10 Times The Past Buried WWE's Future
9. JBL Buries The Ascension
NXT had never seen a tag-team blitz through the brand's competition quite like The Ascension. Booked like absolute monsters, Konnor and Viktor routinely dominated teams in devastating fashion. Showcasing a look that echoed Demolition and The Road Warriors, this team may have lacked originality, but they definitely had a style that was useful in an era where tag teams lacked personality and individuality.
Enter, JBL.
The WWE's color commentator would regularly side with the company's heels, but he took one look at The Ascension's bad guy antics and was having none of them. Verbally assasinating the pair for their contrived look and for being fed lowly competition after they hit the main roster, JBL would tell audiences that Konnor and Viktor couldn't hold a candle to the teams they were echoing on a weekly basis.
In JBL's defence, he always felt like the mouthpiece for Vince McMahon's thoughts, and Konnor and Viktor being ran through by the nWo and other veteran acts with alarming regularity suggests that this was the case with The Ascension. Nevertheless, Bradshaw's treatment of one of NXT's top tag-teams of all time was so brutal that it's something he's still flamed for to this day.