During an appearance on Renee Paquette’s podcast, former WWE NXT star Kyle O’Reilly talked about his transition from WWE to AEW:
“The AEW locker room is full of the guys that I came up with in this business that I’ve been friends with for years. There was a lot of that in NXT too, but it seemed like every couple weeks I would look around at the locker room and it was getting decimated. It wasn’t a very good environment, I guess, at that time. I wanted to follow my heart where I’m going to be happy and be utilized. I felt to stay with WWE, it was going to be to stay with NXT, and at this point after four and a half years, if you don’t really have a spot with Kyle O’Reilly on the main roster, I got the vibe that there wasn’t going to be a spot for me up there.”
O’Reilly also said the following about the NXT 2.0 brand:
“I think people in wrestling are really rare in the sense that you really, really have to love it. I think that might be an underlying problem in this new NXT. There’s a lot of people coming in that I don’t think really have that true love for it. I’m sure they’ll do well, they’ll make a big splash, be a big star, and make a ton of money, but at the end of the day, if your heart isn’t really in it, I don’t know. It’s tough.”
