Speaking to Steve Austin on Broken Skull Sessions, Seth Rollins recalled how WWE wanted to split up The Shield in 2014 in order to have Roman Reigns vs. Dean Ambrose to take place at WrestleMania 30.
The split was held off until June of that year.
“They spring that on us, we’re talking hours before it happened,” Rollins said about the turn. “What happened was, they wanted to break us up back in January [2014], maybe December. They wanted to go to Ambrose and Roman and at WrestleMania 30 in New Orleans. I was left out. Maybe a special referee or something. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ They wanted to break us up and we had just turned the corner into being babyfaces. Over time, it was like, ‘they’re too cool, we can’t boo them anymore.’ We were like, ‘No. What are you doing? We’re not ready for that yet, we have a whole run as babyfaces. There’s a lot of merch money on the table.’ We went to Hunter, we talked about it, we ended up hashing it out and worked with The Outlaws [Road Dogg & Billy Gunn] and Kane at WrestleMania, which was a truncated match, a glorified squash because you guys [Austin, The Rock, and Hulk Hogan] talked for 35 minutes and the Daniel Bryan and Hunter went out and did 35 minutes [laughs]. You know how it goes, shit falls downhill. We had about 90 seconds and we went out and did our thing. Then, we did two matches with Evolution, no peep of a turn, no peep for a breakup, no one said anything. We wiped the floor with Evolution, it was a clean sweep in the elimination match. They pull us into the office and say, ‘tonight is the night.'”
