Title Change On AEW Dynamite

AEW

A new champion has been crowned on tonight’s July 1 episode of AEW Dynamite, emanating from San Diego, California.

A number of weeks ago, Willow Nightingale announced that she’d been forced to vacate the TBS Championship and withdraw from the Owen Hart Foundation tournament due to an injury.

Mercedes Mone ended up being her replacement in the tournament, going on to win the final this past weekend at AEW Forbidden Door with a win against Maya World.

As for the TBS Title, qualifying matches have been taking place leading to a Survival of the Fittest match tonight to crown the new champion – essentially a six-way elimination match.

The women who qualified for tonight were Maika, Harley Cameron, Hikaru Shida, Persephone, Kris Statlander and Queen Aminata.

Eventually, the match came down to Statlander and Shida, with Shida emerging victorious and winning the TBS Title.

She joins the lineage of the AEW TBS Title that features Jade Cargill, Kris Statlander, Julia Hart, Willow Nightingale, Mercedes Mone, Nightingale again, and now Shida.

Shida is also a three-time AEW Women’s World Champion, so this adds to her list of accolades with the company.

Her win came when she took advantage of Persephone attacking Statlander with the title belt after Statlander had eliminated Persephone.

Does AEW Have Too Many Championships?

There has long been an argument that AEW has too many championships – and that hasn’t stopped the company adding more even in the midst of those criticisms.

Specifically for the women, there’s the World Championship, the TBS Championship and the Women’s World Tag Team Championship.

Any more might be too much, but at this stage, that’s probably the right amount for the women considering how the depth of the roster has continued to develop.

The men have the World Championship, World Tag Team Championship, World Trios Championship, TNT Championship, Continental Championship, International Championship and National Championship.

There’s certainly an argument that AEW has gone a bit overkill with the midcard titles here – there isn’t really anything that differentiates the TNT, Continental, International and National titles (other than the loosely enforced Continental rules) and there certainly isn’t a need for all four of them.

Keep in mind too that this is on top of the ROH titles that show up regularly on Dynamite, like Bandido’s ROH World Title and Lio Rush’s TV Title – as well as all the non-AEW belts that talent bring onto the show.

The women probably have the right balance currently, but the men do have too many and it somewhat muddies the waters and lessens the prestige of those ‘midcard’ titles.

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• AEW
• Dynamite

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