By now, everyone who follows this site knows full well that Adam Rose and Konnor are currently serving 60-day suspensions. Although we don’t know the exact details of just why they were suspended under the Wellness Policy violations, it essentially doesn’t matter.
The bigger question in mind is what WWE is going to do with them going forward—if anything at all.
Don’t Do the Crime If You Can’t Do the Time
Right off the bat, you can bring up the argument that this is all their fault. Unless something is reported that there was a glitch in the testing or that foul play was afoot, it would mean that both men did something they were contractually not supposed to do and are suffering the consequences.
You don’t want to lose out on the money you’d be making over the next 60 days? Don’t take steroids or whatever it is they failed their tests for. It’s as simple as that. It isn’t just the money, either. By having this happen, they’ve hurt their reputations within the company as well. WWE officials would be foolish to reward them for their behavior when they come back. Instead, they’ll be even more hesitant to give them any kind of bonuses or praise of any sort because there are no positives on WWE’s end to their superstars being suspended.
The worst part about this is that this is the second time for both of them, meaning they’ve been taught this lesson before. To bring up another cliché, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Why should WWE trust that they won’t just go ahead and do the same thing a third time? Well, if they do, per regulations, they’ll be fired and that will be the end of that.
Waste Management
Normally when someone is injured or suspended, the gut reaction is to think about how WWE is going to survive without them. Losing so many people like Seth Rollins, Daniel Bryan, Sting, John Cena, Randy Orton and more has made the product suffer to various extents as of late, but are we really going to miss Adam Rose and Konnor for these 60 days?
Think about it. These two were among the bottom of the barrel on the roster. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a good portion of the audience that couldn’t even tell you Konnor’s name, let alone would be eagerly anticipating his performance on the card. The same goes for Adam Rose, who has managed to find a niche as the least valuable member of a team of jobbers. Ouch.
Neither man is contributing all that much to the roster, so no big holes are going to be exposed. Ever since coming to Raw and SmackDown, The Ascension has been booked so horribly that they lost any credibility they had a long, long time ago. While I don’t have the statistics to confirm the specific numbers, I would guarantee they’ve spent more time wrestling on Superstars and Main Event than doing anything of value on the flagship show Raw. In fact, they probably have lost the majority of those matches that nobody’s seen on those D-shows, too.
The Social Outcasts are fine without Adam Rose because they never needed him to begin with. This is predominantly Heath Slater’s baby (read: baybaaay) with Curtis Axel and Bo Dallas showcasing their characters just as well. Since its inception, Adam Rose has been the one struggling to find his place, which says a lot about how useless he can be at times. He’s tried being multiple different characters and never gotten quite over with the crowd. This is the best thing going for him and it’s not all that impressive.
If WWE felt as though The Social Outcasts needed a fourth member, Damien Sandow is more than capable of filling in that spot. He’s much more popular with the audience, hasn’t been doing jack shit for a good year, and can be goofy enough to fit right in. There’s also Darren Young, who has nothing much to his name anymore and was even the Marty Jannetty of The Prime Time Players. It’s sad that Titus O’Neil gets suspended but we’ve seen more of him on television than Darren Young. Then again, maybe for the sake of political correctness, WWE shouldn’t make their first openly homosexual wrestler a member of “The Social Outcasts” for fear of seeming discriminatory. In either scenario, the backup option is the simplest: just keep it as a trio. It works for The New Day and many other teams.
When it comes to The Ascension, poor Viktor would be getting screwed if Konnor were to be released. While he’s in a similar boat of not doing anything of much value other than being the resident jobber tag team, that’s at least something more than if he were to be on his own. However, maybe that’s what he needs as a “sink or swim” scenario. Viktor without falling back on The Ascension gimmick could be forced to figure out a new character change which may end up being better in the long run and could save him from being a release down the line. Then again, when Konnor was on his own before The Ascension, his character was “guy who looks like a rat.” Here’s hoping those same creative thoughts didn’t seep into Viktor’s brain.
Losing Konnor and Adam Rose pretty much means nothing right now, and it’s hard to argue that it would mean much if it were to be for a longer period than 60 days.
Future Endeavors
Let’s say they do get released. Clearly, WWE will live on as if nothing happened, but what will these two guys do for themselves? After all, it’s not Adam Rose and Konnor who are suspended, but Raymond Leppan and Ryan Parmeter. Their characters may suck, but even if you’re not a big fan of them as performers, you shouldn’t wish ill on the men behind the masks. Ray Leppan’s son Maverick has severe medical problems which is hard enough to deal with in so many ways on its own, not to mention factoring in taking away his income. While I don’t know of anything similar going on in Ryan’s life and I should hope that’s not the case, the guy’s got to put food on his table just the same as everybody else.
Obviously, it would be heartless to toss them to the wolves and tell them to fend for themselves, but at the same time, they work for WWE, which is a company and not a charity. As stated before, if you’re willing to break the rules, you need to be willing to accept the punishment that comes from that action. WWE doesn’t owe them a job, they are paid to do their duties and if they don’t fulfill them, they aren’t left with no resources to find any other sources of income.
Once you’ve established yourself in WWE, it’s significantly easier to make a living on the independent circuit as you’re by default a bigger star than anybody the local feds have in their roster. Joe Schmoe might be big in town, but he wasn’t on national television for years wrestling with the marquee names in the industry.
Very easily, Konnor can play the typical post-WWE name game and go by “Konor Ascension” or something lame like that while the wrestling world gets some Adam Rose / Leo Kruger hybrid of Adam Kruger or Leo Rose or whatever. They can keep playing their characters or switch things up and probably sign on to TNA (but they probably wouldn’t ever get paid), Ring of Honor, Global Force Wrestling, Lucha Underground, New Japan Pro Wrestling, and so on and so forth. There’s even the option of them quitting sports entertainment entirely and moving on to completely different careers. Plenty of wrestlers have managed restaurants or gone into real estate or a multitude of other opportunities depending on their interests and skills.
At the end of the day, this isn’t a situation where these two men were injured and their careers are being taken away from them. They’re two men who broke the rules for the second time and are paying the price for it, hurting their wallets and their professional pride. It may end up being what puts the final nail in the coffin for their lackluster careers or it could just be a two-month break where they heal up, stay at home with their families, and stretch their funds by spending less. WWE could very easily just be serving these 60-day suspensions and planning on bringing them back exactly as they were on day 61 with no changes whatsoever.
Without knowing some of the other factors that would come into play if you were their coworkers or employers, it’s hard to make a definitive judgment call, but from where I stand, I would probably lean towards releasing them and just ripping the inevitable band-aid off right now.
Where do you stand on the issue? Should WWE let them go or keep them around and give them one more strike? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!
