Eric Bischoff Blasts CM Punk For Being A Cancer To AEW, Rates His Match With Samoa Joe

On the latest episode of Strictly Business, Eric Bischoff talked about the way Tony Khan has handled the physical altercation between CM Punk & Jack Perry at AEW All In, his thoughts on Punk’s match with Samoa Joe, and more. You can check out some highlights below:

On predicting CM Punk would have another incident before All In: “48 hours after I called out CM Punk, and we talked about my thoughts on Punk. And I’ve predicted in the past that this isn’t over. The one incident where guys were biting each other and fighting back in the locker room and all that stuff. That wasn’t a one-off deal. You’ve got a guy like an incident happens. It happened under my watch. It’s not like, you know, there weren’t confrontations backstage. There certainly were. But when they’re done, they’re done, and you move on, and everybody’s a pro. It’s not what you’ve got right now. I said it right after the first incident and the social media universe. Oh, you’re the older man yelling at the clouds, and you’re jealous of Tony Khan, and Tony won’t hire you. So you’re just all this third-grade bulls**t. But I predicted it. It’s a pattern. You know, one-offs happen. But when they happen over and over and over again, it’s a dot here. It’s a dot there. It’s another dot over there. Oh, hey, right before his match, he gets into a confrontation with Jack Perry. You could pick him up on a lawn and dart him across the parking lot, for crying out loud. What does Jack Perry do? Getting in anybody’s face, for crying out loud. That’s a separate subject. But, you take those dots, those one-off incidents, and start connecting them. And before you’ve got a picture. And I don’t know. And that’s why I was so outspoken. I was probably a little tough referring to Tony and how he’s not handling the situation. And I get emotional, passionate, or whatever you want to call it about because I see it happening. It’s like being able to see a movie before it’s made. I and partly because I lived it. A version of it. Yeah. And just it’s mind-boggling to me in all of the discourse that I saw on social media after the All In the event, I made a point not to read any of it until after we did our recap show because I’m capable of being influenced by things I read or hear or see. And I want to come at that recap completely off of having just watched it without any noise affecting my perception. But after we got done and I started looking through social media, it’s like. And I would say seven out of ten posts were all about. Jack Perry and CM Punk are getting into a brawl.”

On his thoughts of Samoa Joe vs. CM Punk at All In:  “And by the way, remember when we did the recap? I’m going to do another recap version of the recap. And I said I think I rated that match a six with Samoa Joe and CM Punk. No, I said it was solid. It wasn’t. I think my exact words were, It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s solid. But I thought the pace was slow. I thought that Punk looked like he was out of gas. Two minutes I was going two minutes into the match. And I didn’t think he was out of gas. I want to make that clear. He was selling like he just got done running a marathon and then jumped in the ring. But maybe the fact that they had to have a pull apart and not too physically probably didn’t take too much out of them, but that’s a pretty distracting thing. Right. And Joe was involved, evidently, from what I’ve read. I don’t know if it’s true. Man, what a weird way to start a pay-per-view.”

Eric Bischoff on the decision to bring CM Punk back after All Out 2022:  “It was a mistake. And here’s what happens when you have executives who don’t know anything about the wrestling business or the people in it making decisions like that; if indeed that was the case, we don’t know that. But let’s assume that you’re right. And Tony, you hoped all of the negative stuff was behind him because this collision is an opportunity there because there are executives in Turner that have this. The value that they think that Punk provides. Well, they’re not wrestling fans for the most part. They don’t know. They’ve never worked with him. So what do they do? They do research. And I’ve been part of this. I’ve seen, believe me, I talk about research all the time. You know, when a subject comes up. I love talking about research. I was blessed to be a part of a pretty extensive research project while developing Nitro. That impressed me and helped guide the creation of Nitro and some of the unique things I was doing at the time. They were very, very innovative. Nobody else was doing them, and many of those ideas came from our research.”

“So I’m a firm believer in research, so I follow Brandon Thurston, for example. I’m a numbers guy at heart. Research can also come back to bite you in the ass. Now, I’ve not talked about this too much in the past. Maybe occasionally, but I’ve also been involved in some pretty horrible research while working for WCW. Early on, when I was still in, I was an announcer, but I was getting more involved, and I think I was interviewed by the group doing some of the research. And you know, Turner spent a fortune on it.  It was a pervasive research, many focus groups, and all that. And they took all that data and reduced it into a presentation. As part of that presentation, I will paraphrase all of this. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but essentially, they walked us through all their Q factor or whatever, however they referred to it.”

“Those are all heels. They’re supposed to be heated with an executive who doesn’t know the story behind it or has never worked with the talent to go. Let’s bet on that horse. That’s a horse that can run. Well, if what you suggested or were. Hanging out there is a possibility. You’ve got some executives who decided a guy who, in my opinion, has cancer. Let’s bring him in; let’s double down. Let’s bet on that horse. And Tony, of course, is in a position where he’s got to serve his client. His client is Turner. And if your client wants something, your job is to try to make it happen. Perhaps that’s what went down. Or maybe it’s Tony. And Tony is just so confident in seeing. I use the word secure there because I’m trying to be. It is. I understand as I can be in this situation because I empathize with Tony. I do. Perhaps it was Tony who wanted to double down on that horse. Either way, whoever was behind it, I think, and I said it when it first happened, making a huge mistake. It is not a good idea in the long run. It is still, as I said, almost a year ago, whenever I got criticized on social media by saying it was one of the worst financial investments in wrestling. Guess what? It’s proven to be true long term.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Strictly Business with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.