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During a sit-down interview with Ariel Helwani, WWE President Nick Khan confirmed PWInsider.com's report that WWE was seeking to completely change and shift WWE NXT going forward.
"We're doing a complete revamp on NXT, led by Triple H, Paul Levesque, who was really one of the architects of the original NXT," said Khan.
As Dave Scherer and I broke on 8/4 edition of the We Don't Need No Name Show this week, there had been lots of talk internally of major changes for the NXT brand including a new logo, new lighting, a focus on younger talents and a different format to the TV show. Several days later, there was an WWE NXT housecleaning with 13 talents released.
"Everything's going to change," Khan told Helwani. "Look for it in the next couple of weeks, it's going to have a whole new look. It's going to have a whole new feel. And we believe, because a lot of the Indy wrestlers, if you will have come through our system, and are in our system with SmackDown and Raw now, we don't want to just keep doing that same thing. We want to look elsewhere for great young talent."
This past weekend's WWE NXT tryout in Las Vegas was mostly populated by athletes who had never stepped inside a ring prior to the tryout, another sign of a shift in terms of the recruiting within WWE for the NXT division.
"So what we found, it's part of why we did the tryout yesterday," Khan explained. "What we want to make sure is easy for folks who want to be WWE superstars, is figuring out how to become WWE superstars. So if you think of the life of an elevated athlete, throughout their career, the opportunity to go play somewhere has always been easy. Being able to play somewhere is not. That's what's hard. But if you're an amazing high school football player, colleges come after you, you get recruited, you go into their system and either you make it or you don't make it. Again, all that it takes to get there very difficult, but the system not difficult, from my point of view. So we want our system to be an easy system, where people who want to be superstars, they know how to get to us and we can get to them."
You can watch the entire interview below:
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