I honestly don’t know what you do if you’re Jay White at this point. We’re coming up on a year since his official AEW debut, and not only has his degree of stardom been thoroughly eclipsed by the arrivals of people like Adam Copeland, Will Ospreay, and Kazuchika Okada, but AEW can’t seem to make up their minds what to do with him.

It felt like White’s full-time AEW career got off to a shaky start, but then he and Juice Robinson had a Match of the Year candidate with FTR, the addition of The Gunns breathed life into the concept of Bullet Club Gold, and all of a sudden, White is being booked as a top singles star. He feuds with Kenny Omega and pins him at All In; he feuds with MJF and main events Full Gear in a world title match; he makes it to the semifinals of the Continental Classic. Everything seems to be coming up Switchblade.

And then, after Worlds End, boom — it all evaporates. Bullet Club Gold turns babyface for no reason whatsoever, win the ROH Six-Man Championship (in the running for AEW/ROH title Tony Khan cares about the least), and form the Bang Bang Scissor gang with The Acclaimed and Billy Gunn. He went from main-eventing Full Gear to working an eight-man tag at Worlds End to working a 12-man tag on the Revolution pre-show. That drop is precipitous. And yes, some of us may have seen this coming based on how the MJF match went, but it’s been even worse than I’d initially expected. And now he’s fighting Darby Allin in Darby’s last match before he leaves for Everest and potentially dies. Gee, wonder who’s winning that one?

All that was bad enough before the actual White/Allin promo segment Wednesday night, which saw White awkwardly attempt to straddle the line between his current babyface status and his previous heel personality, That did not work. The character at this point is entirely confused and barely belongs in the midcard title picture, let alone the world title. And unfortunately, the midcard might just be White’s destiny in AEW. With the top of the card so crowded, it would be hard squeezing your way under the best of circumstances, and the last year of Tony Khan’s booking has left White very much without those. This is a guy who looked like a potential superstar four months ago, but if AEW doesn’t sit down and actually decide on a direction for him instead of going back and forth, he’s never getting to that level again — at least, not in this company.

Written by Miles Schneiderman