Pruett’s Blog: New Year’s Wrestling Resolutions For 2025

By Will Pruett, ProWrestling.net Co-Senior Staffer (@itswilltime)

2024 has ended and I am sitting here on the first day of 2025 enjoying my morning coffee and thinking of the year ahead. Because my brain is broken and often begins thinking about wrestling before anything else, I figured now would be a good time to make some wrestling New Year’s Resolutions.

Like most resolutions these are not promises, but lofty goals I will try to meet. I would love it for you, my loyal readers who surely didn’t click on this blog on accident, to keep me accountable and ask about some of these goals as the year progresses.

Enjoy the end of John Cena

Many of us spent a decade disliking John Cena. He was the face of a bad period in WWE programming where the creative effort could be best summed up as “LOL Cena Wins” and often was on the now defunct forum for this very website. At the same time, John Cena has a legacy of truly amazing matches with near-perfect stories within them. His classics with Rob Van Dam, Edge, Umaga, CM Punk, Kevin Owens, AJ Styles, and so many others should be noted and appreciated, even amidst the “LOL Cena Wins” of it all. In the final year of John Cena’s career, I want to appreciate the performer Cena is and has been. I want to watch his matches knowing one of the best (and weirdest) careers in wrestling history is winding down. I want to see John Cena, while I still can.

Go to more live shows

Live wrestling is my favorite live theatrical experience. A wrestling show is interactive and joyful like nothing else. I adore theater. I love going to concerts (and producing them). Wrestling is an altogether different and electric like experience – and one I spent the entirety of 2024 unable to go to. For reasons often beyond my control, I couldn’t attend any wrestling shows in the year 2024. This was the first year I have not been to a wrestling show since 2006. I will fix this in 2025.

I already have plans to attend WWE’s Netflix debut in Los Angeles on January 6. I am hopeful when it comes to attending AEW’s tapings around Revolution and the pay-per-view itself in March. Wrestling is far too enjoyable to miss.

Delight in live streaming wrestling

For the last eight years, I have avoided weekly WWE programming. I wrote here often about how much better it was to just watch WWE premium live events and use those to catch up on the month prior. While I’ve been more into weekly programming (especially for my AEW viewing and Collision podcasts for Dot Net Members) lately, I plan to dive even deeper in with weekly Raw viewership with their Netflix debut.

Weekly wrestling is a double-edged sword, as it will not always be great and sometimes shows are just made to fill time and network commitments. But when weekly stories and builds hit, they can be amazing. With Raw being more widely available than it has even been on Netflix, now is the time for me to dive back in.

Write more

If you’ve read my work here for a long time, you’re aware that sometimes I’m not around. For years I have been inconsistent when it comes to writing here. In that time I became a parent and have felt my passion for wrestling (particularly current US wrestling at the time) ebb and flow. But I have always loved wrestling and always loved talking about it.

In 2025, I hope to write more thoughts on wrestling than I have in many years. I enjoy this. It’s nice to publish my thoughts in a longer format after breaking my brain with micro-blogging for so long (and I still do that on Bluesky too!). Hopefully you all enjoy me writing more (which I truly started doing at the end of 2024).

And now some resolutions I would love to see the wrestling industry (and fans) make:

Be Less Polarized

Among the disappointing things about writing more about wrestling lately has been some of the reactions. Depending on the piece I write, I’ve been called both a WWE shill and an AEW shill. While I’m sure this means I am doing a decent job expressing well-reasoned wrestling opinions (sometimes with math), it also shows how weird and intense some people have gotten about wrestling online.

Chill out, everyone. We are living in another golden age of professional wrestling. More wrestlers are employed right now by the major U.S. wrestling companies than there have ever been. There are two profitable national wrestling companies in the U.S. with major TV contracts. This is the dream we all hoped for throughout the dark days of WWE’s monopoly from 2001 to 2019. I don’t want to go back there. It was not fun.

Put more women in major main events

Women have never main evented an AEW premium live event. Women have not main evented WrestleMania since 2021, despite the show still being two nights long. WWE has regressed in the last four years, particularly when it comes to presenting their women as equal to men. AEW has never really tried to present women with equality. Both companies can and should do better. AEW’s “one women’s match per show” policy is still enforced more often than not. It’s time to put actual creative effort into the unprecedented wealth of talent we have in women’s wrestling today.

Will Pruett writes about wrestling and popular culture at prowrestling.net. To see his video content subscribe to his YouTube channel. To contact, check him out on Bluesky @itswilltime, leave a comment, or email him at itswilltime@gmail.com.

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Readers Comments (5)

  1. Purty sure the “WWE shill” comments FAR outnumber the “AEW shill” comments…I”m sure that’s just coincidence, though, since as you (had to) say about yourself, you are “doing a decent job expressing well-reasoned wrestling opinions.”
    Keep telling yourself that. Because you HAVE to believe it.

    • I do believe it! Thanks for noticing. And WWE shill or AEW shill actually depends more on what social media platform folks are using to say unkind things to me.

      We can all agree that I am not a Ring of Honor shill though, because Ring of Honor does not exist.

  2. You do realize, or maybe you don’t that women have main evented many a TNA/Impact telecast & even a PPV or 2. They do quite well with showcasing their women’s roster.

    • That is great, but I must admit I tuned out of TNA around the time Dixie Carter was put through a table and have never looked back. I’d rather advocate for major wrestling companies to do better.

      • Will, you’d better get back into the swing of things. TNA is heading for an upswing. Start to take a little more notice of it. You won’t be disappointed.
        Also, wouldn’t you rather have all companies do better? It’s better for the sport in general to have an option here & there.

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