While appearing on TMZ’s Inside The Ring podcast, former WWE star David Otunga commented on the Nexus faction being changed at the start of 2011…
“Eventually they brought people in and we weren’t having it, so they split off and made The Corre, where Wade Barrett had his group with two Rs, which was weird. That was a Vince [McMahon] thing, I don’t know why. Anyway, Wade Barrett had his group and of course Ezekiel Jackson joined. On the Nexus side, we got Joe Hennig—or Curtis Axel, though he was McGillicutty then. Windham, who’s Bray Wyatt, but then was Husky Harris, who was one of my best friends, Joe, too. It was cool having them. Oh, and we had Mason Ryan also. We were the New Nexus, which I was the leader of.
I had high hopes for us and we started turning things around, but then CM Punk happened to us. The way that happened was I told Wade Barrett on RAW, ‘You’re out. We voted you out basically.’ Going into that, I was going to take over the Nexus. Everybody was excited. Literally the next week, CM Punk comes out and he’s our leader now, and we were like, ‘Wait, what? Why did we even have this storyline?’ From what I heard—though it hasn’t been confirmed—Punk needed a new faction. I forget what his group was before with Gallows [Straight Edge Society]. He needed a new kind of thing like that. He was coming back, and so they gave him Nexus. Initially, it was supposed to be my group, but then he was like, ‘Oh, all right.’ That’s why at first he didn’t even seem like he was really into it, and it didn’t last all that long.”