Kazarian shoots on TNA: 'I don't recognize the company'

Although his contract hasn't officially run out yet, Kazarian is gone from TNA and close to making his return to Ring of Honor with fellow Bad Influence teammate Christopher Daniels. In a recent interview with BetweenTheRopes.com, he detailed his last few months with the company:

"Honestly, since after Bound for Glory, there just wasn't any direction for Bad Influence the tag-team. We continued to ask questions, we continued to pitch ideas and it was just like "OK, we're thinking of this or that" but we never got a straight answer and we were just kind of floating. It kind of bothered us because, honestly, we're too good for this. We should really be involved in something. When Davey (Richards) and Eddie (Edwards) came in, we were kind of licking our chops. Sweet! This could be six months, a year. A lot of folks on the internet and within the wrestling community were excited for the potential matchup of us and The Wolves. So were we and so were they when they came in. So we thought we were going to get back in the fold and it never happened and we never got a straight answer other than we're going with other teams. What can you say other than OK? After the UK, we did Lockdown with Muta and Sanada. That was great and after that we were left off television. Right then it was like OK, they literally have nothing going on for us. And here we are now."

And the state of the promotion as a whole, along with the new direction it's going:

"It's different. My last day at TNA, I said this to a few people, I didn't feel like I was leaving TNA because I didn't feel like I recognized the company. There was still people I'll miss but it didn't feel like I was leaving TNA. Honestly, there was a couple of red flags, and this was even preceding when I was starting to make up my mind about my current situation, AJ Styles leaving obviously, because I'm very close to AJ and knowing what he was going through and talking to him, that was huge. I was like wait a minute. I say this as his friend and I say this selfishly, I don't understand why they didn't do whatever it took to keep him there. And I'm not just saying that because he's a friend. I'm saying that because he's a franchise guy. He's one of the best in the world. He's a good human being. He's a guy you can continue to build the company around. He leaves and real soon thereafter Jeff Jarrett leaves so that was a big red flag being waved. Wait a minute ... things are changing. I don't know that they're changing for the better. It could just be me. Internally, management, complete turnover, people on the creative team, people in management. It really is just different."

The biggest issues facing TNA at the moment are financial. Bad Influence may have been an incredibly entertaining tag team but if the idea is to go ahead with younger stars who don't demand big paychecks, relatively speaking, of course, that made them expendable.

You could argue the need to retain top talent to help push those young stars but these are the difficult decisions a company has to make when it's bleeding money.

Check out the full interview at Between The Ropes.