The Briscoes Versus FTR Is The 2022 Match Of The Year So Far

2022  has been an up and down year in professional wrestling.  On one hand, it has been a year marred by injuries to many big names in a number of promotions.  But on the other hand, it has also been a year that has given us some amazing matches, especially in the tag team division.  Episodes of WWE Raw and AEW Dynamite both gave us match-of-the-year contenders in RK Bro vs Alpha Academy vs Kevin Owens & Seth Rollins and FTR vs The Young Bucks.  And as amazing as both of those matches were, nothing in 2022 can stand up to the match that FTR and The Briscoes gave us at Supercard of Honor 15.

The Briscoes and FTR was a match that many wrestling fans were unsure if they would ever see, as Ring of Honor disbanded and it was reported that WarnerMedia did not want to feature the Briscoes on their network.

But when the match was finally announced for Supercard of Honor 15 many fans of professional wrestling circled that show on their calendars as a must-see event.  If you take all the external factors out of it and look at these two teams based just on ability inside the squared circle, there was no denying that this was a highly anticipated match between two of the best tag teams in all of professional wrestling.

Once match time came and the two teams were in the ring exchanging glances in front of a red-hot crowd and the tension in the air was palpable.  Two of the best tag teams in the world were about to give everything they had to prove they were the superior duo.

What came next was a match that is going to be nearly impossible to supersede as the frontrunner for the match of the year.  FTR and the Briscoes took us on a near thirty-minute thrill ride full of ring psychology, edge-of-your-seat false finishes, and one-upmanship on a level, unlike anything we have seen in the recent history of professional wrestling.

Part of what made this match so amazing was how pure it was.  We live in the day and age of the gimmick match and we are reminded of this weekly.  To try to ensure they keep their crowds invested in their promotion, the powers that be in charge of booking try far too often to make the matches into something that will be exciting for their audience by adding stipulations, and most of the time these are unneeded.  The increase of said stipulations does two things, they take away from the pure abilities of the talent and it also desensitizes fans to the extreme nature of these matches due to overexposure.

But on April 1st, 2022, there were no ladders, no barbed wire, no kendo sticks, and standard professional wrestling rules absolutely did apply.  This was just four men at the very top of their game and the only piece of equipment they needed to oooh and ahhh the crowd on that night was a wrestling ring.

The Briscoes and FTR gave us a masterpiece of tag team wrestling.  This match was the perfect combination of a fistfight and technical wrestling that only two teams who were one hundred percent locked in could have given us.

The match was so good that it didn’t even matter that outcome was somewhat a foregone conclusion at the start.  As the show went on that night it became extremely apparent that talent that was currently under contract with AEW were coming out victorious in every match that they were featured in.  The fact that both teams were still able to sell false finishes the way that they did just emphasizes the greatness of both as well as their in-ring chemistry together.

After closing its doors in late 2021, the betting odds of Ring of Honor being the promotion that gave the professional wrestling world the 2022 match of the year had to be slim to none.  Yet as we sit in early July of 2022, Ring of Honor is now the betting favorite.