Seth Rollins Reveals Original WWE Plans For The Shield's Breakup

On June 2, 2014, The Shield imploded as Seth Rollins shockingly attacked his teammates Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose (AEW's Jon Moxley) and defected to The Authority.

That wasn't the original plan, though. Rollins revealed on Broken Skull Sessions the group were originally going to split in January 2014, which would have led to Ambrose vs. Reigns at WrestleMania 30.

"They spring that on us, we're talking hours before it happened," Rollins revealed about the June split. "What happened was, they wanted to break us up back in January [2014], maybe December. They wanted to go to Ambrose and Roman and at WrestleMania 30 in New Orleans. I was left out. Maybe a special referee or something. I was like, 'Are you kidding me?' They wanted to break us up and we had just turned the corner into being babyfaces. Over time, it was like, 'They're too cool, we can't boo them anymore.' We were like, 'No. What are you doing? We're not ready for that yet, we have a whole run as babyfaces. There's a lot of merch money on the table.'

"We went to Hunter, we talked about it, we ended up hashing it out and worked with The Outlaws [Road Dogg & Billy Gunn] and Kane at WrestleMania, which was a truncated match, a glorified squash because you guys [Austin, The Rock, and Hulk Hogan] talked for 35 minutes and Daniel Bryan and Hunter went out and did 35 minutes [laughs]. You know how it goes, sh*t falls downhill. We had about 90 seconds and we went out and did our thing. Then, we did two matches with Evolution, no peep of a turn, no peep for a breakup, no one said anything. We wiped the floor with Evolution, it was a clean sweep in the elimination match. They pull us into the office and say, 'tonight is the night.'"

The Shield would ultimately reunite three more times between 2017 and 2019 before Dean Ambrose departed WWE and joined All Elite Wrestling as Jon Moxley.

H/T to Fightful