Roderick Strong made his surprise debut on this week’s AEW Dynamite, simultaneously revealing he had joined the young promotion and that he had been released by the WWE. Strong hadn’t competed in WWE since last August after suffering an ankle injury. His appearances alongside the rest of Diamond Mine on the NXT brand dried up quickly after that. It’s unknown how long Strong has been a free agent, as he was still listed as a member of the WWE roster on WWE.com at the time of his Dynamite debut.
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Strong hit the ring and helped Adam Cole, Orange Cassidy and Bandido chase off the Jericho Appreciation Society. He ended the segment by embracing his fellow former Undisputed Era teammate. “The Messiah of the Backbreaker” arrived in WWE back in 2016 and worked almost exclusively on the NXT brand — winning the NXT Cruiserweight, North American and Tag Team Championships (twice). Tony Khan took to Twitter shortly after the segment to confirm Strong had signed with the promotion.
Once Cole, Kyle O’Reilly and Bobby Fish all joined All Elite Wrestling by the end of 2021, the company teased an Undisputed Reunion by having the three align with The Elite to form The Undisputed Elita. Unfortunately, the group’s momentum was cut short before its storyline could progress. Cole went down with a pair of serious concussions, O’Reilly underwent neck surgery and Fish left the company after the two sides couldn’t come together on a new deal. An Undisputed Era vs. Elite storyline was teased late last year when Cole and O’Reilly briefly returned to TV, but was scrapped when Cole returned from injury as a babyface.
“I think so (those plans have been scrapped),” Cole said when asked about the status of that storyline in a recent interview with ComicBook. “It’s one of those situations where, obviously, wrestling is dangerous and things change all the time there may have been a couple of ideas as far as where we were going months and months ago. We thought, ‘okay, this recovery process is going to be a little bit quicker.’ But as time went on and we learned how serious this injury was, obviously things had to pivot and change as well. That’s kind of the way wrestling is where things change often and you just kind of have to roll with the punches. We definitely had at least a couple of ideas back then but things have changed now. But it doesn’t mean that we won’t play into that down the line.”
