Hit Row were booked for Survivor Series & filmed Black Friday commercial prior to WWE release

If the fact they were featured prominently on SmackDown for weeks before their release on Thurs., Nov. 18 was proof enough* for you, Hit Row’s Tehuti “Ashante Adonis” Miles & AJ “Top Dolla” Francis offered even more evidence of the impromptu nature of their WWE dismissal on Saturday’s Busted Open.

Miles said the group was booked for all of last weekend’s shows, including the PPV yesterday (Nov. 21):

“Thursday morning was a little weird because we were booked for SmackDown, Survivor Series and Raw and then we were unbooked. They booked us again and then we were unbooked. So, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is what goes on in WWE, there’s a lot of things to figure out.’ I was like, ‘Oh, okay, maybe they’ll have something for us and we’ll fly out Saturday or something like that.’

“But I remember watching Thursday Night Football and I missed the call from John Laurinaitis. I called him back, he told me budget cuts and stuff like that, and I was like, ‘Thank you.’ It is what it is.”

According to Francis, Hit Row had been working on several other projects that would seem to indicate a push for the group — or at least continued employment:

“We just went to HQ and met everybody and talked to everybody. Talked about how we were going to get action figures and be DLC in the video game and all these different things. Everything just got pulled out underneath of us and to be honest, when we got taken off of this weekend, I knew then that we were about to get released even though I didn’t contact anybody or tell anybody because that’s the same thing that happened to Briana [Brandy, aka B-Fab].

“When Briana got released, we were all booked to do a Black Friday commercial together, which we ended up shooting without her, which obviously they’re not going to be able to use this Friday anymore. We were all booked to do the commercial together and then she got unbooked and we didn’t understand why.

“Then found out that she was released, so once we were booked for Friday and weren’t booked for Survivor Series and Raw yet, so then they unbooked us Thursday morning for SmackDown but then said we’re still needed for Survivor Series and Raw. Then they were like, ‘Actually, we don’t need you for Survivor Series and Raw, either.’ As soon as I saw that I knew what was going to happen.”

WWE debuted a Black Friday spot with The Usos during Survivor Series, so as Triple H once said, the powers that be always have a Plan B.

You can listen to Francis & Miles’ entire conversation with Ryan McKinnell & Mark Henry on Busted Open here.

* For further proof, there’s the episode of Main Event which included a John Morrison match that dropped on the same day WWE released JoMo.