Sean Rueter has been thinking too much about pro wrestling since at least WrestleMania I, and blogging about it for SBNation & Cageside Seats since around WrestleMania 28.

Like a lot of folks, I assumed the situation that developed between Corey Graves and WWE this week was storyline. Graves has long been a company guy, and one who's had fun "working the marks" in the past. Blowing up his career by publicly airing his grievances about being temporarily moved to the NXT announce desk didn't fit with the former, but it did with the latter. His tease of "having a lot to say" on the Jan. 14 NXT seemed to seal the deal.

But after Graves was pulled from Tuesday's show, scrubbed from Speed, and with his tweets now deleted, as time goes by without any comment from either side it's seeming more and more like a legitimate issue, aka a shoot. In the latest Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer covered a lot of the ground on the situation between WWE and Graves that he already covered on Wrestling Observer Radio (summarized in our latest Rumor Roundup). He also gave a general timeline of events.

Meltzer's accounting of the WWE/Graves drama in the WON has it that Graves and most people at and around WWE were working under the belief that Corey would move from Raw to SmackDown in early 2025 when Raw started on Netflix and Pat McAfee returned to work with Michael Cole. Then, "a few weeks ago", Graves was informed that Wade Barrett would get the chair on SmackDown while he moved to NXT.

Some in WWE are said to think Graves was trying to get fired with his posts earlier this week. Corey is allegedly "adamant" that was never the case. Instead, Graves claims he was "just trying to blur the lines and create buzz". That didn't go over well with company officials, and he was pulled from NXT and replaced on the Speed call.

Where do things stand now? This bit from the WON seems to sum up what the general consensus is:

One person high up in WWE said after [Graves' deleted his tweets], "He may be telling everyone it's a work. And it may turn into one. But it was a total shoot when it was happening."

So the TL;DR version is... Corey was legitimately upset about the decision to put him on NXT. He tweeted about it, possibly in an attempt to get out of his contract but possibly in an attempt to "go rogue" and generate buzz (which NXT ratings indicate he may have done). We're now waiting to see if WWE's reaction will include more than just removing him from this past week's shows, and if that reaction will involve retroactively turning the whole thing into an on-screen angle.