Report: Announcer Tom Phillips Released by WWE

There have been a lot of changes to the WWE commentary team of late and now there’s another one because Tom Phillips has been released. It was reported by Fightful this morning. The release was confirmed by PWInsider as well. WWE has released a lot of people behind the scenes over the last week and Phillips is another name gone.

Phillips started in WWE in 2012. Phillips started as a backstage interviewer, but then he became the lead play-by-play announcer on many WWE shows. During Tom’s run in WWE, he was on the commentary team for every show that WWE currently runs. That includes Raw (he was the main play-by-play guy on Raw from January 26, 2020 to the Raw before WrestleMania this year), Smackdown, NXT, NXT UK, 205 Live and Main Event.

Tom’s real name is Tom Hannifan and his Twitter handle was changed recently to his real name @tomhannifan as well. His Twitter notes that he graduated from Penn State in 2011. Phillips is 32 years old.

In 2015, got in trouble after he sent some private message to a woman on Instagram with lewd remarks and when the woman found out he was engaged, she called him out on it. Phillips ended up marrying his wife in October 2017, so I guess things turned out okay for him.

As a final thought, I must share some images from the #Tomspiracy days when fans would point out how silly it was that Phillips was made to look shorter than he was when he interviewed WWE superstars. Phillips is about 6’0″ feet tall, but when he did interviews with people around the same height or smaller, he had to look smaller. That’s just how WWE operates. Thanks to Reddit for some of the photos.

This one is ridiculous because Phillips is definitely taller than Jericho.

The former Neville is only about 5’8″ yet poor Tom has to make him look tall.

And yeah, this one is the most ridiculous of them all since Dean Ambrose is around 6’0″ like Phillips is.

By the way, they did it to Raw ring announcer Mike Rome too, who is taller than Phillips. The #Tomspiracy is a #Mikespiracy too.

TJR Thoughts: Goodbye to Tom Phillips. Best wishes to him for whatever he does next in his career. I hope that wherever he goes, he doesn’t have to deal with a #Tomspiracy ever again.