Tag Teams & WWE

On wrestling forums across the internet I see one common complaint about WWE: the underemphasis of the tag division over the last few years. Indeed, during the 2000 era, tag teams were a feature matched by no one- The Hardyz, Edge & Christian, The Dudleys, among others, battled it out constantly in high stakes matches for the gold.

After the brand split, many of these teams were split up, some of them started singles careers in WWE, while others left the company entirely. The tag division in general has taken a definite backseat since, with few pay-per-views in the last year featuring any tag action at all. When the titles have been featured prominently- ala Cena/HBK and Cena/Batista- it's just as a gimmick piece for a feud.

Let's look at the current breakdown:

2 official teams on RAW:
Priceless (current champions)
Cryme Tyme

3 on Smackdown!
The Colon brothers (current champions, as of last night)
Ryder & Hawkins
Jesse & Festus (I guess this counts)

1 on ECW
Morrison & The Miz

The best tag team in the entire company is on a show by itself, although in fairness ECW guys appear on every show regularly, and they held the SD! titles for quite a while.

Right now there is clearly a numbers game. Princess just defeated Cryme Tyme in a PPV match. So where do they go now? Mostly thrown together tag teams and jobbers. The Colons just won the titles from Ryder & Hawkins, so we can expect a return match there, and maybe one or possibly even two more afterwards, but where do you go from there? Jesse & Festus are a gimmick tag and I don't see them getting the belts, so you end up with the same scenario...

Can WWE not create new tag teams? They most certainly can. They've created SEVERAL popular teams. In fact, I would go so far as to say they're better at creating new tag teams than they are singles guys. London & Kendrick were incredibly over, so were Deuce & Domino, The Highlanders, and many others. The Highlanders never did anything after an initial strong showing. L&K held the titles for a long time, lost them, were shipped to RAW to be jobbers and then were split up. Same for Deuce & Domino.

Many people feel like the best solution would be a reunification of the tag team belts. While this would certainly enlarge the pool of talent vying for the top spot, I see a couple of problems with it. First, it seems really strange, of all the belts in the company, to have the tag belts unified and no others. With only one set of belts, and, if, as people hope, a new golden age of tag teams suddenly arrive in WWE, the tag belts would suddenly end up looking more prestigious than the world belts, which are deluded by the fact that there are 3 different world champions. WWE likes to pride itself on 'thinking outside of the box' these days so maybe this wouldn't be a fact, but I see it as a major problem.

Second problem: the idea of the brand split is basically that you can watch your chosen show and not worry about everything that happens on every other show that week. There are crossovers, but these mostly only require that you be somewhat familiar with the other talent. The question arises: what show are the tag belts defended on? Do they go back and forth? If so, the casual viewer loses a lot of the narrative and history.

The third major problem is that it simply fails to address the root problem: failure of the people in charge to book a tag division. That's all it really comes down to. Creative either doesn't care about tags, or they are too stupid to book the easiest division in the company. A tag team shows up, wins the belts, defends them, flounders for a bit, loses belts to newcomers, splits up. The end.

The problem is HARDLY that there are way too few teams. History has shown that you only really need three decent teams to build a strong tag division; add one team on each show and suddenly you have a ready made division.

But it won't happen, because they don't care about tag teams. Both teams currently holding the titles are pairs of singles stars. WWE's future plans for both of them are bigger than tag teams, and instead of using them to have a great teams division, they're using the teams division to have great singles stars. The stupid thing is, they could have both! Look at the Hardyz, look at Edge & Christian; both incredible, competitive tag teams that each spit out two amazing singles stars- in fact, ALL of them have held world titles at one time or another.

In summary: WWE tag team division sucks because WWE doesn't care about tag teams.