Exclusive: WWE Smackdown Announcers Told Not To Reference NXT During Sanity Debut
Tuesday night saw the long awaited debut of former NXT Tag Team Champion stable Sanity on WWE’s main roster program, Smackdown Live. But if you didn’t watch NXT, you might not know they were ever on the show — and that was by design.
Sanity’s debut was set up by video teasers for weeks, which WWE refers to as “VTR Graphics” before being pulled from Smackdown completely around a month ago. With WWE Money in the Bank in the rear view, the company made the call to bring the trio of Eric Young, Alexander Wolfe and Killian Dain up.
However, Fightful.com has learned WWE Smackdown Live announcers Tom Phillips, Corey Graves and Byron Saxton were instructed not to reference the team’s NXT past when setting up the debut. While on the NXT brand, Sanity won the NXT Tag Team Championships, as well as the NXT year-end award for Tag Team Of The Year.
Conspicuous by her absence was also former NXT Women’s Championship contender Nikki Cross. She wasn’t included in any of the previous VTR images, and stuck around in NXT the last several months. While her former stable attacked the Usos on Tuesday, she was nowhere to be found.
