The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 Stable Wars in American Wrestling

Professional wrestling loves its stables—groups of wrestlers brought together under a common banner, often as not to help one another cheat toward victory, participate in gang-style beat downs on other wrestlers when they have the numbers advantage, and compete in any number of logical tag team permutations, not to mention representing their teams in one-on-one contests.

While the stable dynamic tends to lead to situations in which heels outnumber their face rivals, there have also been those times throughout wrestling history when the odds are more or less even—when two (or more) groups butt heads and it results in ongoing rivalries between the stables. That’s the topic of this week’s countdown.

I’d like to take a moment to clarify definitions here, some of which are murky, some of which are arbitrary. I’m defining stables as teams of three performers or more, thus tag team feuds are out unless they were encompassed within a larger stable feud. In addition, each rivalry must have resulted in more than one match while the groups were each intact. So, for example, most of the temporary alliances formed for the purposes of having even teams at early Survivor Series events or for War Games matches are not eligible because the teams only paired off one time (not to mention that it’s debatable whether most of those teams allied meaningfully or for long enough to justify calling them stables). Finally, and, admittedly, most fuzzily, I’m only counting instances in which a stable functioned as more than just the foil for the other stable. For example, the team of Dusty Rhodes, Nikita Koloff, and The Road Warriors that got together to beat back the Horsemen, while entertaining, and while involved in multiple matches, was a stable for the sole purpose of competing with the Horsemen, and so this rivalry was not in contention. I am, however, counting past stables that reunited specifically to oppose a newer one, so, for example, TNA’s Fortune group realigning to challenge Immortal does count (though it didn’t make the countdown)—keep this in mind because there’s more than one instance of such a stable war making the cut.

I also made the call that a whole promotion (or everyone but a stable) does not, itself, count as a stable. Therefore, combinations like ROH vs. SCUM, TNA vs. Aces and Eights, WCW vs. The nWo, and WWE vs. The Alliance or The Nexus were not eligible for this countdown.

Finally, this list is limited to rivalries that occurred primarily on US soil. I’m adding this caveat because I’m aware of a number of stable wars abroad (particularly based in Japan), but can’t claim to know the stories well enough to fairly rank them in this context.

In making the list, my primary considerations were heat, drawing power, and the immediate storyline. Secondary concerns included the long-range effects of the program on the talents involved and match quality within the feud. As always, my personal opinion weighed heavily.

#7. The Nation of Domination vs. Los Boricuas vs. The Disciples of Apocalypse

This entry is a bit problematic because, admittedly, you could make a fair argument Los Boricuas and the DOA were formed for the sole purpose of feuding with the Nation, which would go against my criteria. In including this rivalry, I’m choosing to look at these stables as also having been forged for the purpose of pushing Savio Vega and Crush as stable leaders, besides featuring their stablemates more prominently for a short spell.

On to the rivalry itself, you might notice that it’s the only entry in the countdown firmly entrenched in the mid-card, in which only guy really emerged from the pack and went on to bigger and better things. This three-way feud earns its place, however, for just how heated it was.

After the Nation of Domination had a fledgling run in Memphis with mostly different personnel, the stable debuted in the WWF in 1996, ostensibly a black power group, though, in its increasingly sprawling size, it came to include PG-13, Crush, and Savio Vega, who clearly didn’t fit that identity.

The racial identity of the group became less an undertone and more of a defining factor a year later, however, when Faarooq proclaimed his stable would become “bigger, badder, better, and blacker.” Crush and Vega were shown the door, while Faarooq welcomed new members that included Kama Mustafa, The Rock, and (briefly) Ahmed Johnson. Not to be dismissed so easily, Crush and Vega each formed their own stables to go against the Nation (and each other)—Vega recruiting Miguel Perez, Jose Estrada Jr., and Jesus Castillo for Los Boricuas; Crush rallying with Chainz, Skull, and 8-Ball for a white biker gang.

You can say the angle was in poor taste, that it stereotyped performers based on racial and ethnic identities, or even that it reflected reality in uncomfortable ways. Regardless of your personal reaction, and though the feud didn’t result in any particularly great matches, the fighting between these three factions was a spectacle that added a sense of violence, controversy, and gravitas to the WWF product in the early days of the Attitude Era. The rivalry would eventually fizzle after Crush left for WCW and The Rock began his ascension up the card, leaving the remaining players—particularly from Los Boricuas and The Disciples of Apocalypse—to loosely feud with each other in the lower-mid-card for most of the remainder of their WWF tenures.

#6. The Shield vs. The Wyatt Family

For the latter half of 2013, The Shield and The Wyatt Family coexisted—generally not interacting with each other—in the upper mid-card WWE landscape. Both groups worked as heels—The Shield as mercenaries, The Wyatts as a cult. The Shield was made up of three blue-chip prospects, while The Wyatts seemed built squarely to push their leader, Bray Wyatt. And yet, over the months, each team grew increasingly popular for all of their off-beat style and clear potential, not to mention the fact that WWE successfully pushed each group as legitimate threats that rarely suffered any losses.

In 2014, these two teams of three collided, ostensibly starting their war when The Wyatts attacked the Shield’s opponents in a six-man tag that would send the winners into world title contention in the Elimination Chamber, causing The Shield to get disqualified. That mechanism of starting the feud was pitch perfect for its time as it exemplified what was different about the two heel groups. The Shield had well-defined goals. They debuted having CM Punk’s back for money. They went on to win titles for all three members. At this stage, they were dead set on all three moving up to the main event picture. The Wyatts embraced chaos—they didn’t seem to consider how attacking a group of faces would ultimately send all of those faces into the world title picture, but rather just wanted to beat up their enemies.

So, The Shield became those enemies.

When The Shield and The Wyatts collided at Elimination Chamber 2014, it felt like a dream match scenario. Strange, because each of the talents was still relatively new to the WWE landscape and mainstream wrestling in general, and stranger yet because no one turned face to facilitate the rivalry. Just the same, the fans were clearly eating it up as they chanted “this is awesome” during the pre-match stare down. The match itself delivered, too—a bout that a number of pundits (myself included) called the best WWE match of 2014.

These stables would reprise their rivalry in the weeks and months ahead, particularly as The Shield did turn face. And after The Shield split up, this short rivalry from 2014 would provide the foundation for ongoing feuds—most prominently Roman Reigns vs. Bray Wyatt and Dean Ambrose vs. Bray Wyatt for the two years to follow (with every likelihood WWE will go back to the well and reprise these feuds in the future).

With wicked heat, a unique story tell, sound kayfabe logic, and one great match (plus several good ones to follow), this was an easy pick for the countdown, which would probably rank higher had it gone on a bit longer.

#5. The Four Horsemen vs. The New World Order

I’m an absolute mark for the early days of the nWo running wild over WCW. As a teenager, this angle blew my mind, and when I was on the cusp of becoming a bit less invested in the wrestling world, that storyline was key in shoring up my long-term interest in the business.

As I explained in the intro, I don’t count the nWo vs. WCW as a stable war, because I don’t feel WCW can be rightly described as a stable, but this sub-plot in the over three-year nWo odyssey—the nWo versus The Horsemen—certainly does count.

A little over a year into its run, the nWo was still running strong, and in the late summer of 1997, the Horsemen—spurred on by Arn Anderson’s emotional retirement and the nWo callously poking fun at it—challenged the nWo to a War Games match, a near perfect platform for the old guard traditional stable that had, in large part, built the legacy of War Games, to challenge the newer face of organized evil. The match to follow was emotional and violent, and ended poetically—with Curt Hennig betraying and helping to decimate the Horsemen as he defected to the nWo, which was in perfect alignment with nWo machinations of the day and reflective of precisely the sort of scheme the Horsemen would have pulled on a face like Sting in eras past.

From there, the Horsemen would ride one more time, reuniting a year later to challenge (and get beat back by) the nWo once again. While this rivalry never quite delivered on all of its potential, considering it pitted WCW’s two greatest stables against one another in a high profile position, it did generate buzz and provided a few welcome spikes in the overall trajectory of the nWo, besides passing the torch to Hogan and company as the top heel faction of their day.

#4. The Shield vs. Evolution

While I am among those critics who rate The Shield vs. The Wyatts, as a match, above either Shield vs. Evolution match that happened later in 2014, I would contend that the latter rivalry, on the whole, was a nudge better.

A big part of that has to do with what Evolution represented. In its initial run, it was the combination of the old guard (Ric Flair), the top star of the present day (Triple H), and two young stars making a stop under the learning tree on their way to the main event (Randy Orton and Batista). It was surreal to see this group reassemble a decade after its run, this time with Triple H as the old guard and Orton and Batista fresh off of main eventing WrestleMania (and neither of them for the first time).

Contrast them with The Shield. They were a stable that bucked the conventional wisdom that a faction needs a veteran or an established star to get the fans invested in the younger talents. On the contrary, they were three fresh faces, two of them indy-proven, super over in-ring workers (Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins), the third a monster with charisma who it was always clear the WWE brass was behind (Roman Reigns).

The Shield established itself via upset victories over the likes of John Cena, Sheamus, Ryback, Team Hell No, and The Big Show. But over the course of 2013, they began to lose a step in the kayfabe world, no longer a breakout act so much as henchmen for The Authority, and then threatening to schism before they jobbed to the Wyatts.

A face turn later, The Shield was on the rise again. And arguably the three fastest rising young stars of the day found themselves on a collision course with the most established of establishment reunion acts.

Despite having youth and a push on their side, The Shield nonetheless succeeded in coming across as underdogs for both of their top-notch bouts opposite Evolution, first at Extreme Rules, then at Payback. In the former case, it was a classic six-man that culminated in Reigns spearing Batista for the pin. In the latter case, it was a No Holds Barred Elimination Match, with the added wrinkle that Evolution positively dominated for an extended period late in the match, most memorably ripping off Reign’s vest, stretching over steel steps in the middle of the ring and taking turns whipping him with kendo sticks. And yet The Shield rallied, picking up unlikely elimination after unlikely elimination, to not only win, but sweep Evolution.

While there will always be an argument that stable like The Shield should have carried on while they were so hot, the Evolution feud functioned as a graduation of sorts for the triumvirate. The night after the second match of this feud, Evolution disbanded, only for The Shield to follow suit at the end of Raw when Rollins turned his back on his compatriots. A fun stat: twenty-three out of the next twenty-eight Sunday night “special events” to air on the WWE Network featured at least one Shield alum in the main event. Sure, they developed the cred to main event over the preceding year and a half, but this feud was undeniably important to cementing them as viable main event draws.

#3. Degeneration X vs. The Nation of Domination

Comparing the nWo-Horsemen and DX-NOD faction rivlaries feels in many ways like a microcosm of what WCW and the WWF were up to at this point in history. WCW had the bigger names, the stables with longer legacies, the veteran stars and they paired them up in ways that had so much potential only to fall a little flat. On the flip side, the WWF had DX and the Nation, both groups of comparable longevity to the nWo, with little proven legacy behind them, particularly after Shawn Michaels’s retirement left Triple H at the head of DX and after The Rock usurped Faarooq as the front man for the Nation.

And so, while WCW traded on the sizzle of big names who weren’t booked to offer quite as much substance, the WWF thrived on young lions who desperate to earn their spot in the next generation—The Rock and Triple H eventual main eventers of course, and acts like Owen Hart, Mark Henry, X-Pac, Billy Gunn, the Road Dogg, The Godfather, D-Lo Brown, and Chyna thriving in their roles, each of them memorable in the upper- to-mid-card during one of the most successful periods in the history of the business.

The clash of personalities was evident here. Despite The Rock coming into his own, the Nation was still largely rough and serious, relative to the sophomoric humor that largely defined DX’s identity. The rivalry was highlighted by DX’s infamous (and, in retrospect, pretty racist) parody promo of the Nation, a serious of different tag team encounters, and an exceptional IC title ladder match between Triple H and The Rock at SummerSlam 1998—a bout that would foreshadow world title collisions in the years to follow, not to mention the confrontation between the two stars at WrestleMania 31 that, by that time, came across as something of a dream rivalry between two part-time stars so high profile that we fans could hardly imagine it coming to fruition.

DX would outlast The Nation and enjoy different reunions in the years to follow, but there’s no mistaking the importance of The Nation in getting DX over as an arguable-top-five wrestling stable of all time, and elevating The Rock and Triple H, in particular, to iconic status.

#2. The Hart Foundation vs. Degeneration X

When people talk about all-time great stables, Degeneration X inevitably ends up in the conversation. It’s criminal how often The Hart Foundation—not the tag team, but the stable anchored around the Hart family in 1997—gets forgotten.

It’s easy enough to see why The Hart Foundation gets overlooked. The unit only remained intact for about six months and never reformed after that initial run. Moreover, the tragedy over the five years to follow is enough to overshadow the group’s great run—in Brian Pillman dying before the group’s run was even over; in Owen Hart falling to his death in front of a live crowd; in The British Bulldog suffering a career ending back injury due to WCW buffoonery and then dying from a heart attack before he was forty; in Bret Hart, after suffering through the Montreal Screwjob, taking a mule kick from Bill Goldberg that effectively ended his career.

DX’s fate reads, in some ways, like a bizarro version of the foundation. While Michaels would temporarily retire due to injury, he’d come back for some of the best years of his career after the Attitude Era; Triple H would become one of the business’s preeminent stars; Chyna, for all of her hardships later in life, had one of the most successful runs a woman has ever had in pro wrestling. The only member of DX at the time who didn’t prosper in the aftermath of their initial run as a unit was Rick Rude, who ironically left the WWF in solidarity with Bret Hart after the Screwjob.

But I’m getting a head of myself. DX took shape after Bret Hart calling Michaels a degenerate. The group came across as directly counter to the Hart Foundation with its traditional values and concerns in wrapping itself up in an old school nationalistic war. While Rick Rude, wearing a suit as the group’s bodyguard, added a hint of a wrestling legacy to the group, its other three stars were at the fore as renegade pranksters and angry young people to the Foundation’s relatively veteran cast.

As was the case for the Foundation’s run, Bret and co. were heels in the States and overwhelming heroes in Canada and Europe. In the groups’ couple months of going head to head, they drew massive crowd reactions, with DX tending to get the upperhand when it mattered most. Michaels beat Davey Boy Smith to end the very first European Championship reign (drawing massive heat for happening in Birmingham, England). Little did fans know that this would be but a precursor to The Montreal Screwjob, in which Michaels would take part in the highest profile swerve in wrestling history, relieving Bret Hart of the world title in storylines and reality in his last night with the company.

The Hart Foundation marked a climax for the Hart family, and particularly Bret, in the WWF. Over a five year period, Bret rose to the top of the card and proved himself as a main eventer, and in this last stretch of his full-time career with the WWF, proved himself capable of being a top heel. Having Owen, Davey Boy Smith, Brian Pillman, and Jim Neidhart each in perfect supporting roles to accent their respective talents and name recognition only furthered the cause. On the flip side, DX would mark an important chapter and turning point in Shawn Michaels’ career, and a launching pad for Triple H and Chyna. The stable would grow to include others—most notably The New Age Outlaws and X-Pac—in the years to follow, and even joy nostalgia runs with Michaels and Helmesley as a two-man unit a decade later.

And as a coda to this great stable war, the next generation of Harts—DH Smith and Tyson Kidd, The Hart Dynasty—would challenge Michaels and Helmesley for the tag team titles in 2009.

#1. The Von Erichs vs. The Freebirds

When I started crafting this list, I had plenty of shuffling to do in the lower and middle tiers, but I never had a doubt in my mind which rivalry would end up in the number one spot.

After working in the Mid-South, the trio of Michael Hayes, Terry Gordy, and Buddy Roberts made their way into Texas to work for the Von Erich family’s World Class Championship Wrestling territory. They debuted as faces and quickly became the second most popular faction in the territory—second only to the Von Erich brothers themselves.

This all changed in a sheer masterstroke of booking, Christmas night 1982. Kerry Von Erich had a shot at the World Heavyweight Championship in a steel cage match, opposite Ric Flair, with Hayes as the guest referee. After a grueling match, Flair ran afoul of Hayes, who decked The Nature Boy and aimed to gift Kerry the title win. Kerry didn’t want to accept the victory that way, and in frustration, Hayes looked to walk out of the cage. Flair shoved Kerry from behind so that he’d collide with Hayes, knocking him to the floor. The Freebirds assumed Kerry had hit him on purpose and responded the only way they knew how—with Gordy slamming the steel cage door on Kerry’s head to launch a war. For the better part of the next two years, different permutations of Freebirds would battle different combinations of Von Erichs, one-on-one, in tag matches, and perhaps most famously in six-man bouts with varying stipulations and rules.

This feud drew, it had heat, and the matches were more often than not quite good. On top of all of that, as a number of other critics have pointed out, the guys worked under conditions closer to a contemporary wrestling feud in which a regular TV audience watched the action unfold (as opposed to traveling to different cities and getting to repeat angles and spots). These factions fought in front of largely the same audience at the Dallas Sportatorium week in and week out, and kept drawing back the masses for more. That’s a testament to great storytelling and a feud that the people bought into.

Which stable wars would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.