Select Answers: Andrade, Royal Rumble Winners, Creative Changes

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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Any update on the Andrade contract situation?

Not a lot, outside of I know that people are looking into it. Personally, I wouldn't expect it to stand. There's not a lot of room for something that firm to work out for WWE in this day and age, even when they clearly have important people of influence on their side like Donald Trump. The Andrade situation is a clear non-compete and impeding the ability to provide for himself if unpaid. If it's paid, then that's a different story.

Who's your early picks to win the rumble and MITB? Mine are Sami and Liv for the rumble. Knight and Lyra for MITB

CM Punk was a selection of mine before he won the world title, and I guess there's still room if he loses it. It's a big potential accolade that he's never achieved. I thought that he would go after Cody and that would be a WrestleMania main event.

I don't think you can rule out Roman Reigns either, and him making it to a major match. Sami Zayn seemed poised for that, and maybe he still could, but WWE has leaned out of his world champion talk on screen that was a focal point of the Kross feud. I would personally go with Oba Femi, leading to a Cody Rhodes match, or Bron Breakker.

On the women's side, I would go with Liv Morgan. You have a totally new crop of women's stars, but most of them have already been pushed to titles, such as Giulia, Tiffany Stratton and Stephanie Vaquer.

I think 2026 is the year an NXT call-up should win the Rumble.

Money in the Bank is ten months away. That's a fruitless exercise. We don't know what the company looks like at that point.

It seems like the consensus among fans being that WWE and AEW are stuck in a rut right now, what would it take for there to be a change in creative in both companies and do you think that’s necessary?

I think that staying fresh is always important in pro wrestling. I am only as familiar with the creative process as I've been educated about, but I think that there always needs to be a couple of "this is why this could suck" voices in the room. I feel that is very, very important to not fall into booking ruts and tropes. Unfortunately, feelings get hurt way too much. I know constantly people in the companies say "we don't book for the online audience," but you should be paying attention to the good faith criticism from your most loyal fans.