Released WWE Star Reveals Frustration With Vince McMahon Changing NXT

A few years ago NXT made the jump to USA Network, and shortly after the show started going head to head with AEW Dynamite on Wednesday nights. For the majority of the Wednesday Night Wars it was AEW that came out ahead in the ratings, and NXT was moved to Tuesday nights earlier this year. NXT has since been rebranded NXT 2.0, and the brand is now moving in a different direction.

During a recent appearance on the Wrestling Inc. Daily former NXT Champion Bronson Reed, now known as JONAH, noted that for the first year of NXT on USA the Chairman of the Board didn’t care much about what was going on, but frustration set in when Vince McMahon got more hands on.

“At first, no. The time I came in, we were still doing just tapings at Full Sail, and then it ended up getting its USA Network deal and going on cable. So they really did push it, and it did seem like we were a third brand. That’s what Shawn, that’s what everyone was saying. ‘This is a third brand. You don’t need to go to RAW or SmackDown anymore. We’re going to focus on this being a big third show,’ obviously, given that we have TV time.

“For that first year of TV time, I think everyone backstage saw it as ‘hey, we’re NXT. We’re something different. We’re still part of WWE but something different. But we’re focusing on trying to make this great,’ and it seemed like that’s what it was. It seemed like Vince didn’t really care so much, and it was just Hunter’s baby. But in this year, these last six months or so, I think that’s all changed and some frustration definitely has grown backstage. I’ve seen it firsthand.”

The Wednesday Night Wars were a hot topic in the wrestling world for a period of time, and JONAH also revealed what was said about the head to head competition backstage.

“I’m not 100% too sure. I know Hunter and some of the top guys would say, ‘We’re not in direct competition. We’re focusing on our own thing. We’re just trying to make our own product as good as possible.’ There always was that bit of competition, and I don’t know what the higher ups thought of that, thought of us, obviously, losing to AEW week in and week out. But we were still putting on great TV. And I don’t know if they just thought, maybe we weren’t, but my whole thing is, they didn’t watch the product, so how did they know? So to then completely revamp it, how do you know that this is now going to be successful if you didn’t watch what was happening before?”

JONAH was released from his WWE contract back in August. Stay tuned for updates.