AEW's Swerve Strickland Talks Joining Up With New Level & Big E's Absence

Last month, Swerve Strickland returned to AEW programming with the trios division in his immediate focus. It wasn't until AEW All In, though, that his new tag team partners revealed themselves as Kofi and Austin Creed, formerly two-thirds of WWE's New Day stable.

During an interview with "Black Couch Booking," Strickland opened up about the process, both backstage and on-screen, of bringing Creed and Kofi into AEW as his new allies. Their departure from WWE in May 2026 initially emerged as a shock to the former AEW World Champion. Once he moved past that, a vision of working with them then became clear.

"I knew that was something that's a possibility. It was just floating in the clouds at the time," Strickland said. "But I knew coming back after the main event with me and [Will] Ospreay for the Owen, it was like, okay, I need a momentum shift right here. And it was the fact that Tony Khan, he knew he was going to place me in trios, that's where he wanted me. I was like, 'Okay, cool.' I have a story with Hangman and Brodido. Those are my Owen tournament opponents, so that story is just setting itself. They had Demand just losing the trio titles to these guys. I was like if I'm going to go into this, it has to be new, it has to be fresh, has to be a moment with guys that haven't been here before."

As The Demand's Ricochet pointed out on "AEW Dynamite," much of the AEW trios division had existing or previous beef with Strickland. That hatred extended to the general locker room as well, which meant that Strickland likely had to look outside of the company for his potential new partners. Fortunately for him, two of wrestling's most decorated tag team specialists happened to be free agents at the same time.

In their trios debut, Strickland, Kofi, and Creed outlasted several teams to capture the AEW World Trios Championships in a roulette royale at All In. The three then successfully defended the Trios Titles against The Rascalz on "Dynamite."

In the midst of their celebrations, Strickland has noticed some pushback from fans, specifically due to the absence of Kofi and Creed's original partner, Big E. Alongside Big E, Kofi and Creed (as Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods) held a number of WWE tag titles and cemented themselves as one of the most popular acts in company history. Together, the three were known as The New Day. Now in AEW, Kofi and Creed call themselves The New Level, with "New Level" by A$AP Ferg and Future set as their theme song.

"In the end, you want to shake the doubt of the people that are already going to have negativity towards it. 'Man, it's not Big E. It's not Big E.' Shout out Big E. I can never replace a Big E, but we can do something new that moves forward instead of looking backwards," Strickland said. "That's why the New Level song with Ferg and Future on the track, all these things just hit at the right time at the right place with the right people to put a shockwave into the energy of the wrestling world at one encapsulating time. I was like, that's the only way I could do something like that. These are the guys to do it with."

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit "Black Couch Booking" with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.