Jeff Cobb Says ‘JONAH’ And ‘Jafar Smash’ Were Potential WWE Names
When Jeff Cobb signed with WWE, he became JC Mateo, as many wrestlers who join WWE often change the name they went by in other promotions.
The name changing process almost always consists of a wrestler submitting a list of potential names or seeing a long list of potential names.
For Cobb, when he got to WWE, they had a list for him.
“The day that I flew into St. Louis, well, actually the day of the PLE, Backlash, I went backstage and met everybody, met the writers, and then they gave me two pages of names. I haven’t released them yet, but I think it’s pretty funny. At that time I was like what the hell? The first page, I’ll say it was maybe 60 names on there. I was like okay, this is pretty cool, pretty cool. They’re trying to go into my background with Guam, my background in Hawaii. I was like, okay. Second page, I don’t know what happened. It just started doing random names. I was like, How are they choosing this? One that stuck out made me giggle because it was all caps, JONAH,” he recalled while speaking to Chris Van Vliet on Insight.
Bronson Reed used the name JONAH before he became Bronson Reed in WWE.
Cobb continued, “The guy that’s in your company. I was like, wait a minute, are you guys even trying now? This is why I really like Drew (McIntyre). After I narrowed it down, I chose the name out of the sheets. I was like, ‘Hey, can I have a copy of this?’ They’re like, why? I was like, ‘Well, I just want to keep it for mementos because I like collecting random, silly things.’ So I brought the list back to the locker room, and Drew was like, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is my list of names.’ He’s like, ‘Can I see this?’ Yeah, sure. He looked at them, he’s on the second page. He saw one. He’s like, ‘I like this one.’ I was like, ‘Well, we’re not using that.’ He signed it, so it’s a Drew McIntyre authentic signature, which I’m not gonna sell because it’s funny, but it was Jafar Smash. I said, ‘What?’ So every time I saw Drew without hesitation I was like, ‘What’s up, Drew?’ He’s like, ‘What’s up, Jafar?’ I was like wait, Jafar is neither a Polynesian name, a Hawaiian name, nor a Guam name. I don’t know where that came from.”
Cobb settled on JC Mateo, which worked out because he already had tights with “JC” on them.
Cobb signed with WWE in May 2025 and was released in May 2026.
