Ricky Saints is no longer the DEFY World Champion.
Before the former AEW star made his shocking NXT debut, the 35-year-old beat KENTA for the title at the 8th Anniversary show. DEFY Hundredth was packed with several notables names such as Swerve Strickland, Ricochet, Nick Wayne, Marina Shafir, Paul Walter Hasuer, and The Bollywood Boyz.
Following that weekend, it was a whirlwind for Saints as he was released from his All Elite Wrestling contract. So questions surrounding the DEFY World title immediately popped up. WWE and NXT are more lenient about talents working on the independent scene these days; hell, Karl Anderson notably worked Wrestle Kingdom 17 to drop the NEVER Openweight Championship while under WWE contract. However, it appears that Saints won’t be doing the same thing as the man himself confirmed that he will relinquish his belt and a new champion will be crowned on March 15th:
Thus far, DEFY has not confirmed how a new champion will be determined. It’s really a shame that Saints didn’t work out in AEW, but he’ll be given a nice opportunity in NXT to truly showcase his talents. Speaking of his former employer, the former Starks spoke on Busted Open Radio about his release and he didn’t particularly go into detail about what happened; in fact, Ricky didn’t even know where it all went wrong:
“I can’t tell you exactly what the moment was. You could say it was Punk leaving and things kinda fell apart. Absolutely, I probably agree with you on that, alright? Or you could say is that Ricky didn’t play the politics well enough. Alright, for sure…there’s so many things you can say.
What I can say for myself is that when I got hurt in March, that was it, I never came back. And even then, I wasn’t hurt, it was a precaution thing where I got scared as I had a stinger. Then I was fine. After that, no, no dice, no communication. No nothing. And that is okay because….I ended up here. And it’s fine. Everything worked out.
I don’t know explicitly where it went wrong, I can’t point to one thing. I can say it was a storm of things probably. Did I do something that may have tipped them off? Sure, asking for my release whenever you know, this past whatever, that could have been about it right? But never once was I not willing to do something, never once was I sabotaging anything.”
Though he did hint that a couple of veterans may have had something to do with his odd disappearance from television:
“I will say this, there are some people who stuck their nose in my creative business that shouldn’t have happened. Veterans. And that’s it, I’ll leave it at that. And if they got a problem with me, they got my number. And text me about it. I think what it was is if it didn’t work for their creative, then someone had to get the boot. That’s how I see it.
But I’m not trying to be negative in my thought process about it…if you want to step on me to get ahead in your illustrious career, everyone has an illustrious career. Everyone should have an illustrious career. That is perfectly fine. But at the same time, I’m not wet behind my ears.”
Saints is fresh off his victory over Ethan Page & Wes Lee in a tag team match with Je’Von Evans. We'll find out what's next for him on Tuesday.