This New Era is just another regime change where people of the previous regime had either gotten phased out and/or fired. When Jim Ross got removed as head of talent relations, most of his hires had either quit, gotten fired, or downgraded. Same for Johnny Ace's boys. Now it's the rise of Hunter's crew and guys like Sheamus are out of place. You would have thought with him being in good standing with Hunter, he would still be in the spotlight, but he's about to be ghost, despite the TMNT push, along with Jericho. In Cody's case, he may have already seen the writing on the wall with the new callups and figured that it would better to leave while the getting was good than wait until the hammer falls.