Kofi Kingston On What Led To The New Day Going To NXT

Kofi Kingston has shed some light on what led to The New Day going to NXT, which led to the team becoming Tag Team Champions again.

At NXT Deadline on December 10th, The New Day’s Xavier Woods & Kofi Kingston challenged Pretty Deadly (Elton Prince & Kit Wilson) for the NXT Tag Team Titles in a match that went back and forth. The match ended when New Day hit Prince with the Midnight Hour double team move (a double foot stomp off the top/backbreaker combo) and Woods got the pinfall win for the team to capture the titles.

It was a few weeks before that when The New Day made their NXT debut after spending the last seven years winning championships on Raw and Smackdown as one of the best tag teams and stables in WWE history.

During an appearance on WWE’s After The Bell podcast, Kofi revealed that New Day loved the idea of going to NXT while also praising Pretty Deadly.

“We were presented with that opportunity to go over to NXT and we’re like, ‘Yeah, of course, we’d love to do that’, and especially working with Pretty Deadly is something that we had been wanting to do for a very long time. From a character perspective watching them in NXT, like, these guys are ridiculous in the best way possible.”

“Just the way that they look, you want to boo them and that was proven. We actually had a live event loop with them a couple of weeks ago. They just walked out and everyone just automatically booed them. I’m like, you don’t even know who these guys are. They have such a special talent.”

As for his role in NXT, Kofi Kingston spoke about how The New Day’s job is to help other tag teams in WWE.

“Our job is to kind of pass down the knowledge that we’ve learned through experience and through the people that have given it to us, otherwise the business doesn’t continue. That’s the way that the business has been able to thrive is by people passing down what they’ve learned and getting in there with guys who have less experience. It’s cool to be on that side of the coin because it happened really, really quickly.”

“A lot of things that we assume are common knowledge, the people in NXT don’t know, because right now, the experience level is so uniform. It’s really even. You have certain people who have a little bit more experience than others, but there’s no one there that’s been there for like, you know, that has like 10 or 12 years of experience. Everybody’s kind of right around the same.”

“So for us to be able to bring our experience there and talk about what we’ve learned, and people are like, their minds are blown. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. We do know a little bit, I guess.’ So yeah, it’s cool, man.”

The New Day’s next major NXT Tag Team Title defense will come at NXT Vengeance Day on February 4th when they defend the titles against Gallus and Pretty Deadly in a triple threat match.