Tony Khan Says Samoa Joe Is All Elite, Joe Set For AEW Dynamite

By Marc Middleton

Samoa Joe is now All Elite.

As noted before at this link, Joe made his surprise return to ROH at the end of Friday's Supercard of Honor XV event. The main event saw Jonathan Gresham defeat Bandido to become the Undisputed ROH World Champion, but Gresham and Lee Moriarty were attacked by Sonjay Dutt and Jay Lethal after the bout.

Lethal, who turned on longtime friend Matt Sydal earlier in the night after defeating Moriarty, challenged Gresham to an immediate title match but Gresham denied him because of his earlier actions. This led to Dutt hitting Gresham and Gresham getting beat down. Moriarty tried to help Gresham but he failed, and that's when Joe came out. Joe faced off with Lethal, then choked Dutt out.

In an update, ROH announcer Ian Riccaboni noted on commentary that Joe would be appearing on AEW Dynamite this Wednesday.

Furthermore, AEW President and new ROH owner Tony Khan took to Twitter to declare that Joe is All Elite. Khan confirmed Wednesday's Dynamite appearance for The Samoan Submission Machine, who has the longest ROH World Title reign of all-time at 645 days when he held the strap from March 22, 2003 – December 26, 2004.

Supercard of Honor XV marked Joe's first ROH appearance since June 2015. He is a one-time ROH World Champion, a one-time ROH Pure Champion, and was inducted into the inaugural class of the ROH Hall of Fame earlier this year.

WWE released Joe from his contract back on January 6. He was believed to be under the standard 30-day non-compete clauses that most WWE NXT talents have, which would've made him a free agent on February 5 when the clause expired.

You can click here for our full report from Supercard of Honor XV, which included several significant happenings.

Stay tuned for more on Joe in AEW/ROH. You can see footage from his return below, along with Khan's full tweet:

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