On November 18, 2021, Swerve Strickland was released from his WWE contract following which he debuted for AEW at the 2022 Revolution pay-per-view event.
Speaking with 95.7 The Game, Strickland stated that his WWE release lit a fire under him. He said,
“As many things as WWE does right, there’s a lot of things that WWE does wrong, and I was one of those. I wanted to make sure I proved that I was one of the worst decisions you could make. Because I also sat in that for a little bit of being disappointed, like I didn’t want to tell my family for a couple days at first. Then I was like, ‘How about I turn this energy and emotion into something positive? How do I use this as fuel to power this locomotive?’ I just went balls to the wall.”