While WWE has made a point out of re-signing a number of the wrestlers they fired during the pandemic and beyond, with Paul “Triple H” Levesque's Infinity Gauntlet now looking like a suit of armor, there were a few notable names who either weren't rehired – like Wesley Blake or EC3 – or can't be because they've been scooped up by another promotion and are currently under contract elsewhere.

One of the performers who firmly falls into the latter category is Ruby Riott, who now goes by Rudy Soho as a member of AEW. Though Riott wasn't exactly a featured player on RAW or SmackDown during her main roster reign and regrettably never held championship gold with her fellow Riott Squad members, Liv Morgan and Sarah Logan, there's one Hall of Famer-turned-WWE employee, Road Dogg, who believes that the tattooed punk rocker could have been an absolute star had she been booked correctly, as he detailed on his Oh You Didn’t Know podcast.

“I'll tell you this, and this is nothing against Liv. I think she's improved 100 fold and she's a legitimate star now and I book her on live events as such and put her in positions that position her as such, and so that's a different story for a different show, but for me, it was always Ruby Riott,” Road Dogg said h/t Wrestle News. “Ruby Riott was always the one. I still to this day think she's the one out of those three. That is just my personal opinion, but I thought she could work. I thought she could cut promos. She kind of was the total package, but she didn't look like Liv. You know what I mean?”

“So that's what I figured was the end all be all, but I was a huge fan of Ruby Riott and still to this day a huge fan of her and Liv and Sarah too for that matter. Sarah Logan's back now and I always love seeing her. She's fun to be around, and what a great name. All three of them are delights to work with and great at what they do. I’m sure the highlight will be Road Dogg hates Liv Morgan or something, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Love her. Love all three of the girls. Personally, what I saw with my little eye was a little, short, scrappy, tattooed girl. Like she's the underdog outsider that people can relate to and that's what I thought and I still feel that way.”

Is Road Dogg correct? Could Riott have been a star on RAW or SmackDown as a spunky underdog? It's impossible to know, but one person who should take Dogg's words to heart is Tony Khan, as he could benefit from booking the Soho in the same way.

Road Dogg believes that Triple H has an improved plan for WWE's NXT pipeline.

Elsewhere on his podcast, Road Dogg described how, after years of a bizarre disconnect between NXT and WWE, Levesque actually appears to have a plan to build a true pipeline between all of the company's brands.

“Yeah. So all of the above to be quite honest with you because there's not a strict streamlined process, especially now that Hunter is in charge of the creative,” Road Dogg said. “He understands much more about giving fair warning so you can write the person out or write the person off or however you're going to do it. It gives you time to prepare creatively for that. I like a heads up. So sometimes we got those and sometimes we didn't. I think going forward, you'll always, I'm speaking now from NXT creative experience, that we had time to prepare to send people off, but sometimes we got, ‘Hey, we're taking this person because we got an idea for this and this,' and you could be in the middle of something with them or not, and there they went. So I don't think it'll be that way anymore because I think everybody understands at least let me beat him on the way out or let me do something to close the book on his character or whatever. Give us time to create something. I think that'll happen a lot now.”

After watching performers like Karrion Kross famously get beaten for no reason in particular in a squash to Jeff Hardy while being built up for a massive title match with Samoa Joe on NXT, having some cohesion between the main roster and developmental could be just what the doctor ordered for WWE to take the next step in their developmental journey, especially with Bron Breakker, the company's latest 5-star prospect – if you will – readying to make the jump up to the “big show.”