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Tony Khan Announces His Latest Move To Defeat SmackDown Tonight

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• Tony Khan Announces His Latest Move To Defeat SmackDown Tonight

WWE will air a “Supersized SmackDown” tonight on FS1 (not FOX), which will air for 2.5 hours.

SmackDown will be going head-to-head with a live edition of AEW Rampage from 10 PM EST to 10:30 PM EST.

After this news became public, AEW President Tony Khan announced that he can’t wait for Rampage to beat SmackDown (which is WWE’s #1 show right now).

This led to WWE announcing that the last 30 minutes of SmackDown will be commercial free.

Tony then decided to add a “Buy In” show for Rampage on YouTube (a pre-show), where the main match would be Bryan Danielson vs. Minoru Suzuki. This YouTube show will air at 9 PM EST tonight, during SmackDown, as Tony hopes to have the AEW fans watch this and then tune in straight for Rampage, and not watch SmackDown.

During an interview with NY Post, Khan had the following to say about WWE airing the last 30 minutes of SmackDown commercial free:

“We can take the commercials out of it. If you want to take the commercials out of it, I can do that too. It doesn’t seem very civil, but I have more money than they do, so I can afford to do that longer than they can. But that’s how we make money at the end of the day, so I was surprised when they took those out.”

With that being said, the first 30 minutes of Rampage will be commercial free now and will feature CM Punk in his 4th AEW match.

Here’s what Khan tweeted:

“Thank you to you great wrestling fans who’ve supported AEW on TNT for over 2 years now, & because of you fans & your support, we’re opening tonight’s LIVE AEW Rampage with CM Punk (3-0 AEW record) vs. Matt Sydal (21-9 AEW record), AND that match will be commercial free on TNT!”

For those who don’t know, Shahid Khan (Tony’s father) invested $100 million to help start All Elite Wrestling, and Shahid is richer than Vince McMahon.

SmackDown, which usually draws more than 2 million viewers every week on FOX, draws less than 1 million viewers on FS1. This is the reason behind WWE pulling out all the stops to make sure it draws more viewers than a live episode of Rampage, especially given the fact that the die-hard AEW fans and anti-WWE fans will do whatever they can to help AEW win tonight.

Also, Tony knows AEW has a very good chance of defeating WWE tonight, so he isn’t holding back either.

WATCH: Carmella Suffers Wardrobe Malfunction At WrestleMania 37:

• Old School Wrestling Veteran Celebrates His Birthday

Old School Wrestling Veteran Jeff Gaylord celebrates his 63rd birthday today.

Jeff wrestled for various different territories during the 80s & 90s, such as Mid-South Wrestling, World Class Championship Wrestling, USWA (Memphis), as well as the American Wrestling Federation.

Even those of you who have never heard of him, will probably remember him from his only World Wrestling Federation appearance, which was him wrestling at the Survivor Series 1993 PPV as The Black Knight, one of Shawn Michaels’ 3 masked knights, who faced the Hart Family team.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFF GAYLORD!


        
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