Latest Reboot Shows WWE Is Serious About the Tag Team Division

WWE’s tag team division is about as well-stocked as it has been in quite a while.

We have three stables now with The Shield, The Wyatt Family and 3MB. We have a family team in The Usos. We have teams like the Prime Time Players and the Real Americans that are built on the combination of power and speed. We have big-man tandems of Mark Henry and The Big Show, and Tons of Funk.

Soon, we will add some more international flavor with the arrival of Los Matadores. And while LM is really nothing more than a repackaging of former tag champs Primo and Epico, the fact that they are being hyped means one thing.

WWE appears to be serious again about tag teams.

Once upon a time, it was cool to be part of a tag team or a stable. There definitely was strength in numbers back then.

So when did tag-team matches suddenly turn into bathroom breaks? That probably happened because WWE was putting more into individual merits and not really giving much thought to team building. Performers were thrown together because the promoters had to have a tag match or two on the card.

Suddenly we had Hall of Fame-caliber teams—insert sarcasm here—such as The Miz and The Big Show, Air Boom, Miz and R-Truth, and R-Truth and Kofi Kingston. They were nothing more than two guys who were booked together to fill holes in the card. Some of them even won the tag titles because…well, someone had to wear them.

Instead of the Tag Team Division, it was more like the Sag Team Division or the Bag-n-Tag Team Division.

Within the past two years, WWE teased a reboot of the Tag Division. Leading that reboot were Kane and Daniel Bryan, two wrestlers with contrasting styles who caught lightning in a bottle as Team Hell No. Once again, teams with quality potential, such as the Rhodes Scholars, were being developed. Eventually, The Shield was brought in from NXT to reintroduce the stable.

But that launch did not get much further than the pad before it was aborted. Shield members Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins won the tag titles, but the push to find them good feuds stalled.

Now, WWE again is poised to restart the division. This time, the quality level is much higher than it was with the last reboot.

Yes, we have comic-relief teams like Tons of Funk and 3MB, both of which have goofy gimmicks designed to cover up any true lack of cohesive talent.

But we also have teams with serious chemistry, like The Usos and the Prime Time Players. Up until recently, PTP was part of the crowded heel-team roster, but now they seem to have found a comfortable spot as a top face team.

In the Real Americans, we have Jack Swagger. His singles career was practically DOA until WWE paired him with another wayward wrestler in Antonio Cesaro and put them under the mentorship of Zeb Colter, who as Wayne Keown in real life is one of the best creative minds in the industry today. As a team, they generate a tremendous amount of crowd heat, which always is a yardstick of measuring success.

We also are being slowly introduced to Los Matadores, who are intended to bring the feeling of Spanish bullfighting to WWE fans. They are being promoted with an inkling of romanticism once found in novels by Ernest Hemingway, and time will tell on which side of the fence they will be booked.

A good takeaway from this reboot is the fact that WWE is not throwing these teams immediately into feuds with tag champs Reigns and Rollins. The company is allowing these teams to contend among themselves for the right to one day be the top contenders for the tag team championship belts.

WWE currently is in a storyline renaissance of sorts with Triple H running things like a dictator with diaper rash. WWE Creative, long criticized for being stale, looks like it has righted the ship and is beginning to come up with intriguing plot lines and twists that will shape the product for some time to come.

It’s a new day in WWE. We only can hope that there will be enough hours in that day for a strong and relevant tag team roster.

Follow Bill Atkinson on Twitter at @BAtkinson1963.