WWE’s Huge Randy Orton Move Convinced Top Stars To Leave The Promotion

One-half of the former WWE Tag Team Champions has revealed that a Randy Orton-related decision led to their departure from the company.

Cash Wheeler currently represents rival promotion AEW, where he fights alongside Dax Harwood in the FTR duo.

During their time in the Stamford promotion from 2014 to 2020, Wheeler and Harwood performed as The Revival on NXT as well as the main roster later on.

While performing on Raw and SmackDown, they became multi-time tag team champions. In mid-2019, they aligned with Randy Orton during their feud against The New Day’s trio of Kofi Kingston, Big E, and Xavier Woods.

At that year’s Clash of Champions, The Revival beat The New Day to win the SmackDown Tag Team Championship, thus becoming the first team in WWE to hold the Raw, SmackDown, and NXT tag titles.

As a result, they were drafted to SmackDown during the October 2019 WWE draft, thus ending their alliance with The Viper.

While speaking in an interview with LNG Productions, Wheeler called the end of their association with Randy Orton “the final straw,” leading them to ask for their release.

That’s the one I miss the most as far as what could have been. I thought that we really could do something cool with him, and Randy was a big proponent of pushing for it.

I’ve said before – I think I’ve said on record before, but if not, here we go – I think that was the final straw for us when we knew we wanted to ask for our release, was when they drafted us to SmackDown and Randy to Raw at that point.

I think he’d just lost to Kofi or something along those lines but we still thought we were gonna get a chance to do stuff together. And we knew if they killed that, that they didn’t really have any expectations or plans for us.

And when they drafted us to separate shows, we were like, ‘Alright yeah, I think that the writing’s on the wall here, as far as what our ceiling is ever gonna be.’ I’ve never regretted that decision ever, even for a second.

But I do hate that we didn’t get to do more with Randy, because even today he’s still such a good friend and we still stay in contact. He’s such a funny guy. I wish that we could have done more.

Latest Update On Randy Orton’s WWE Return

Randy Orton’s last match in WWE was at WrestleMania 42, where he faced Cody Rhodes for the Undisputed Championship.

In the lead-up to their match, Orton turned heel and aligned himself with former commentator Pat McAfee. Their rivalry also saw Grammy Award-winning artist Jelly Roll become a casualty when Orton RKO’d him during one of his brawls with The American Nightmare.

At the Show of Shows, Orton surprisingly lost to Rhodes, but also severed ties with McAfee in the process when he hit an RKO on the sports analyst.

WrestleVotes on Fightful Select provided an update on Randy Orton’s WWE return while also discussing Drew McIntyre, whose last appearance was at WrestleMania, too.

WrestleVotes claimed that the former champions were advertised for the May 29 edition of SmackDown in Barcelona, Spain, but plans seemingly changed as they were a no-show.

He also claimed to be in possession of a WWE document which revealed that Orton and McIntyre were being discussed for SummerSlam, scheduled on August 1 & 2.