Hot Tag – Five Months of Silence and a Training Video — WWE, You’ve Already Blown This

Drew McIntyre posting ring-work footage from Rusev’s gym in Nashville is the best news I’ve had all week, and it should embarrass the hell out of the people booking RAW.

Here’s a guy who was, without question, the hottest character on WWE television for the better part of two years. A legitimate main eventer. Somebody who understood that a great promo isn’t about remembering your lines — it’s about making the guy across the ring feel personally threatened. He had that. He still has that. And what does WWE do with him after WrestleMania 42? They put him in an Unsanctioned Match against Jacob Fatu on Night One and then let five months of dead air swallow him whole.

An Unsanctioned Match. On the biggest show of the year. That’s a burial dressed up in a tuxedo.

I’m not knocking Fatu — that kid is a future cornerstone and the Mania moment was earned. But you don’t then just… park McIntyre. You don’t let a guy of that caliber go dark for five months with zero narrative thread keeping him connected to the audience. No vignettes, no window, nothing. The casual fan has forgotten the story. The smart fan is watching a training clip from a gym in Tennessee trying to reverse-engineer a return date. That’s a failure of creative, full stop.

Now the internet is asking whether Drew slides into a Money in the Bank spot, like that’s a satisfying destination for someone who main-evented back-to-back WrestleManias. A briefcase angle for Drew McIntyre in late 2025 is the booking equivalent of parking a Ferrari in the mud.

What this should be is a reckoning. McIntyre coming back with an axe to grind — against the company, against the card, against whoever benefited while he was gone. There is a ready-made story sitting right there, free of charge, requiring approximately zero imagination to execute. You just have to respect the asset enough to actually do it.

The “Reps” caption is doing more storytelling than five months of television managed to accomplish. That’s one word. One clip. And it got every smart wrestling outlet running the story before lunch on a Friday. That’s star power. That’s a guy who doesn’t need to be rebuilt — he needs to be pointed at something.

So yeah, great news that he’s back in the ring. Now let’s see if WWE is paying attention, or if they’re already scheduling him for a mid-card program that’ll have me writing this exact column again in six months.

I sincerely hope I don’t have to.