10 Notable WWE Releases Who Are Still Available To Be Signed
8. Mojo Rawley
This is a textbook case of someone having everything Vince McMahon looks for in a superstar and Creative not having the foggiest clue what they want to do with him.
Former NFL Player? Check. Connects with the crowd? Check. Dynamic character exploding with energy and, for lack of a better word, hype? Big check. So what happened?
As is the case too often in WWE, it was going well at first. WWE assembled The Hype Bros, pairing Rawley with perennial fan favorite Zack Ryder and they quickly connected with crowds in NXT and later on SmackDown. Rawley even won the annual Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal in 2017. Then the writers' room took a hard left turn, splitting the duo and made the excitable Rawley the bad guy.
Gone were the bright colors, the erratic entrance music and connection with the crowd, replaced with a crazed loner with blue shatter patterns on his face, shouting mindlessly into the abyss (or mirror, as was often the case) for weeks and months with no discernible payoff for the angle. They tried to go back to square one during the ThunderDome Era, but the damage was done. The fans didn't care, Creative didn't care, and one imagines on some level, Rawley didn't care anymore either.
Still an impressive combination of speed, power and technique, with a little fine tuning, WWE's lost 'Mojo' could be almost anyone's gain.