Road Dogg Says WWE NXT ‘Never Once Thought’ They Were Competing With AEW

– During a recent appearance on Busted Open Radio, WWE Hall of Famer Road Dogg discussed how while working in WWE NXT, he did not view AEW as competition for the NXT brand. Below are some highlights (via Fightful):

Road Dogg on not viewing WWE NXT as competition to AEW: “This is how I look at that. I’m trying to calm down a little before I react or respond. I don’t think NXT lost the head-to-head battle. I don’t think it was ever meant to. I think things got out of hand a little bit and USA agreed to a deal for NXT and Vince (McMahon) wanted that to be what it is now. He wanted it to be a total tryout thing. ‘Put these people on TV, we’ll see if they stick, and we’ll get them up here.’ Hunter has a different philosophy. ‘Train them, make sure they’re good to go before you put them on TV.’ It’s two totally different philosophies. Speaking from NXT, and I say this from sitting in every meeting when it was Black & Gold and writing, producing, and directing, we never once thought we were competing with those guys.”

On looking at NXT as purely as a developmental program: “We looked at ourselves as a developmental program. I hope for AEW they weren’t thinking that beating a developmental program was a notch in their belt because it was people nobody had ever heard of on a Tuesday night against Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley. I always thought that was apples and oranges and you can tell I take I t personally because I worked there. Of course, we wanted to beat them, but we never thought we were in competition or had to write for competition. We just wrote the best show we could.”

WWE released Road Dogg earlier this year as part of the company’s restructuring of the NXT brand.