4 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE NXT Stand & Deliver 2025 (Results & Review)

Downs…

4. ‘Tony Fumbled’

NXT Stand & Deliver 2025 Ethan Page Ricky Saints
WWE

…said a bunch of fans who probably never watched an episode of Rampage in their lives.

The NXT fans in attendance showered the Stand & Deliver opening match between Ricky Saints and Ethan Page with that chant, along with “Thank you, Tony,” an obvious reference to both men’s time in AEW.

Tribalism is a ridiculously stupid thing, but it’s magnified when WWE is kicking off WrestleMania weekend with a match on their developmental brand between two wrestlers with a combined 31 years of in-ring experience who were part of AEW last year.

That’s not a knock against Page or Saints or the match itself, but shouldn’t your developmental brand strive to highlight your up-and-coming stars first and foremost? What does it say about NXT leading off with that instead of the excellent tag title match, which saw two homegrown stars win their first major championships?

Fans obviously are free to chant what they want, but even Saints himself pointed out in an interview that he’d much rather them focus on the present and not “put somebody else down.” Perhaps fans should take a cue from one of those “fumbled” wrestlers.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.