Backstage News On Samoa Joe – As noted last night, Samoa Joe announced in a video posted on Twitter that he was relinquishing the NXT Title due to an undisclosed injury. Joe stated that he wouldn’t be out of action for very long and didn’t note the exact injury.
Originally, when Joe came back to WWE, he was supposed to be an on-air character in NXT with his main job being behind the scenes in the talent scouting department. However, WWE quickly put him back in the ring for him to beat Karrion Kross for the NXT Title at NXT TakeOver 36 as Kross was moved to the main roster.
Dave Meltzer noted on today’s Wrestling Observer Radio that there’s a lot of vagueness around this situation, which typically means there is more to the story that will come out later. There’s no clear reason why Joe would give up the title instead of losing it to someone in a match.
“It’s a weird story. He’s still with the company as far as that goes. I don’t know if he’s going to be wrestling much because the only thing I heard officially from WWE on this because I contacted a bunch of people unofficially who really didn’t know anything. He’d actually said this before people in NXT even had an idea any of this was going on, so it wasn’t like they knew anything.
The official thing that I was just told is that he was hired to be more of an administrator or whatever, like a front office person, more than a wrestler, so that’s gonna be his job. The thing with him and Kross, it drew interest, it was a big deal in NXT, but its [NXT] going in a different direction. Why he couldn’t lose the title beats me. There’s many unanswered questions in this story. If he’s gonna be able to wrestle in a couple of weeks, or whatever, or a short period of time, stripping him kind of makes no sense. There’s a lot of vagueness and when there’s vagueness there’s probably a lot more to it than has come out.”
Meltzer noted that he is under the impression that Joe is going to be wrestling less going forward as the new vision for NXT is to make new stars for the future and Joe is older so he will become a coach and trainer.
Fightful Select also reports that an original script called for Samoa Joe to appear on tonight’s WWE RAW episode.
As it stands right now, it’s unclear whether he will appear on the show due to his NXT status. It was said that the appearance was in relation to promoting the relaunch of NXT on Tuesday night.
Backstage News On Samoa Joe
