Analyzing WWE’s Tag Team Division: Is It Really Better?

Introduction: When RAW went off of the air on Monday October 19th, I sat down and began writing a fiery missive about how making old guys who barely wrestle (or, worse, do not wrestle at all) more important than young guys who do, week in and week out, is exactly the kind of mission statement that drove WCW out of business. Because I start work early on weekday mornings, the head of steam that carried me into the column quickly dissipated, and by the time I sat down Tuesday evening to get back at it, I opted to leave it half-finished, as it was written in a far more negative tone than I aim for in even my most critical columns. Depending on how Hell in a Cell plays out, I may end up revisiting it, or maybe it will remain in my Google Drive, forever incomplete.

Also on Tuesday, my last column went live, and I started reading some of the feedback, a lot of which was well thought out and constructive (and which I greatly appreciate). In a reply to my reply to his comment, Norm mentioned that he doesn’t see any support for the tag division, which he believes is better than it has been in quite some time. I love tag team wrestling, so it occurred to me that maybe Norm is right; maybe instead of focusing on the things I do not like about wrestling right now, maybe I should focus on something that has actually improved. But then I sat down to write this column, and I wondered: has WWE’s tag team scene really gotten better?

First off, let me start by saying that great tag team wrestling is, in my opinion, the absolute pinnacle of this business. It takes everything that is great about singles wrestling – the drama, the stories, the psychology – and adds an entirely new layer onto it, creating a plethora of new possibilities. And that does not just apply to standard two-on-two tag team wrestling, either – think about how many good matches WWE got out of the relatively short lifespan of the Shield, and how at one point, back before the “Deadly Game” Survivor Series of 1998, the annual installments of that pay-per-view could always be counted on to deliver drama and matches that were sometimes fun, sometimes spectacular, and almost always memorable, largely because of all of the different options for matches that resulted from creating four-on-four or five-on-five teams.

Not only that, but tag teams themselves can be used to help a relatively inexperienced wrestler round out their game while hiding their weaknesses (see: Batista and Ric Flair), or take two wrestlers who have their own unique strengths or styles and make them into a well-rounded team (the original Hart Foundation). Looking at tag team wrestling from that perspective, I think it is hard to argue that it should not be one of the most important parts of any promotion’s business strategy, but if you look back at the history of the WWF/WWE, it certainly does not appear as though Vince McMahon would agree with that statement.

Sure, WWE has had its fair share of tag team classics, and nearly every major team from the last thirty years has either made their name in WWE or at least passed through, from the Hart Foundation, the British Bulldogs, and the Rockers to the Brainbusters, the Steiner Brothers, and the Road Warriors/Legion of Doom to the Dudley Boyz, the Hardy Boyz, and Edge and Christian. But for the most part, outside of perhaps two periods (the Dudleys/Hardys/E&C era and the Smackdown Six era) could WWE honestly claim to have the best tag team division in the United States. This is where that focus on style over substance that I mentioned last week comes into play, as if you compare, say, the Steiners tearing it up with Kensuke Sasaki and Hiroshi Hase in 1991 or Tatsumi Fujinami and Takayuki Iizuka or “Dr. Death” Steve Williams and Terry Gordy, both in 1992, their work in the WWF, while still very good, just did not compare. (For reference, the match against Sasaki and Hase was the 1991 Match of the Year, according to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. The Steiners also won PWI’s Match of the Year award in 1991, though it was for their match against Sting and Lex Luger at Superbrawl.)

Not terribly long after Paul Heyman was either ousted or stepped down as the head writer of Smackdown in 2003, the division faltered for the better part of a dozen years. Sure, there was still the occasional good match or standout championship pairing, but a continued lack of emphasis by Vince McMahon, combined with the strain of trying to run two tag team divisions for seven years afterwards, conspired to keep the division from reaching any real heights. And even after the original WWF/WWE tag team championships were decommissioned in 2010, the resulting combined tag team division was still largely ruled by teams of thrown-together singles Superstars. (Of the fourteen reigns between 2010 and 2013 – when the team of Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns won the titles – a full half of them were teams that hadn’t previously teamed together for any length of time or shared any real connection outside of “tag team champions”.) There have been twenty-one separate title reigns since 2010; of those, only three of them have come from teams that are still together, and those have all happened within the current calendar year. (If, like me, you maintain hope that Tyson Kidd and Cesaro are reunited whenever Kidd returns from injury, that adds an additional reign, and assuming the Usos eventually return to television as a tandem, that’s an additional two reigns, but still, six out of twenty-one is a pretty telling number.

And yes, before we go any further, the tag team division of October 2015 is absolutely better than the barren wastes we were subjected to for the vast majority of the last dozen years, but is it actually any good? If you are like me, your immediate reaction is to say “yes”; however, upon further consideration, I began to wonder if perhaps I was not just glossing over some major issues facing the division because of how good the current champions (as of the time of this writing) are.

And make no mistake, New Day are, from week to week, the most consistently entertaining act on any WWE programming. I cannot stress that enough – New Day are one of the few acts in WWE that are being booked well and are able to actually showcase their natural talent and charisma on a weekly basis. Just having them as the figureheads of the division makes the division stronger and more enjoyable.

But beyond that, what do we really have going on? When Kidd and Cesaro won the tag team championships from the Usos, a tag team that I openly despise, I honestly believed that perhaps the tag team division was going to finally improve, as the championship matches actually started to get time on the main card of live specials, rather than being relegated to the pre-show or excluded entirely. And right up until Tyson Kidd’s unfortunate injury during a match with Samoa Joe, it certainly looked like that would be the case, as Kidd and Cesaro were the equals of the New Day, both in terms of ring work and in terms of entertainment. Not only that, but the title were defended in an Elimination Chamber match at the live special of the same name, and while the match at times felt disjointed, it still represented a step forward for a division that had largely felt forgotten by WWE management.

Then Kidd was injured less than twenty-four hours after Elimination Chamber, and I feared that the division would quickly return to being all-but-forgotten. Thankfully, the Prime Time Players stepped up to fill the void, and while they are not really on-par with Kidd and Cesaro in terms of in-ring ability, they did do a fine job carrying the tag team championships and were certainly passable in matches (largely due to Titus O’Neil’s insane hot tags). The PTP would go on to capture the tag team championship at Money in the Bank and they held them until Summerslam, when New Day would reclaim the belts. The Summerslam match was another solid contest that also featured the Lucha Dragons and Los Matadores, and it looked like the division was going to continue to roll…

…until the following night, when the Dudley Boyz made their WWE return and immediately got the upper hand on the champions. I wrote an entire column about how I thought the Dudleys would made better tag team champions than Sting would a WWE World Heavyweight Champion; however, with the prospect of a Sting title reign now tabled perhaps forever, let me clarify that I think the Dudleys beating the New Day with the tag titles on the line would be a terrible idea, especially with the division still trying to return to any sort of prominence. Yes, the Dudleys routinely get nostalgia pops, but therein lies the problem. While certainly not as far past their expiration dates as the New Age Outlaws where when they beat the beloved Rhodes Brotherhood for the tag team championships at the 2014 Royal Rumble, the Dudleys are still little more than a nostalgia act, hitting their same old spots and bringing nothing new to the division. They lack the dynamic nature of New Day, and giving them a win over the champions may have some short-term benefit for the division, but it can only hurt it in the long run.

With the post-Hell in a Cell RAW mere hours away as I type this, and the result of last night’s tag team championship match not likely to be the end of the feud, let us instead take a look at the rest of the division. The team of Cesaro and Kidd have been sidelined by the aforementioned injury to Kidd, which will likely leave him out of action for roughly eight more months (and that is using the most optimistic timetable for his recovery), so they are essentially non-factors until mid-2016. What about the team that beat New Day for the titles earlier this year, the Prime Time Players? Darren Young and TItus O’Neil lost their championship rematch in the build to New Day’s first match with the Dudleys, and they’ve been largely relegated to Superstars and Main Event for the past month, when they are used at all. There are rumors that Los Matadores, one of the other teams who challenged for the tag team championship, will be repackaged in a less campy manner in the near future, which would certainly coincide with a heel turn that saw them attack El Torito after losing to the Dudleys.

The Lucha Dragons remain essentially enhancement talent, not unlike the team they won the NXT tag team championship from, the Ascension, who have apparently been demoted to Stardust’s henchmen in the Cosmic Wasteland group. Sadly, neither team is living up to the potential that they exhibited in NXT (and that is saying something, as the Ascension never really impressed me in NXT). And the Usos, like Kidd and Cesaro, are currently sidelined due to an injury to Jey’s shoulder, though his return could realistically happen at any point between now and the end of the year. Sadly, that is every major team who has made a serious challenge for the tag team championships in 2015, and no teams that held the titles prior to this year are still together, as I mentioned previously.

Of course, there is still the trio of Luke Harper, Erick Rowan, and Braun Strowman, though they are currently embroiled in their leader Bray Wyatt’s issues with Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose. They would certainly prove a formidable challenge for New Day once their issues with the former Shield have been settled, and, to be quite honest, making Dean Ambrose and Roman Reigns a regular tag team and putting them into the tag team title hunt would certainly not be the worst use of the duo and would likely allow them to rebuild some of the credibility that poor booking (at completely opposite ends of the spectrum) has taken from them over the past year.

And, perhaps most importantly, there are a multitude of tag teams cutting their teeth in NXT right now, most notably the current NXT champions the Vaudevillians. While their gimmick may not be as over on the main roster as it has been with NXT audiences, Simon Gotch and Aiden English are both competent workers and performers and they should have no trouble finding fans upon their main roster debut, even if they are used as poorly as the last two NXT tag teams to be called up have been. Former champions Blake and Murphy are in a similar boat, though most of their appeal lies with their in-ring work. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Enzo Amore and Big Cass, who are far better characters than they are wrestlers at this point, though they have shown significant improvements in the ring in 2015. Unfortunately, Cass will apparently be sidelined until 2016 with a leg injury, and while they were able to ride out Enzo’s lengthy leg injury, Cass has always been the better in-ring presence of the two, so hopefully his recovery is on the shorter end of the timeline.

There are also a pair of under-the-radar teams who are making a name for themselves right now, the teams of Dash Wilder and Scott Dawson (sometimes known as the Mechanics) and Jason Jordan and Chad Gable. Both teams put on strong showings in the recent Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Invitational, and I would not be surprised if both of them were soon in the thick of the NXT tag team championship hunt, especially if either the Vaudevillians, Blake and Murphy, or both are called up to the main roster in the near future.

Looking at it from that perspective, it is easy to say that WWE’s tag team division is in the best shape that it has been in for quite some time, and strictly from a numbers standpoint, it is difficult to argue that notion. But just as the Divas Revolution has largely been plagued by a lack of character depth and non-existent storylines, so to can we find the current shortcomings of the tag team division. Currently, two tag teams have a storyline – New Day and the Dudleys, who are vying for the tag team championship. (I will give you four if you count the Wyatt Family members and the former Shield members, but they are segregated from the tag team division by and large.) And while New Day have made the feud entertaining with their petition to save the tables and the continued use of Xavier Woods’ now-destroyed trombone, the storyline itself is as barebones as they get in wrestling, with the champions even occasionally relegated to props in the Authority’s machinations.

As mentioned, the Prime Time Players have barely been on Smackdown or RAW for the past month, the Ascension are fighting Stardust’s battles, and Los Matadores and the Lucha Dragons show up to lose to the two teams with a storyline. Perhaps the return of the Usos will bolster the division (though it could also have the potential to return it to the same boring status quo it experienced for much of 2014), or maybe one or more of the standout NXT tag teams will make their main roster debut, but at the moment, while the division is finally showing signs of life, I just cannot get behind Norm’s assertion that it is better than it has been, at least not outside of New Day.

Wyatt Beougher is a lifelong fan of professional wrestling who has been writing for 411 for over four years and currently hosts MMA Fact or Fiction and reviews Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.