A big difference between WWE and AEW is the lack of time limits in matches, something that’s more strictly followed in Tony Khan’s company, especially when it comes to the Continental Championship, with its strict rules that also include no outside interference in matches. Someone who has competed in both companies, and even helped found AEW following his first departure from WWE, Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes, thinks it’s time to bring back time limits in all wrestling. He told Sports Illustrated that’s something he’d want to bring back from the old-school professional wrestling days.
“Say you have a cold match, and I mean ‘cold match’ by there’s no previous heat or anything of that nature,” Rhodes explained. “Say you just had Dom Mysterio vs. anybody, name ’em. New guy. Ricky Saints, ‘NXT.’ You have a match, and they have no previous equity, no storyline. There’s a natural stakes when you first hear, ‘five minutes gone, ten remaining.’ There’s a natural stakes. There’s a clock. Jim Ross taught me that and he was really accurate about it. You can give a match stakes that didn’t really have, because crowds are the most important engagement we have for this.”
Rhodes is an obvious student of the “old-school” thanks to his late father, Dusty Rhodes. He explained that in NJPW, you can start to feel the crowd come up from their seats in their quiet excitement and realize a match is getting serious when the “time remaining” announcement rings out. The “American Nightmare” admitted that time limits are unlikely to ever come back, but he loves them.
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