If there’s one person who’s story of rebirth via draft pick rivals Alexa Bliss, it’s the story of Drew McIntyre. These days, pretty much everyone who follows WWE knows the broad strokes — McIntyre came into the company as, quite literally, Vince McMahon’s “Chosen One” and proceeded to endure a staggering fall from grace, eventually finding himself as part of comedy stable the Three Man Band before getting released in 2014. Some of the details of his triumphant return, however, are less known to those who weren’t watching “WWE NXT” at the time, and crucially involved the 2018 draft.

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McIntyre was gone for three years, and when he came back in 2017, it was as part of the “NXT” roster. It was clear from the start that McIntyre’s stay on the Black & Gold brand wouldn’t be for long — he won the NXT Championship four months after his debut — but his meteoric rise was temporarily derailed when he lost the title and suffered an injury in the months that followed. When he came back, it was as part of the “WWE Raw” roster, as he was the first “NXT” wrestler selected in the 2018 Superstar Shake-Up (a less structured version of the WWE Draft), appearing as back-up for Dolph Ziggler.

In the later years of McMahon’s creative regime, very few male wrestlers who succeeded in “NXT” could also say they succeeded on the main roster. While McIntyre might have only had a cup of coffee in “NXT,” he remains the major exception — one of only five wrestlers to follow up an NXT Championship reign with a world title reign on the main roster, and the only one since Seth Rollins to compete for a singles world championship, let alone win it, in the main event of WrestleMania. Unlike the vast majority of “NXT” alumni, McIntyre is a consistent main event player in the modern WWE to this day, something that never could have happened if he hadn’t been chosen (for real this time) in the 2018 WWE Draft.

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Written by Miles Schneiderman