AEW Rampage Review - October 15, 2021

By Graham "GSM" Matthews

The Buy-In: Tay Conti def. Santana Garrett

As most people have pointed out, these two previously met on an episode of WWE NXT almost exactly two years ago. Both women were criminally underutilized there and Conti is already having more success for herself in AEW. I hope Garrett can join her, but nothing is official. She looked good here, even though the match was relatively brief. I appreciate that Conti got some actual competition for a change because she usually faces unknown enhancement talent on the Dark shows.

The Buy-In: Bobby Fish def. Lee Moriarty

Fish's signing was announced just over a week ago and he already has three big matches under his belt in the company, including the one he has coming up with Bryan Danielson on Saturday's Dynamite. Speaking of which, this was intended to be a warm-up for him before that, but I thought Moriarty was impressive and looked credible in defeat. He's officially been signed by AEW and I hope to see him spotlighted on AEW programming more often going forward.

The Buy-In: Bryan Danielson def. Minoru Suzuki

Holy hell, what a war this was. I had zero issue with this being "given away" for free on YouTube because, well, there's a chance we'll never get to see it again, and I doubt it would have ever happened on an AEW pay-per-view. This was the perfect attraction-type match and it lived up to the hype. This was undoubtedly the best bout Suzuki has had to date in AEW and I'm sure this is the type of style Danielson wants to work in AEW and New Japan Pro-Wrestling. I had a blast watching this and the live crowd did as well.

CM Punk def. Matt Sydal

I assumed these two would have a tough time following the spectacle that was Danielson vs. Suzuki, but they ended up having an excellent match. I fondly remember some of the matches they had in WWE over a decade ago, so the fact they were able to recreate some of that magic here was amazing. Sydal had a strong showing and Punk continues to hold his own against a variety of opponents wrestling all sorts of styles. This was a ton of fun. Now we await Punk settling into his first feud in AEW.

Ruby Soho def. The Bunny

This was easily the low point of the evening. It was far from a bad match and I appreciated that they got as much time as they did (much more than any of the Queen's Crown tournament matches have in WWE lately), but there wasn't anything exciting about it. Soho is special, but The Bunny does nothing for me at this point and is passable enough for her matches to not be terrible. Penelope Ford and Bunny teamed up on her afterward, so Soho's issues with them aren't over yet.

Junior Dos Santos and Men of the Year def. Inner Circle (AEW TNT Champion Sammy Guevara, Chris Jericho and Jake Hager)

Considering this marked Santos' pro wrestling in-ring debut (and he was in there more than I thought he would be), I thought he fared well. I don't need to see him exchanging strikes with Jericho considering he used to legitimately knock people out in UFC, but he didn't embarrass himself and that's all that matters. Everyone else played their roles well and it was a perfectly solid main event on the whole. The heels scoring their second straight win over Inner Circle was pleasantly surprising and sets up another multi-man match with Santana and Ortiz reuniting with the rest of Inner Circle.

Overall Show

The Buy-In was only added because WWE had a "super-sized" edition of SmackDown on Friday night and the last 30 minutes aired opposite of Rampage, so Tony Khan decided to play ball by adding a pre-show for Rampage and it worked out wonderfully. If you count The Buy-In, and you should, this was an awesome two hours of wrestling and arguably one of the best editions of Rampage to date. Having it be live for the first time in weeks helped a lot, too. I obviously wouldn't do a Buy-In every week, but it was a treat in this case. Danielson vs. Suzuki and Punk vs. Sydal are well worth checking out.

SEE MORE: Rampage Reviews