory for the AEW World Tag Team Championships.

Now granted, that’s no offense to Swerve Strickland and Keith Lee; they are both incredibly popular performers and received warm reactions when they walked to the ring, but from the moment The Acclaimed took to the ring for their fated match and Max Caster yet out a “Yo!” with Anthony Bowens by his side, the fans in attendance couldn’t get enough of it.

To say the All Out crowd in Chicago loved The Acclaimed and their manager Billy “Daddy Ass” Gunn, would be an understatement. They cheered on their entrances, demanded to see some scissors, and even swapped out Lee’s typical chant “bask in his glory” to “scissor me daddy” in a move that made even the performers in the ring surprised.

And yet, after a number of near falls and should-have-beens, including a “two count” that saw the referee clearly hit three, who came out of the match with the win but Swerve in our Glory, who admittedly looked like stars in the match but were clearly the second-most popular performers in the ring.

Will Tony Khan use this as a learning opportunity? Does he now fully see that The Acclaimed are certified stars and that their time to run the AEW tag team division could soon be upon us? Either way, after watching Lee accidentally destroy Swerve with a rush, it’s clear their run at the top might soon be done.