Best and Worst Booking Decisions of AEW Full Gear 2022 Results

Full Gear 2022 saw a handful of changes to the landscape to the All Elite Wrestling roster with some new champions being crowned, alliances ending and wrestlers taking major steps in their careers.

For the most part, the pay-per-view was a step in the right direction to bounce back from the negativity of All Out, but not everything was spot-on perfect.

Looking back on the results, here are some of the best and worst booking decisions of the night.

Thankfully, almost every match on this card had arguably the best result possible. So much so that this list would be rather flat and too elongated to just praise every win as simply being the right call.

Some stood out more above the rest and will get their own spotlights, but generally speaking, here is a quick rundown of why some of the others were also great booking decisions:

• Ricky Starks beating Brian Cage sets up a babyface-and-heel tournament final. Seeing who is the champion coming out of this, Starks could be the best bet to challenge next.
• Jungle Boy needed this victory over Luchasaurus to move up the hierarchy and to offset his loss at All Out. This was one of his biggest wins yet and solidified that he's still climbing that ladder.
• After teasing their split for so long, it was past time to break up Swerve in Our Glory. Keith Lee has been the babyface the whole time and will be the one to cheer heading into his feud with Swerve Strickland, which is perfect. Also, The Acclaimed are too over right now to have dropped those titles and needed to retain.
• Saraya's victory over Britt Baker was the feel-good way to end this. Baker could have won and the story been about Saraya needing to overcome that setback, but fans would have had a harder time accepting that downer.
• Chris Jericho is the best thing going for the Ring of Honor brand right now. Had he lost, it would have been a setback for the ROH World Championship just prior to Final Battle.
  

One of the only questionable outcomes was the No Disqualification tag team match that saw Darby Allin and Sting defeat Jay Lethal and Jeff Jarrett, who also had help from Sonjay Dutt and Satnam Singh.

Lethal is long overdue for a noteworthy win in AEW. The longer he goes picking fights that he can win, the less value he has in putting anyone over.

He's supposed to be a rather big deal considering his history, but since coming to AEW, he's been coming off more washed-up than ready to make his mark.

Jarrett is in no position to need a push after his Hall of Fame career, but if he's going to be a presence going forward, having him lose his first dance takes the wind out from under his sails.

Also, there was discussion of Allin wanting to break away from Sting prior to this. What does winning this tag team match offer in that storyline?

Had Allin and Sting lost, it could have driven a wedge between them and proven to Allin that Sting is holding him back. That's an advancement for that story, instead of a detour, or something that proves Allin is wrong and effectively renders his idea a poor one.

Both Jamie Hayter and Samoa Joe walked away from Full Gear as champions, which in and of themselves were good decisions, but it is also how those matches went down that made them even better.

Wardlow has been one of the most protected stars on the roster. He's rarely suffered any losses, and when it happens, he tends to go down fighting. It's part of his presentation that he's a nigh-unstoppable juggernaut.

For him to lose the TNT Championship, but not take the pinfall or submission, avoids making him look weak. Powerhouse Hobbs is the one who lost the title for him, not that Joe actually beat Wardlow.

This gives Wardlow every reason to want a singles match with Joe for either the TNT title or Joe's ROH World Television Championship.

Likewise, Hayter winning the interim AEW Women's World Championship received one of the biggest pops of the night.

The feud with Toni Storm has been going on for what seems like forever. If Storm had retained, it would remain deadlocked where it's been for months. Hayter winning throws a twist in the narrative.

But she didn't win clean. Anyone saying Storm looked weak by dropping the title has to ignore interference from Rebel and Baker, being hit with the title belt and the exposed turnbuckle.

Hayter's the interim champion, but Storm is in a similar position to Wardlow in that she is justified in wanting a rematch to get that title back. Hopefully, this leads to a Triple Threat with Thunder Rosa to settle on the true champion soon enough.

It would have been far too obvious if The Elite had won the World Trios Championships on their return. Also, that would have signified Tony Khan was merely hitting the reset button and acting like everything from the All Out fiasco was smoothed over with zero punishment toward The Elite's side of that argument.

Granted, bringing them back in general and putting them in the title hunt is already proof they're moving on in better ways than CM Punk. But at least with Death Triangle retaining, it doesn't make Pac and The Lucha Brothers look like they were only good enough to hold the titles in an emergency backup situation.

That would sent a message of "thank you for your service, now get out of here because the real champions are back and you were just filler."

Many fans were surprised, and it is good to keep the viewers on their toes. If things get too predictable, people tune out.

Now, with this Best of Seven Series, by the end of this feud, if Death Triangle retains, it'll look amazing. But if The Elite win the belts back, it'll have earned it by going through a rough gauntlet, rather than being gifted the gold as if it had never been stripped of the titles in the first place.

As much as the crowd was treating him like the hero of this match, MJF was absolutely not going to work as a babyface. He needed to reaffirm himself as a heel, as that is his bread and butter.

Beating Jon Moxley by cheating was essential to that, but what made it significantly better was having William Regal be the catalyst.

So much of what led into this match revolved around Regal talking down to MJF while simultaneously praising him. He wasn't ready before, but Regal still saw the potential in him and was coaching him even in the differences of how to be a villain in this sport.

The brass knuckles is a signal that he's passing the torch in a way. It wasn't so much a retraction of all the positive things Regal's said about Moxley, but an affirmation that MJF had the momentum on his side.

Moxley had his time as champion. MJF holding the title freshens up the top of the card going forward, which is always welcome.

The swerve gets people talking and putting the belt on MJF—the hottest act in the company—is a no-brainer.

Addressing criticism that AEW events go on too long, Tony Khan had said last week that Full Gear would end at a reasonable time and be a tight show (h/t Josh Nason of Wrestling Observer).

Your mileage may vary, but starting at 7 p.m. ET and ending at midnight with almost no breaks in the action was just as exhausting to many as All Out and Double or Nothing.

Saying there were two less matches than All Out means nothing when the average match time per match actually increased by two minutes and the overall action was two minutes shy.

Every match on the Zero Hour could have been on an episode of Dynamite or Rampage and felt like a bigger deal, or, in the case of the 10-man tag team match, didn't mean anything to begin with.

A few times on the show, the crowd's energy dipped considerably. It took big moments like the flurry of near-falls in Hayter vs. Storm to get the fans to wake up.

Looking at Twitter during the show saw many viewers expressing their frustration about this.

Too much of a good thing can happen, and AEW cannot just keep ignoring the burnout that tends to happen with these shows.

Sometimes, less is more, and if there are great matches that feel pay-per-view-worthy but happen on television, it should only benefit the ratings for those episodes. That's a win, not a loss.

So long as fans feel they're getting their money's worth and buy the pay-per-views, it might go a long way in trimming them down a bit to allow more room for each match to breathe and for the audience to soak everything in, rather than to hastily move on to the next segment.

Anthony Mango is the owner of the wrestling website Smark Out Moment and the host of the podcast show Smack Talk on YouTube, Spotify and everywhere you find podcasts. You can follow him on Facebook and elsewhere for more.