Vince McMahon Reportedly Set To Treat Cody Rhodes As a ‘Huge Deal’ In WWE

As we reported yesterday, Cody Rhodes is no longer a part of AEW and is expected to come to an agreement to work for WWE soon. This mammoth news draws a lot of speculation about what Cody’s role in WWE might be and how the company will push him.

According to Wade Keller of PW Torch, Vince McMahon reportedly has ‘big plans’ for the former WWE Intercontinental champion and plans to treat his return as a ‘huge deal’. He noted that he had “four plus hours” of talks with his AEW and WWE sources, which makes him believe that Rhodes will be a part of Wrestlemania 38 in Dallas.

Keller said (via Wrestlingnews.co): “Cody and WWE haven’t confirmed it but Cody is going to WWE and he’s going to get a big push. Vince McMahon is going to treat this as a big deal. Everybody I talked to thinks Vince loves the idea of acquiring a co-founder and EVP and, you know, main event wrestler. He just held their secondary singles title not that long ago, and having him show up on WWE TV is something that Vince is very interested in taking advantage of and making money on it. It could even be a situation where Cody is in a major match at WrestleMania. I fully expect Cody to be on WrestleMania either as a wrestler or making his first appearance. I don’t know if they can hold back on putting him on TV so I could even see him appearing on Raw or SmackDown next week. I’m not aware of there being any kind of non-compete at this point since he’s been a free agent for a while so Cody could appear. I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s even some augmentation to the booking plans for WrestleMania perhaps related to the Elimination Chamber in order to set the stage for Cody to do something really big at WrestleMania.

I think Cody will get a big push, at least at first. You know, there’s different opinions on whether Vince is going to resent Cody for creating competition or admire Cody for his entrepreneurial spirit and being classy about it the whole way. You know, Paul Heyman, Eric Bischoff, Jeff Jarrett, they all competed with Vince [and] they all got jobs again. So, you know, we’ll, we’ll see how it goes. Vince saw Cody as a mid-carder. He saw Christian as a mid-carder. Christian went to Impact Wrestling and won a world title…He came back, he got a better push, but it wasn’t at the level of Edge, which is what, you know, Christian always wanted. He wanted to be at the Edge level.“