The Grizzled Young Veterans Open Up About Their WWE Departure

The Grizzled Young Veterans (Zack Gibson & James Drake) open up about their departure from WWE.

The former NXT U.K. tag champions officially became free agents in October after multiple attempts at getting released early. Gibson and Drake spoke about their final months with WWE during a recent interview with Metro. Gibson begins by saying that it all came down to them being unhappy with how things were going.

In a nutshell, this is one of the big driving forces as to why we wanted to leave and get out because without going into too much, we just weren’t particularly happy with how things were going. It all felt a bit boring. Ultimately, you know, this is our job, but it’s also it’s our hobby, and it’s our life. So we want to be enjoying what we’re doing. ‘Now we’re back out in the wild west. It all feels exciting and fresh again, it feels a little bit like starting over, like you’ve got a new lease on life.

Later, Gibson discusses how the objectives in WWE shifted and they no longer lined up with what they were trying to do.

When company objectives shifts, sometimes you find yourself not lining up with what it is that they want at that current time. Our decision to move on wasn’t necessarily like, ‘We don’t like that company anymore!’ It’s not a big middle finger to the company, the company is doing great business, it’s just we felt that as a product, we weren’t doing the best business.

Drake later adds that they toughed their contracts out because they didn’t want people’s perception of them to go down.

A lot of people have had that in the past, and they’ve just decided to stay at home. [But] it wouldn’t have been a good look for us, and it wouldn’t have been a good look for the company.

You can check out the full interview here.