seth rollins said celebrity involvement in WWE works in small doses, but he drew a line at Pat McAfee and Jelly Roll being pushed into the WrestleMania main event storyline. He said WWE can use outside stars, yet those names do not belong in the top spot of a card built around Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton.
Rollins Draws The Line
“So Speed, Bad Bunny, small doses, great for our industry,” Rollins said, putting a limit on how far WWE should go with outside names. He framed Bad Bunny differently from McAfee and Jelly Roll, saying, “you don’t understand how big it is that Bad Bunny is wrestling in WWE.”
He also said, “Well, I am the Bad Bunny of sports broadcasting.” The point was clear: celebrity involvement can help, but only when it fits the company’s rhythm rather than replacing the wrestlers carrying the story.
McAfee And Jelly Roll
Rollins was blunt about the WrestleMania angle itself. “There was a big pushback against Pat McAfee when he came in,” he said, and he said McAfee and Jelly Roll should not have been placed in the main event storyline.
That reaction tracked with how fans treated the angle. WWE used McAfee and Jelly Roll as key players in the main event storyline of Cody Rhodes versus Randy Orton this year, and the reveal of McAfee as Orton’s mystery caller was widely panned as a terrible angle. The storyline also sat on top of 20 years of history between Rhodes and Orton, which made the outside involvement harder for fans to accept.
Bad Bunny And Speed
Rollins pointed to two other names as examples of how WWE can make celebrity work without overloading the show. He said Bad Bunny trains for WWE appearances instead of just showing up on game day, and he said Speed was on a red-eye plane with him while getting ready for a WrestleMania match.
That difference is the friction point in Rollins’ argument. He was not rejecting celebrity involvement; he was rejecting celebrity involvement in the biggest storyline slot, especially when the company already had a long-running Rhodes-Orton program to carry the main event weight.
For WWE, the message lands as a creative boundary. Keep the outside names in small doses, and use them in a way that supports the wrestling story instead of taking the center spot from it.
