The pillars are crumbling, but the roof is still on

There are some things in professional wrestling you can just set your watch to. Death, taxes, and Darby Allin taking years off his own life on a Saturday night for our sick amusement. AEW Collision rolled into Salisbury, Maryland this weekend.

Tony Khan decided the best way to spend the evening was watching his reigning world champion get thrown through assorted pieces of furniture. We are exactly seven days out from Double or Nothing. You would think the company would want to bubble-wrap the guy holding the big belt.

Put him in a safe backstage promo segment. Let him wave to the live crowd and keep his fragile bones intact for Las Vegas. Instead, we got a wildly dangerous No Disqualification match between Allin and Sammy Guevara.

These two have been trying to physically end each other's careers since the Carter administration. Okay, maybe just since 2019, but wrestling bumps make those years feel like decades. Guevara and Allin know exactly how to work with each other.

They skip the entire awkward feeling-out process entirely. There are absolutely no boring collar-and-elbow tie-ups to be found here. They go straight from the opening bell to the vehicular manslaughter portion of the evening.

It is beautiful, violent sickness. It is the exact kind of high-risk match you watch through your fingers while wincing at the screen. But we really have to talk about the booking logic here, because it is essentially non-existent.

Guevara is immensely talented and an absolute freak athlete. Putting him in a No DQ match for the world title a week before a massive pay-per-view is certainly a choice. Nobody in that entire building bought Guevara as a legitimate threat to win the belt.

We all know the real money is waiting in Las Vegas next Sunday. So instead of any real dramatic tension, we just got a glorified stunt show. It was a spectacular, breathtaking stunt show, absolutely, but a stunt show nonetheless.

Allin retained after hitting a horrifying Coffin Drop through a wooden table. Because of course he did. My own spine hurts just typing that sentence.

Darby survived the night with his title intact. But you really have to wonder how much tread is left on those tires before the wheels completely fall off.

The Conglomeration keeps rolling while STP stalls out

Let us shift gears over to the trios division. This division remains the wildest wild west in all of professional wrestling right now. We had an AEW World Trios Championship Eliminator match on the card.

The Conglomeration took on the boys from Shane Taylor Promotions. The Conglomeration consists of Orange Cassidy, Kyle O'Reilly, and Mark Briscoe. They faced off against Lee Moriarty, Carlie Bravo, and Capt. Shawn Dean.

This match was exactly what you expected it to be. It was chaotic, stiff, incredibly hard-hitting, and entirely predictable from the very first minute.

The Conglomeration is one of those groups that feels like a weird fever dream. It is like they were booked by a random TEW simulation generator that glitched out. You have a guy who lazily puts his hands in his pockets next to a legitimate martial arts murder machine in O'Reilly.

Then you add Mark Briscoe, a man who looks like he fixes tractors with his bare teeth. And yet, against all logical reasoning, it works. It really, genuinely works.

They are incredibly over with the live crowds right now. O'Reilly picked up the win for his team by forcing Lee Moriarty to tap out. He locked in a gruesome grapevine ankle lock that looked incredibly painful.

But let us be completely critical for a second here. What on earth are we doing with Shane Taylor Promotions? These guys look like absolute killers when they walk down the ramp.

They hit like heavy-duty trucks and have a great aesthetic. But they are treated like glorified enhancement talent every single time they step on television. Moriarty taking the clean submission loss here is just another massive speed bump.

He should be a featured focal point of the Ring of Honor brand. AEW has this frustrating, deeply annoying habit of putting together solid midcard factions. Then they exclusively use them to feed the top singles stars.

STP deserves vastly better treatment from the creative team. They should not just be cannon fodder for Orange Cassidy's current weird side quest.

Moxley wants blood, Claudio wants the cup

The backstage segments on this show actually carried more emotional weight than half the matches. Jon Moxley cut a blistering promo targeting Kyle O'Reilly, and it was glorious. Moxley looked like he had just crawled out of a storm drain behind a Waffle House.

That means he was in absolute peak, unhinged form. He explicitly brought up O'Reilly's past victories over him, refusing to ignore their shared history. That is the exact kind of strict continuity I am begging for in modern television wrestling.

Acknowledge the past events. Use those real events to build the current bitter feud. Moxley versus O'Reilly at the pay-per-view is going to be an absolute bloodbath.

It is two guys who genuinely seem to enjoy hitting each other directly in the face. There is no high-flying nonsense or flippy stuff involved. Just grim, methodical violence.

Then we had Claudio Castagnoli officially calling out Brody King. This is for the highly anticipated first round of the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament. Go ahead and inject this matchup directly into my veins right now.

Claudio and Brody are going to beat the absolute brakes off each other in the ring. We are talking about two massive, terrifying humans throwing heavy European uppercuts and stiff lariats. They will hit each other until somebody's chest completely caves in.

This is the exact type of meaty hoss fight the Owen Hart tournament desperately needs. It needs matches like this to establish its prestige this year.

Nigel McGuinness also spent the evening teasing a potential return to the ring on commentary. He was heavily hinting at a future challenge for the ROH Pure Championship. Moriarty currently holds that specific belt, which makes his submission loss earlier in the night even more baffling.

Why have your Pure Champion tap out cleanly on national television? Especially when your legendary commentator is actively trying to set up a massive comeback match with him. It is a total mismatch of booking priorities.

You are telling the audience that the Pure Champion is a stepping stone. That is a terrible message to send right before you ask people to pay fifty bucks for a pay-per-view. The left hand does not seem to know what the right hand is doing over in the creative meetings.

Willow Nightingale stays dominant, but where is the story?

Willow Nightingale defended her AEW TBS Championship against Red Velvet on this show. The match itself was solid enough from a purely mechanical standpoint. Willow is always incredibly fun to watch perform.

She hits her opponents like a runaway freight train. But she does it all with a giant, terrifyingly wholesome smile on her face. She finished Velvet off with the Babe with the Powerbomb for the decisive 1-2-3.

But again, we have to talk about the overall build, or rather the total lack thereof. Why was Red Velvet getting this random title shot on a Saturday night? What exactly did she do in the last month to earn it?

AEW sometimes just throws names into a hat and pulls out a challenger on a Wednesday afternoon. Velvet is a very good worker, but there was absolute zero heat going into this match. The crowd basically sat on their hands for the majority of it.

It felt like a rigid contractual obligation rather than a featured, important title bout. If you want the TBS Championship to feel important, you have to tell a compelling story with it. You cannot just schedule a random match and hope the pure workrate carries it over the finish line.

She deserves a storyline with actual teeth, not just a random name pulled from the lower card. This is how you slowly kill the prestige of a secondary title. You let it drift into irrelevance through sheer creative apathy.

The Women's Tag Team Championship picture also got a brief, violently quick spotlight. Divine Dominion, the terrifying duo of Megan Bayne and Lena Kross, showed up. They demolished some poor local talent in a scheduled 5-Minute Eliminator match.

It took them well under three minutes to completely ruin these poor women's lives. Bayne is a physical monster, and Kross complements her aggressive style perfectly.

They are exactly what that tag division desperately needs right now. They are a dominant, intimidating force that actually feels genuinely dangerous to the rest of the locker room.

An unlikely pairing finds absurd chemistry

We also got an incredibly strange tag team match that somehow completely stole my heart. Samoa Joe unexpectedly teamed up with Anthony Bowens. They are apparently calling themselves "The Opps," which is just hilarious on every level.

They faced off against "The Lethal Twist" in standard tag team action. That team name sounds like a terrible flavor of energy drink, but it is actually just Jay Lethal and Lee Johnson. Joe and Bowens really should not work together on paper.

One is a scowling, murderous submission specialist who wants to snap everyone's neck. The other runs around the ring with giant pink foam scissors yelling loud catchphrases. But the sharp contrast between the two is brilliant television.

Joe locked Lee Johnson in the brutal Coquina Clutch for the definitive finish. He put the young man right to sleep in the middle of the ring. Bowens violently scissoring the air while Joe chokes a man unconscious is peak professional wrestling absurdity.

I want ten more televised matches of this specific pairing immediately. They are the buddy cop movie we never knew we needed. It is the kind of dumb, beautiful magic that makes professional wrestling so uniquely entertaining.

Final thoughts before the Vegas trip

The show opened with a heartfelt tribute from Tony Schiavone to the late Ted Turner. It was a classy, necessary move from the promotion. Turner is the reason a massive chunk of us grew up watching professional wrestling on basic cable.

Without his massive financial investment in WCW, the entire television industry looks completely different today. It was a fitting acknowledgement to start a chaotic night of wrestling in Maryland.

Collision essentially served its basic purpose this week. It moved the various chess pieces into position for the pay-per-view next Sunday. The main event was a car crash of the highest order.

But it gave Allin some much-needed chaotic momentum heading into Las Vegas. The Conglomeration keeps racking up wins on the undercard. Meanwhile, the Owen Hart tournament is shaping up to be an absolute war zone.

But the structural flaws of the show are still glaringly obvious to anyone paying attention. The midcard booking remains wildly inconsistent week to week. The women's division outside of the very top tier still heavily feels like an afterthought.

Tony Khan has exactly seven days to tighten the loose screws before we get to Las Vegas. The roster is delivering heavily between the ropes right now. But the creative team desperately needs to give them better narrative material to work with before the opening bell rings.

If they want Double or Nothing to be a historic success, they need to fix these pacing issues. Otherwise, they are just relying on the talent to kill themselves to cover up the creative holes.