Huntsville turned into a booking black hole
If you were sitting in the crowd in Huntsville last night for the ROH tapings, you legitimately have my sympathies. We had high hopes that Ring of Honor would start pulling out of its prolonged creative stall, but instead, we got a lineup that felt like a house show from 2014 that someone found in a dusty locker. It’s hard to stay invested when the booking feels like it was put through a paper shredder.
The card, reported by PWInsider, gave us a bizarre mix of talent that felt completely untethered from anything resembling momentum. We had the Iron Savages facing The Outrunners, followed by a clunky turn from Top Flight and Action Andretti. It’s not that these guys can’t work; it’s that they are being treated like filler on a C-level card while the main event scene remains a total enigma.
The ROH roster is drowning in mediocrity
The real issue isn't even the wrestling quality, which stayed technically sound in spots, but the booking direction. You had Anthony Henry scraping for relevance against beefy teams, and a bizarre segment with The Infantry. Why are we running these matches without any stakes or real narrative threads? It feels like the writers are just throwing darts at a roster board and hoping something sticks.
I’m watching Mark Briscoe walk out there every week trying to hold this promotion together with his bare hands while the creative team continues to treat the brand like a footnote. When your best character work happens in the promos rather than the actual feuds, you have a problem. The crowd in Alabama wasn't exactly setting the building on fire, and frankly, I don't blame them for the polite golf claps.
Missing the chance to build genuine stars
The most frustrating part? The wasted potential. We have seen multiple tapings lately that follow this exact same rhythm of nothingness. They have a massive library and a legacy that arguably birthed the modern indie scene, yet they choose to act like a side project for the main roster. It feels small. It looks small.
We need more than just solid technical exchanges. We need a reason to actually care who walks out of the arena with a win. Right now, winning an ROH match feels like winning a game of rock-paper-scissors in the parking lot. Put a belt on someone people hate, or run a feud that actually makes me want to log in for the next episode. Right now, the only thing being pinned is the audience's patience.
Look, I get it. The grind of the industry is exhausting and the schedule is unforgiving. But when you are charging fans money to see a product that feels like it’s being phoned in from a desk in Connecticut, you’re losing the room. The match results from May 31 are buried in a thread on the forums for a reason—nobody is talking about them because there’s nothing to talk about. Fix the booking or stop acting surprised when the engagement numbers hit a 0.3 rating, or worse.
