Pat McAfee is a class act

The 2021 Wrestling Observer Awards were announced in this week’s edition of Dave Meltzer’s Newsletter. They’re pretty much what you would expect*, but it is nice to see Bryan Danielson win the Bryan Danielson Award again. Get the full list by subscribing to the Observer, or via Google.

Other than the Dragon’s reclaiming the “Best Technical Wrestler” crown that’s named for him, the other winner we’ll spoil for you here is “Best Television Announcer”. It went to Excalibur, who is a great commentator and the glue that holds AEW’s big broadcasts together. If I was voting, I’d have probably had Pat McAfee or Taz at the top of my ballot, but I don’t have a problem with the masked guy winning.

You know who else doesn’t have a problem with it? Brock Lesnar’s favorite announcer, Pat Mac.

As Carlito would say, that’s cool.

We’ll miss fourth place finisher McAfee on SmackDown again tonight, but he should be back next Friday. Then you can either start campaigning for him to win next year, or just be happy we have a bunch of great announcers — and class acts (Excalibur and runner-up Kevin Kelly also shouted each other out after the awards came out this morning) — calling our televised pro wrestling/sports entertainment these days.

* Even as someone who tends to enjoy AEW more than WWE, the way all the “best” awards go to the former while the “worst”s go to the latter is pretty hilarious. It definitely only feeds the stereotypes about Observer subscribers/AEW fans/ the internet wrestling community. But at least Dark didn’t beat SmackDown in the Best Weekly Television Show voting again this year.