The Motor City Machine Guns’ AEW rollout has been stop-and-start almost from the moment it began, and fans are once again asking why Alex Shelley and Chris Sabin have disappeared from television.
The duo returned at All In and wrestled on Collision two weeks ago for their first win since officially signing, but they’ve since gone quiet again. The question came up on the post-Dynamite show, where a fan asked Sean Ross Sapp why the newly signed team seemingly vanished again despite arriving with real momentum.
According to Sapp, Shelley and Sabin had made clear to AEW early on that they wanted to finish out previously booked tour dates before diving in full-time, and he indicated the pair weren’t necessarily even pushing to debut on the Detroit episode of Collision specifically. AEW was the one that decided that was the right moment to introduce them.
So, they had made it kind of clear to AEW they wanted to do their tour first, and they didn’t, I don’t even think they were necessarily that eager to debut on the Detroit episode, and AEW were like, ‘No, this is where we should debut you.’
Sapp wasn’t faulting AEW for honoring the duo’s outside commitments, but he did suggest the company could have handled the gap more creatively.
For instance, sending a camera crew to capture Shelley and Sabin around Detroit and cutting together short weekly segments building their motivation and their rivalries with teams like the Young Bucks, FTR, and Cope and Christian, rather than leaving them off television entirely during the gap.
Whenever the Motor City Machine Guns do return full-time, they’ll be stepping into a stacked tag division that also includes New Level, giving them no shortage of high-profile opponents once their schedule finally clears up.
