Seth Rollins Confirms How The Shield Was Originally Going to Break Up

It’s been over seven years since Seth Rollins whacked Roman Reigns in the back with a steel chair on a June episode of Monday Night Raw, effectively ending The Shield’s first run in WWE. But the original plan for how the trio would split was much different as Rollins explained while on Broken Skull Sessions this week. According to him, WWE officials wanted to end the group as far back as January in order to set up Reigns vs. Dean Ambrose for WrestleMania XXX. The three instead squashed Kane and The New Age Outlaws in a three-minute six-man tag match at the pay-per-view and feuded with Evolution for a few months. 

“What happened was, they wanted to break us up back in January [2014], maybe December,” Rollins said (h/t Fightful). “They wanted to go to Ambrose and Roman and at WrestleMania 30 in New Orleans. I was left out. Maybe a special referee or something. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ They wanted to break us up and we had just turned the corner into being babyfaces. Over time, it was like, ‘they’re too cool, we can’t boo them anymore.’ We were like, ‘No. What are you doing? We’re not ready for that yet, we have a whole run as babyfaces. There’s a lot of merch money on the table.’ We went to Hunter, we talked about it, we ended up hashing it out and worked with The Outlaws [Road Dogg & Billy Gunn] and Kane at WrestleMania, which was a truncated match, a glorified squash because you guys [Austin, The Rock, and Hulk Hogan] talked for 35 minutes and the Daniel Bryan and Hunter went out and did 35 minutes [laughs]. You know how it goes, sh— falls downhill. We had about 90 seconds and we went out and did our thing.

“Then, we did two matches with Evolution, no peep of a turn, no peep for a breakup, no one said anything,” he continued. “We wiped the floor with Evolution, it was a clean sweep in the elimination match. They pull us into the office and say, ‘tonight is the night.’”

The three would reunite a few times in the years that followed before Ambrose allowed his WWE contract to expire. He now wrestles in AEW, New Japan and the independent scene as Jon Moxley.