LA Knight doesn’t know if he needs a title, but ‘you can’t let this stagnate’

Ahead of his third appearance on a WWE premium live event this year, LA Knight made his second appearance of the year as Corey Graves & Kevin Patrick’s guest on After The Bell.

Like with all Knight interviews these days, several of the questions focused on the reactions he’s currently getting whenever he appears at a WWE show. In particular, the hosts wondered if LA needs a championship to continue getting those huge pops.

Knight isn’t sure he does, but he knows that neither he nor WWE can just keep doing what they’re doing and expect the cheers to keep coming:

“At this point — I don’t know. There’s so many different ways to go with it, but I do think — you can’t let this stagnate. So whatever happens, it needs to be an upward and onward trajectory. Whether that’s championships or whatever it is — for sure, you can’t just let this sit. And that’s something on me, that’s something on everybody, to where it’s gotta stay — you can’t just rely, and rest on your laurels and just be like, ‘Alright, well, this is just going to be here. All I have to do is go out there and it’s just going to be there for me.’ No. There has to be an evolution. There has to be something that continues to progress.”

The way fans have embraced Knight’s often compared to others whose popularity caught WWE off-guard and forced the company to change plans. The veteran believes his rise is different for a couple of reasons. For one thing, most have already been established within the promotion, even winning midcard titles before fans really got behind a main event-type push. For another...

“I‘ve been [on the] SmackDown roster now for nine-ten months, and I don’t mean to say this with any arrogance or whatever, but let’s face facts — I don’t think there has been anybody, ever, who’s had in nine or ten months this kind of reaction, and with honestly not a lot to do.”

He also isn’t worried that his run will fizzle out once he’s carrying a belt, the way it may have with things like the YES! Movement or Kofi-Mania (not necessarily through any fault of Daniel Bryan Danielson or Kofi Kingston):

“The thing that made me, the thing that carried me is the talking. The trash talk, the personality, the swagger, all that stuff. And I don’t think the other people they’ve made comparisons to had that same thing going for them. A lot of it was, ‘Oh, this guy is the underdog.’ Well, okay, now if you take the underdog and finally get ’em the thing, he’s no longer the underdog so you have nothing to cheer for.

“But if the thing they’re cheering for with me is the trash talking, stompin’ rompin’ guy, and now you give him the championship, nothing’s changed. I’m still that same trash talking, rompin’ stompin’ guy, now I’m just continuing it while I’m holding a championship. So where they’ve gotten to blow their wad, in a certain way, with the underdog, you don’t get the same opportunity with me. Now it’s just me continuing it, but I have hurdles to jump, I still have speed bumps, I still have walls to break through.”

Does that makes sense to us? YEAH!

Let us know if you agree with Knight’s assessment of his spot, and possible future. And check out his entire conversation with Graves & Patrick on After The Bell here.