As Wade Barrett finds himself the unlikely topic of a major news story following an unlikely beef with Nikki Bella, WWE has decided to shake up its commentary teams in a major way, promoting the on-again, off-again team of Corey Graves and Michael Cole to be the lead voices of both RAW and SmackDown while sidelining Joe Tessitore and Wade Barrett.
Sharing the Cole-Graves pairing on SmackDown for AJ Lee's big return, Wrestle Headlines pointed out that the team will be leading both shows moving forward.
“Calling tonight's WWE SmackDown show at AllState Arena in Chicago, Illinois, is the commentary team of Corey Graves and Michael Cole, instead of the usual blue brand announce team of Joe Tessitore and Wade Barrett,” Wrestle Headlines wrote. “Apparently, Graves and Cole will be calling all of the SmackDown shows for the foreseeable future.”
Now, for Tessitore, this absence actually makes some sense, as he also calls other sports outside of WWE and may struggle to go from a SmackDown on a Friday night to a college football game on the opposite side of the country regularly, but what about Barrett? Well, according to the man himself on social media, his time off was approved at the beginning of the year, which makes any suggestions that he's being sidelined because of Bella simply untrue.
“I usually ignore BS reports like this, but it's causing needless hate to be spewed towards people I work with,” Barrett wrote. “WWE have kindly given me a couple of weeks off for personal time (booked nine months ago), and then I'm back to business as usual. A complete non-story. The end.”
Now granted, could WWE have sent Barrett back to NXT, where he was a force with Vic Joseph back in the day? Sure, they did the same when Graves was without a consistent gig, and will certainly do the same one way or another in the future when there's a commentator without a consistent role. But because of the timing, it makes sense why fans would assume it was for disciplinary reasons, and even a message from Barrett himself likely won't clear that up.
