In a pre-WWE NXT Vengeance Day conference call, Shawn Michaels discussed several topics, including WWE’s decision to announce Mandy Rose’s departure from the company a day after a recent episode of WWE NXT, noting how it shifted creative plans for the brand immediately.

“Obviously, it was not the ideal situation. I will say, if I’m allowed to say it for the record, I didn’t fire her, I can’t fire anybody, only thing correct about any of that is that I handle creative.

It was unfortunate, I think Mandy was fantastic for us, I absolutely enjoyed working with her, she was a phenomenal Champion. We would have loved things to have gone different, and been able to build our story with Roxanne, but I was put in a position to where I had to make a call creatively, and so, we did that.

It’s one of the things that I’ve learned doing this job, nothing comes before the brand, we have to put those things forward and that’s what we did. Roxanne was certainly where we were going regardless, we just went a few weeks earlier than we expected to. The great thing is, now we’re right back on course, and I will say honestly, I think the world of Mandy Rose, she was nothing but phenomenal with us, we’ll miss her, but we’re thrilled about Roxanne Perez being the NXT Women’s Champion and taking us into the future.”