Details on why Damian Priest didn't debut on Smackdown Submitted by Aaron T-Bar Rift on 01/07/2021 at 08:50 AM
as previously noted, there was a report that Damian Priest was going to make his main roster debut on last week's WWE Smackdown but plans were changed. Dave Meltzer of F4WOnline.com discussed the situation during Wrestling Observer Radio:
“They had decided – someone had decided – with this idea of ‘we need to make stars on SmackDown, but we’ve ruined everyone on SmackDown.’ I don’t think that anyone actually says that they’ve ruined everyone on SmackDown but it’s kinda like inherent. ‘We need new babyface stars, we all know that.’ So it’s kinda like somebody was asked, ‘who can be the next new babyface who can come on the main roster?’ And the guy was Damian Priest. So, they had a story where it was supposed to be Damian Priest is Kevin Owens’ best friend and he’s helping him against Roman Reigns and Jey Uso. In fact they were even gonna do a tag match on the show Friday night. And Damian Priest is there and ready and all that, and Kevin Owens essentially said ‘it makes no sense for me to be my best friend. What do we have in common? Why would he be my best friend? I mean we could do it but, why is he my best friend?’ So Roman Reigns agreed, and since it’s Roman Reigns, it was nixed. I don’t know where Heyman stood on it but Roman’s the one who got it nixed, so we got what we got. So Damian Priest is lost because he is going to the main roster, or a main roster. As of this morning it was later this month on Raw, but when I heard that it’s like ‘yeah right, whatever’. I mean he’s gonna be on Raw or SmackDown some day soon. Or not soon. Or tomorrow. Or who the f**k knows? Or maybe they’ll do the angle next week that they didn’t do this week. But anyway, he was supposed to start on Friday, but this was not a long planned out thing. Before, it was supposed to be nobody moves from NXT to the main roster unless it’s planned for months in advance so you can finish the story blah blah blah. This was actually something that was decided like Thursday before Friday and then they decided not to do it.” (quote courtesy of WrestleTalk.com)
