With American Alpha’s NXT Tag Team Championship loss on Wednesday night’s TakeOver special and their immediate placement into a program with newcomers The Authors of Pain, many have begun speculating that Chad Gable and Jason Jordan – one of the most popular acts in NXT – might be on their way to the main WWE roster sooner, rather than later.
Rumors have been running rampant about another mass call-up of NXT talent within the next month, in part because it is clear the RAW and SmackDown rosters will need to be fully stocked in preparation for the upcoming brand split before SmackDown begins going live on July 19.
On Thursday’s episode of Wresting Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer elaborated on the last-minute decision to put the tag title belts back on Scott Dawson and Dash Wilder, and explained we are likely still at least a few weeks away from any NXT talent debuting on the main roster.
“None of these guys are going to be called up at least until mid-July. [The decision to take the titles off American Alpha] was a last-minute call, so that’s an interesting thing. When you watch the TV, though, from last week, Ciampa and Johnny Gargano beat Dash and Dawson. And the only way that result made sense was if Dash and Dawson were going to win the belts and Ciampa and Gargano were going to be the next [challengers].
“Again, it very well may have been Vince McMahon’s last-minute call, but if you look back at the booking, this goes back a couple of weeks … I think that they had a mentality of that being [the case].”
Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez went on to explain that there were people who knew of certain NXT call-ups for months, while the talent themselves had no idea they would be debuting on the main roster until days or in some cases hours beforehand. So it’s always a crap shoot as to who will be coming up and when.
That won’t stop us fans – or certain trolling champions – from rampant speculation, however!
See you soon, American Alpha.
I'm just trolling. I know nothing.
— Ettore “Big E” Ewen (@WWEBigE) June 9, 2016
NXT tapes their next round of television episodes on Thursday night, but that slate of tapings will likely only take the company up through the end of June or beginning of July. There is still plenty of time to play around with storylines, angles and farewells prior to the July brand split, to say nothing of the build toward NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn at the end of August.
