The Young Bucks Address If They Pay Attention to TV Ratings, the Biggest Challenge as EVPs of AEW

– Chris Van Vliet recently interviewed AEW stars and tag team champions The Young Bucks (Matt and Nick Jackson) for The Chris Van Vliet Show podcast. They spoke on various topics, including being the AEW EVPs, their thoughts on the best tag team of all time, Dynamite’s TV ratings, and more. Below are some highlights for The Young Bucks sent to us by Van Vliet.

Nick Jackson on the biggest challenge of being AEW EVP: “I never would have thought that we’d be doing this on a weekly basis, so I have to pinch myself every Wednesday before we go on live. So that aspect is still there. It still feels like a dream. The hard part is the job and keeping everyone happy because you don’t even really realize it until you get into management that’s it’s hard to keep a lot of these wrestlers on the same page. Because obviously there’s a lot of egos in wrestling and you want the wrestlers to be happy and that’s something that’s hard but it’s manageable and we’ve learned that you can’t always be the good guy so at some points you have to be the bad guy.”

Matt Jackson on TV ratings: “Our fans, I’ve learned, are very loyal to us and no matter what is on we still have a good base and they’re always going to watch at this point now that we’re a little over a year in. But yeah, we definitely pay attention to everything. You have to pay attention to everything because everything is competition.”

Matt on the balance of storylines vs. in-ring action:“It’s constantly trying to come up with compelling, interesting television that also will get a rating. And sometimes those two don’t go together. Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice a week or two and do something that maybe people won’t be compelled by or gravitate to immediately but maybe in four to six weeks they’ll go ‘oh!’ and then they’ll get it and it will then create a bigger rating. But that’s difficult, especially in wrestling. So that’s been a challenge having interesting storylines that normal people are interested in watching because sometimes we’ll maybe overcomplicate something or try to make it a little too complex and sometimes wrestling fans just kind of want to watch wrestling.”

Nick on if they want the Young Bucks to be considered the greatest tag team of all time: “My last goal in wrestling is to be known as the best tag team of all time. It’s a hard goal to get to but LeBron says the same exact thing, he wants to be known as the best player of all time so why should we think differently? You have to have high goals and I think that’s the last thing that I’d like to accomplish even though it’s an impossible thing to accomplish because wrestling is an opinion and everyone has an opinion on things and it’s actual factual things and it’s predetermined. But I want at least some people to say we’re the greatest of all time.”

Matt on who he thinks is the greatest team ever: “It’s Matt and Jeff Hardy. They’re the greatest ever. There’s so many ways that you measure that and I know that we say it’s an opinion but at the same time this is a box office business and Matt and Jeff Hardy are the biggest box office tag team act in the history of the business. Could we ever reach those numbers that they hit? I don’t know because it’s a different time now. We’re talking about The Attitude Era when those ratings were insane and people were buying merchandise everywhere but hey, again, dream big. If one day people compare us to them and they already do compare us to them but if they say we’re better than them. Man, what a crazy accomplishment. But like Nick said, who wants to really be known as the second best tag team of all time?”

Nick on what the Young Bucks have on The Hardys: “The one thing we have on them is we haven’t split up and they’ve had a few angles where they had to split up. So we just have to stick together and if we do, I think that’s an accomplishment in itself. Just being a tag team that never split up ever.”