5 Things AEW can do to improve in the company's second year on TNT

#1 Shine more light on women

Penelope Ford gave Shida all she could handle

The problem with the women in AEW has been two-fold. While not many people could have predicted the COVID-19 Pandemic, most of the women's roster has been stuck overseas and/or released. A big part of the initial formation of AEW was that it had a strong Joshi presence in its women's division, including two of its first three AEW Women's Champs (Riho, Hikaru Shida).

In addition to those two, Yuka Sakazaki, Emi Sakura, Sadie Gibbs and Bea Priestly were all members of Stardom and competed sporadically for AEW. The latter two women were released last week. The women of AEW have also been hit hard by the injury bug as Kris Statlander, Shanna and Britt Baker are all currently out with ailments. Baker seems to get hurt once every three months. She's had a concussion, broken nose and leg injury in her first year with AEW.

The promotion did sign more women (Big Swole, Anna Jay, Statlander) along the way after tryout matches on AEW Dark, but it still needs more women to round out the division with good depth. That could happen if they reach deals with any of the following women - Ivelisse, Diamante, Lil Swole, Rachel Evers, Tay Conti - unless they were just brought in to fill out teams for the women's tag tournament.

There are also the likes of Kelly Klein, Priscilla Kelly and many other talented women who are unsigned. And fans have also questioned why Allie has been more of a manager/tag wrestler than a singles star when they are hunting for challengers for Shida?

Another problem that could have helped the entire roster was that episodes of Dynamite rarely have more than one women's match. Sometimes, there's only a segment for the women and no matches. People can criticize WWE all they want, but the last few months of programming have at least had multiple feuds/matches/segments featuring women.

By allotting a few more minutes or ring time to the women, it would have kept all of the match-ups available to AEW fresh. Instead, all of the tag teams seem like they have already faced each other (except for newer ones). Since most of the tag teams have already squared off, it means that AEW will have to dip into the well again since not every match had a storyline/angle attached to it. Giving more TV spotlight to the women would help the entire show out.