What’s she doing there? “You’ll see.”
She’s back in NXT, in some fashion, for some indeterminate amount of time. Seemingly, without Dana Brooke.
Now, you may be asking yourself “But isn’t she feuding with Natalya and Tamina? Didn’t Rose and Brooke just keep that angle going the day before on Raw?”
Yup. They are, and they did. But WWE doesn’t care about continuity. You can’t think logically about some of these things. Shotzi Blackheart and Ember Moon were the tag team in NXT, and Tegan Nox returned to screw Candice LeRae and Indi Hartwell. The next time we see them, Shotzi and Nox are a team, the Candice story is dropped and Moon is simply losing to Dakota Kai for the sake of probably taking up a few minutes. Toni Storm was trying to set up a match with Sarray and instead, the latter is fighting Gigi Dolin.
WWE spent weeks setting up this Women’s Tag Team Championship match only to not pull the trigger. Very easily, the match could have taken place at WrestleMania Backlash or Money in the Bank, or any episode of Raw in the meantime. For whatever reason, WWE decided to keep pushing it back. Now, there’s a good chance it just won’t happen and it’s just dead.
My suspicion is that Triple H sat down with the team and said “You took three of my girls away. I’d like to get someone in return.” Then, they said “How about Mandy Rose? We don’t think we’ll do anything super important with her and she’s a big enough name that she might improve the ratings.”
Maybe Mandy doesn’t want to travel right now and is opting to stay in Florida, for all we know and that’s the impetus for this change. My theory is that it was either planned to take place in a few weeks at the draft and they’re just shifting it up on the calendar, or there is NO plan and they’re just doing random things for the sake of it while one hand isn’t talking to the other.
What does this mean for Dana Brooke? She’s likely going back into a jobber role, sadly.
Aliyah Splits from The Robert Stone Brand
It’s a little suspicious that we’ve seen another tag team split in NXT this week, too, with Aliyah turning on Robert Stone.
Not only did she lash out on him, but she flat out quit and seemingly turned babyface in the process. Then, Franky Monet joined up, as has been teased a few times.
Aliyah’s been in NXT longer than I think anyone else on the roster. Between the tryouts and the assessments that have been happening at the Performance Center, maybe something clicked and they’re finally willing to take a chance on her on the main roster.
And/or, maybe they just decided enough time’s gone by. At a certain point, you have to shit or get off the toilet. It’s time to sink or swim. If she’s not ready by now, she might never be ready, so let’s try her out on Raw or SmackDown and see what happens. At the very least, she’ll be someone fresh for people who don’t watch NXT, which is a bonus.
I’m anticipating she was going to move up during the draft and the plan to split her from The Robert Stone Brand had been in the works. Then, after moving things back a month, they figured it shouldn’t delay the NXT plans and they’ll just deal with it.
Essentially, this is probably her last run with the black and gold brand. She probably was set up to wrestle a few more times and jump to Raw or SmackDown at the end of August and beginning of September. Now, she’ll do exactly the same thing, but sit out the rest of September until the draft happens in October—or, they’ll simply drag out this story an extra couple weeks and only touch on it every other week, instead of every week.
Time to Plan…Maybe? Probably Not
Maybe…just maybe…WWE realized they continually botch the draft every year and Bayley’s injury got them thinking “Shit! We never plan anything in advance! Now, we’re caught with our pants around our ankles and we have no backup plans! How can we stop this from happening?”
If we’re so lucky that this finally got through, they could have realized they need more time to properly plan out the draft and plans for the next year. Then, feeling the pressure of August 30th being too soon, they decided to push it away for a few more weeks to give themselves time to have a few more meetings. In fact, that may be in part because they want to know what happens with…
Live Crowd’s Reaction for Superstars
Vince McMahon has always lived inside a bubble. Everyone speaks about how he works so much that he doesn’t connect with pop culture in the same way as everyone else. His perception of the world and his company is entirely from the inside.
This past year, WWE itself has lived inside a bubble. The ThunderDome is quite literally an enclosure that has allowed WWE to dictate the cheers and boos from without knowing at all how the actual audience would react.
Checking Twitter responses and message boards (which WWE might not even do) is not an accurate enough assessment of what the live audience will do with each individual Superstar. Riddle might seem like the biggest villain in the world on Twitter with a vocal minority tweeting about how he should be fired, only to get massively cheered at WrestleMania.
WWE could think it’s too quick to go from this upcoming Friday Night SmackDown to August 30th and get a proper gauge of how each wrestler is perceived right now in preparation for the draft. Maybe they want a few more weeks to really showcase all the talent so by October, there’s a better idea of who is over, who the heels and babyfaces are, and how each roster would be best served being balanced out.
Of course, there’s a chance this is all b.s. Maybe Zarian’s information was wrong before, or it’s wrong now, or both. There’s no way of knowing for sure, nor will we ever probably find out the specifics of how things are playing out backstage. But for now, it’s fun to speculate on the potential chaos going on right now and the mess that’s about to unfold.
What do you think is going on with the 2021 WWE Draft? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!
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