It didn’t take long at all for The Shield to establish themselves as a force to be reckoned with after they debuted on the main roster, and together they managed to take out some of the biggest names in the business. But all good things must come to an end and in June of 2014 WWE decided to have Seth Rollins turn on the group and split them up.
Recently Seth Rollins joined Steve Austin on Broken Skull Sessions, and he revealed that originally WWE wanted to break the group up earlier to set up a match for WrestleMania 30.
“They spring that on us, we’re talking hours before it happened. 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.'”
The members of The Shield would go on to find major success as singles competitors, and the heel turn launched a main event run for Seth Rollins when he aligned himself with Triple H and The Authority.
H/T Fightful
