WWE Rumor Roundup: Aggressive offer made to sign 2 AEW stars, long-time character retired, reason behind John Morrison's return - 11th December 2019
It was one those slow news days that we just hate! However, despite the sluggishness, we've still managed to gather a few noteworthy stories from in and around the WWE.
The company went on an outrageous trademarking spree of old WCW and ECW PPV names, which has been viewed as an obvious move to prevent AEW from acquiring the rights to use them. The list has 21 names!
There was an update regarding which match would main event the TLC PPV.
The recent WWE releases have been one of the biggest talking points of the week and more updates about the same were made public.
A long-time WWE character was effectively retired as well.
WWE's aggressive attempts to sign a top tag team were also revealed. There were also a couple of interesting stories regarding John Morrison's return and the statuses of Mike and Maria Kanellis.
Not that bad of a lineup, eh? On that note, here's what's in store in today's edition of the daily rumor roundup:
#7. WWE aggressively tried to sign Ortiz and Santana
There was a time not too long ago when an all-out bidding war broke out between WWE and AEW to get the signatures of Ortiz and Santana, previously known collectively as LAX from their impressive Impact Wrestling run.
Ortiz and Santana eventually decided to join All Elite Wrestling but WWE were relentless in their pursuit of signing the highly-rated tag team.
'Proud-N-Powerful' spoke to Chris Van Vliet and revealed WWE's attempts at getting them on board.
The duo revealed that they were initially going to turn down WWE's offer, however, they made the decision to not burn any bridge. WWE was willing to let the stars 'write their own ticket' to seal the deal.
"We were about to turn down WWE, and we sat down and we were like, ‘Alright man, we don’t want to burn a bridge.’ We never want to burn a bridge anywhere we go because that’s not how you do business, you should keep every avenue open. So he [Santana] had this whole spiel, he was like, ‘Alright, this is what we’re gonna say so we don’t burn a bridge,’ right?
"So we go, and we get cut off, and they were like, ‘Listen, just really think about your decision,’ right? And then we stop and we hang up the phone, we were about to turn them down, and then we sit there and we’re like, ‘Damn, they’re making this really hard for us.' H/t Credit: 411Mania
The plan was to get the former Impact Wrestling tag team to NXT before they moved up to the main roster. Ortiz and Santana chose AEW over WWE as they wanted to be a part of history rather than be small fish in WWE's big pond. They were confident in their abilities to be successful in the WWE, however, the AEW project was just too appealing to pass up.
The Inner Circle members revealed that they were in talks with WWE much before AEW came into the picture. They were also considering Ring of Honor as a possible destination and had never intended on kicking off a bidding war.
However, the emergence of AEW changed the scenario and they realized that they could get lost in the shuffle if they went to the WWE. There were people in the WWE who were pushing for Ortiz and Santana to be signed, but the team decided to go to AEW instead.
They also added that WWE knew about AEW's contract as Vince McMahon's company has 'secret agents' everywhere.