Seth Rollins gives original plans for The Shield split.
Rollins shocked the world on the June 2, 2014 episode of WWE Raw when he turned against Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose (Jon Moxley in AEW), officially splitting The Shield.
Speaking to Steve Austin on Broken Skull Sessions, Rollins discussed how the turn came about.
"They spring that on us, we're talking hours before it happened," Rollins said about the turn. "What happened was, they wanted to break us up back in January [2014], maybe December. They wanted to go to Ambrose and Roman and at WrestleMania 30 in New Orleans. I was left out. Maybe a special referee or something. I was like, 'Are you kidding me?' They wanted to break us up and we had just turned the corner into being babyfaces. Over time, it was like, 'they're too cool, we can't boo them anymore.' We were like, 'No. What are you doing? We're not ready for that yet, we have a whole run as babyfaces. There's a lot of merch money on the table.' We went to Hunter, we talked about it, we ended up hashing it out and worked with The Outlaws [Road Dogg & Billy Gunn] and Kane at WrestleMania, which was a truncated match, a glorified squash because you guys [Austin, The Rock, and Hulk Hogan] talked for 35 minutes and the Daniel Bryan and Hunter went out and did 35 minutes [laughs]. You know how it goes, shit falls downhill. We had about 90 seconds and we went out and did our thing. Then, we did two matches with Evolution, no peep of a turn, no peep for a breakup, no one said anything. We wiped the floor with Evolution, it was a clean sweep in the elimination match. They pull us into the office and say, 'tonight is the night.'"
Rollins ended up joining Triple H in the Authority as part of the turn. He would go on to win Money in the Bank 2014, famously cashing in at WrestleMania 31.
Elsewhere during the interview, Rollins revealed how he really felt following his Hell in a Cell match against "The Fiend" Bray Wyatt in 2019. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
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