We'd hoped it was going to happen, but Adam Cole made his AEW debut during last night's All Out PPV. While it initially looked like he was there to square off with Kenny Omega, the former NXT Champion instead turned heel and Adam Cole BAY-BAY is now officially part of The Elite.
Cole's contract expired last month after he signed an extension back in July that kept him in WWE through SummerSlam. "I was under the impression that it was, like, six months later," he said of his NXT contract (which also had no non-compete). "It was a surprise to me [and] a surprise to them."
"I went from thinking December was when I was going to start talking about a new contract, to all of a sudden we were talking about in three days. It was public knowledge for a lot of people that I had signed a little extension. I was in the middle of a really serious angle with Kyle O’Reilly, which was very important to me. He’s one of my best friends in the entire world. After that is when stuff kind of opened up for me, but very surprising to me. It was just as surprising to me.”
While Cole spoke positively about WWE, he admitted that he's known for a while now that he planned to sign with AEW, describing his decision as "a fairly easy one."
As for that meeting with Vince McMahon backstage at SmackDown recently, Cole added: "The talk went great. We had a really good conversation about a lot of different things. The conversation itself was awesome. I had no bad experience with him whatsoever. He is an intimidating man. He definitely commands respect in a lot of ways, but the experience was totally fine."
Clearly, he realised that a run on WWE's main roster probably wouldn't end well for him, so Cole deciding to become "All Elite" is, without a doubt, the best possible decision he could have made.
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