Donovan Dijak shares his hypothesis.
Donovan Dijak, formerly known as Dijak, had a successful run in NXT before he was selected by WWE Raw in the 2024 WWE Draft. However, he did not make any appearances on Raw. On June 27th, Dijak announced that WWE had decided not to renew his contract, so he entered free agency. He has since returned to the independent scene.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Dijak was asked why another return to NXT was not possible, given how well his previous stint there went.
“I can give you my hypothesis. I don’t know this to be fact. It’s a complete guess and no one has told me otherwise. I don’t know when this decision was made. But at some point, there was likely a decision made that Dijak or T-BAR is on a main roster contract and under that main roster contract, it concludes on June 28, 2024. So I’m in NXT on a main roster contract. So at some point, whether it was before I went to NXT, or during NXT, or whether it’s right before the draft, I think at some point a decision was made that he’s on a main roster contract on NXT and that doesn’t work in whatever capacity. I’m not sure, but my guess would be they don’t want to renew a contract for someone who’s on NXT. My guess would also be, not my guess, but I know that they didn’t have a creative plan for me on Raw. So at that point, what do you do? You can leave me on NXT. But if you leave me on NXT and the plan is to just let my contract expire, then that doesn’t look good. Because if the plan was, I wasn’t directly told, but it was alluded to me that the plan was for me to, or there was at least a pitch for me to feud with Trick Williams for the NXT Championship. So if that happens and it plays out at Battleground and we have a match, my contract is up maybe a week later or something like that, I don’t know the exact timing of it. So if you’re WWE, do you want someone having a feud for the main championship and then not being employed the next week? That’s probably not a great scenario. So I think, my guess is they looked at all the possible scenarios and said, Okay, best case scenario right now for us and what we want to do with his contract is just kind of quietly bring him up to Raw and just kind of hope he fades away," Dijak said.
Dijak opened up about his WWE exit in an interview with Fightful. Click here to see what he had to say.
Check out Dijak's comments about his time in NXT here.
Click here to see what Dijak had to say about a potential Retribution reunion.
Thanks to Chris Van Vliet and his team for sharing the quotes in this article.
