Back when Seth Rollins was making the round at the NFL Draft — to promote WWE, and in preparation for his post-wrestling dream career as a football pundit. While appearing on The Rich Eisen Show, Rollins & Eisen announced Seth would soon guest host the show.
He certainly hoped it would be under better circumstances, but Rollins is hosting The Rich Eisen Show today (July 16), just a few days after suffering a knee injury during his match with LA Knight at Saturday Night’s Main Event.
He addressed the situation right at the top of the episode, essentially saying that they’ve thus far been unable to determine the severity of the injury due to swelling in his knee, but Seth believes it’s pretty bad:
“I was doing a move I do all the time, it’s a moonsault, a back flip. In this particular instance I was landing, not on my belly, but I was landing on my feet. When I landed, I felt my knee kinda pop and buckle... we got out of the match and we move forward. Monday, I was in Birmingham, Alabama where our specialists are at, we tried to take a look at the knee through some imaging, it was a little too swollen, so we’re gonna take another look, hopefully in a week or two hopefully here in LA to try to get something — some kind of firm diagnosis and then we can go from there. I am not a doctor, I only know my body and what I feel, and what I feel is this is gonna be me out for an extended period of time.
“We were talking off air earlier and — it is a bummer, but look: It is what it is. Our business moves on. This isn’t the first time that I’ve been injured. It won’t be the last time. And I’ve always just got WrestleMania in the back of my mind, like, ‘Can I make it back for WrestleMania?’ For WrestleMania season, the whole thing. So my brain always goes there. And I feel good about that. But.. like a firm timeline, I just won’t know until we get a better answer on the MRI. So that’s where it’s at.”
TJ Jefferson, regular Eisen show contributor and co-host of the network’s No-Contest Wrestling podcast with O’Shea Jackson, asked how Rollins is doing mentally and emotionally, given that he was in the midst of a main event program:
“There’s no good time to get injured, you know? There’s no like, ‘Oh, this is the best time of year for this to happen’, or you’re not being used very much so you take a break. But this is not my first rodeo. I had a very serious knee injury — same knee, actually — back in 2015. I was in a much different state of mind at that point of my career, where I was still feeling like I needed to work, work, work to get to the top. Now I’m sort of at the top [his co-hosts laughed at “sort of”], I’ve had multiple injuries over the years, so I know what it feels like to take a step back. But also I have the confidence in our roster and in our team that they’re gonna be able to move things forward in a way that’s entertaining. I don’t want to say they don’t need me, but we’re good. We’re in a good place right now, and when I come back, I’ll be better than ever.”
Asked to compare this to his past knee injuries (tearing his ACL, MCL, and medial meniscus in 2015, and a torn meniscus in his other leg last year), Seth reminded us that he doesn’t have a diagnosis yet. But he said this physically feels like his more serious knee injury, but that he’s handling it much better overall:
“Mentally I’m in such a different place ten years gone, you know? I’m more comfortable with it, I’m trying to find the silver linings. Things like, my daughter’s four-and-a-half, I’m gonna be able to spend a lot of time with her that I might not have been able to otherwise, cause the schedule’s gonna get crazy, we have a bunch of international stuff coming up so I would have been gone for all that. So, I think mentally I’m in a good place. Physically, I’ll be fine to come back from it when we get into the rehab, and what it is we’re gonna end up doing with this. But I feel good, man. I feel good. I don’t want to jinx it. I’m sure there’s gonna be some weeks where I’m miserable, but I feel good about it, trying to find the silver linings — everything’s gonna be good. Everything’s gonna be fine. We’re good.”
We’ll see what that next round of MRIs says... and (at the risk of being “disrespectful”) briefly mention that while 95% of reports on Rollins injury say it happened on Saturday night and is 100% legitimate, there’s one floating around that what happened in Atlanta was cover for a previous injury, and that the Saturday Night’s Main Event match could have been an angle to set-up a surprise early return and Money in the Bank cash-in.
You can watch the full segment of Rollins discussing the injury on today’s Rich Eisen Show above.