AEW Dynamite: Booms and duds for Feb. 19, 2020, including Cody vs. Wardlow

What segments worked, and what didn’t? How were stories built and developed? Let’s take a look at what hit (“boom”) and what missed (“dud”) from AEW Dynamite.

We’re going to try something a bit different for DailyDDT.

We already have our “3 winners” pieces, as well as handing out grades for PPVs. This will be some sort of amalgamation of the two as we identify hits and misses from AEW’s weekly Dynamite show. In line with the show’s name, let’s call the hits “booms” and the misses “duds.”

I’m not going to run through each match/segment. Rather, I will identify a couple of segments that either worked (“boom”) or didn’t for whatever reason (“dud”).

My criteria includes quality of match/segment and how it starts and/or builds stories. After all, we watch partly to be caught up in the stories. If a great work-rate match happens with no context or bearing on the stories, it’s going to be a miss.

By the way, if you have a better name for the booms and duds, message me.

We had an action-packed show for this first booms and duds column. There was a #1 contender’s tag team battle royal; a tag team title match with Kenny Omega and “Hangman” Page defending against the Lucha Bros.; and the anticipated cage match between Cody and Wardlow, which was also Wardlow’s in-ring debut. Did you know this was the first ever cage match in AEW history???