Building a Tag-Team Division
The WWE has received a lot of attention to the Tag Team #1 Contender Tournament. Wrestling fans of my generation love tag team wrestling. I hear people on podcasts over and over again say how they want Tag Team wrestling to come back. People have great memories of the tag teams of the past.
The thing about successful Tag Team wrestling is you need a whole division of wrestlers to be successful. Wrestling has always had a serial nature. Even when that serial nature was live shows working a loop, wrestlers used that nature to build stories and rivalries. If the WWE wants to have a successful tag team championship it needs a number of Tag Teams working at the same time.
Everyone points back at the 1987 and 1988 as the golden age of WWF tag teams. In the Survivor Series Pay-Per-Views in those years the WWF had enough tag teams to have 10 on 10 tag team Survivor matches.
I am trying to figure out the minimum number of tag teams that are needed to have a tag team division. I think that number is six active tag teams. You need the champions, the number one contenders, two teams facing off to be the number one contenders, and two teams trying to work their way up the ladder. That is the bare minimum teams you need to sustain a tag division. In the WWE all these teams if I had six teams, two would focus on Raw, two would focus on Smackdown and two would focus on superstars.
I bring this up, because I worry the WWE won't do this. Already Kofi & R- Truth and Gabriel & Kidd have stopped tagging together. I worry that the WWE had no idea what stories to tell when it is not about a title. Every story in the WWE has a title in reach or a title in mind. I think that leaves a lot on the table. I worry in another few weeks all we will see is two tag teams on television at any one time. That seems like a waste.
On top of that, the stories being told about the champions over the last few weeks have not been about conflicts with other teams. It has been about conflicts in Team Hell No. I have liked this story a lot, but it does not help the tag team division.
Oh, all these things I have written about tag teams also reflects the problems the WWE has with their Women's Wrestling Division.
The thing about successful Tag Team wrestling is you need a whole division of wrestlers to be successful. Wrestling has always had a serial nature. Even when that serial nature was live shows working a loop, wrestlers used that nature to build stories and rivalries. If the WWE wants to have a successful tag team championship it needs a number of Tag Teams working at the same time.
Everyone points back at the 1987 and 1988 as the golden age of WWF tag teams. In the Survivor Series Pay-Per-Views in those years the WWF had enough tag teams to have 10 on 10 tag team Survivor matches.
I am trying to figure out the minimum number of tag teams that are needed to have a tag team division. I think that number is six active tag teams. You need the champions, the number one contenders, two teams facing off to be the number one contenders, and two teams trying to work their way up the ladder. That is the bare minimum teams you need to sustain a tag division. In the WWE all these teams if I had six teams, two would focus on Raw, two would focus on Smackdown and two would focus on superstars.
I bring this up, because I worry the WWE won't do this. Already Kofi & R- Truth and Gabriel & Kidd have stopped tagging together. I worry that the WWE had no idea what stories to tell when it is not about a title. Every story in the WWE has a title in reach or a title in mind. I think that leaves a lot on the table. I worry in another few weeks all we will see is two tag teams on television at any one time. That seems like a waste.
On top of that, the stories being told about the champions over the last few weeks have not been about conflicts with other teams. It has been about conflicts in Team Hell No. I have liked this story a lot, but it does not help the tag team division.
Oh, all these things I have written about tag teams also reflects the problems the WWE has with their Women's Wrestling Division.
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