Daniel Bryan once again came up short in a Universal Championship match with Roman Reigns on this week’s Friday Night SmackDown. Per the stipulation of the match, Bryan was banished from the Blue Brand with the loss and took a Con-Chair-To from Reigns on his way out. Eagle-eyed WWE fans were quick to notice Bryan’s name was pulled from the WWE.com official roster over the weekend, moving the leader of the Yes Movement to the WWE Alumni section. WWE isn’t afraid to use its website to further a storyline (Roderick Strong is in the same section with his current angle in NXT), and there’s been no official word over whether or not Bryan’s contract has actually expired.
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He talked about the contract once again in an interview with TV Line earlier in the week, confirming that his deal doesn’t expire in September as some fans had assumed.
“It’s funny that people gravitate towards the date ‘September,’ and I think it’s because that’s when my last contract ended, but it doesn’t end in September,” Bryan said. “I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like.”
Elsewhere in the interview Bryan confirmed that he’s been dealing with a neck injury, and once again pondered about what his workload would look like as a part-timer.
“I had a tag team match on SmackDown (recently) and it was a lot of fun,” Bryan said. “But my neck was just wrecked. I’m going to be 40 in May and my daughter likes to get on my shoulders to pick leaves from a Japanese maple in front of our house. You get to that point where it’s like, how long can I do this full-time and still be able to do those kinds of things with my daughter? What’s the right balance between part-time and that sort of thing? It may be that it’s just every once in a while when the urge strikes, or maybe like a schedule where it’s like eight months on, these months off. One of the coolest things about wrestling, and just be being an independent contractor in general, is that you can say, ‘Well, I really only want to do this amount of work.’ What that amount of work is, I have no idea yet. I still have to figure it out.”
Stay tuned for further updates on Bryan’s status as they become available.
