FTR aren’t going anywhere. If it was not evident enough by their victory in the AEW Careers vs. Titles match this past Wednesday on AEW Dynamite, Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler have officially re-signed with AEW. This comes after months of speculation on the tag team’s future, as both Harwood and Wheeler took a sabbatical from AEW TV this past December to make a decision about their futures. They returned to programming at AEW Revolution in March, building to a tag title bout against then-champions The Gunns, which they ultimately walked away from victorious.
The timing of FTR’s re-signing aligns with Vince McMahon’s return to power in WWE. That said, those events lining up proved to be nothing more than a coincidence, as Harwood revealed that he and Wheeler decided to remain with AEW long before McMahon reclaimed his WWE control.
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“Yes. We have re-signed with AEW,” Harwood confirmed on his podcast. “If you think that we put pen to paper as soon as that happened (McMahon’s return to WWE) and Tony (Khan) made all the adjustments as soon as that happened, I don’t know if you understand how business or contracts work. If you think we went into the building Wednesday night with no contract signed and said, ‘We’re not going to sign unless you give us these belts,’ you’re so short-sighted. I said on the podcast months ago, we knew what we wanted to do and everything was getting fine tuned. We knew way before Vince came back in charge what was going to happen.”
While WWE did have interest in bringing back the tag team once known as The Revival, Harwood emphasized that a “bidding war” was never the goal.
“As I’ve said a million times: never did I want a bidding war between WWE and AEW or to play one side against the other,” Harwood continued. “I appreciate everyone that reached out to me and were interested in having us back, wanted to have us back, said they made a mistake in letting us go. For me, Cash, Maria (his wife), Finley (his daughter), the best course of action for us was to stick around in AEW.”
As Scott Dawson and Dash Wilder, Harwood and Wheeler had big success in WWE. They skyrocketed to popularity in NXT thanks to their highly-praised pay-per-view bouts with American Alpha and DIY, but somewhat flustered upon their main roster call-up. Despite winning gold on bold Raw and SmackDown, the two were often booked as a comedy act and did not feel valued by their former employer.
“I was just a number, just an object to Vince. To Tony, I am a human being. He cares about me, my feelings, my family,” Harwood said. “Working for someone like that, obviously, is going to make our decision much easier when comparing and contrasting to a person who just has us as a number.”
