Longtime indie wrestling star Austin Aries has now signed with WWE NXT
To kick off the weekend in Florida leading up to Sunday and the 2016 WWE Royal Rumble, NXT was running a show at the University of Central Florida on Friday night, using the event for a set of tapings. Leading up to the event, Triple H and several other associated with NXT were teasing a huge surprise. As it turns out, that surprise was Austin Aries, who is the latest huge independent signing to now have signed with NXT:
Over the course of three different combined runs with Ring of Honor, Aries spent roughly a decade with the company that has been fantastic at developing talent for making the leap to WWE. However, Aries never got his shot with WWE like many others, instead having to waste away in TNA for quite a while.
After Aries’ contract with TNA ran out in mid-2015, though, and he started working indie dates and dates with ROH, rumblings started that he might be in discussions with WWE. Those discussions had started ramping up in a big way over the past few weeks and now it’s 100 percent clear as to why.
Aries, though 37 years old, is tremendously talented in the ring and a face that pro wrestling fans know and that many love. It’ll be interesting to see what NXT and WWE have in store for him in the immediate future, but it’s impossible to say anything other than the fact that WWE keeps adding top-level talent and things continue to look up for the future of NXT and the company as a whole.