The State of Tag Team Wrestling!

I was recently asked what I thought about Tag Team Wrestling from Bleacher Report's Leroy Watson.

Leroy asks: “In light of a piece you did earlier this week, what do you think has happened to Tag Team Wrestling? Once a big part of wrestling, it seems like it is dying.”

I agree with Leroy a bit here. Tag Team wrestling has gone downhill, but more so in the WWE.

It is a shame, too, because I remember times where tag team wrestling was something I looked forward to watching, especially in WWE.

The WWE has the worst tag wrestling of any wrestling organization televised right now. Heck, ROH is even better.

However, the best tag wrestling is in TNA right now. They have been doing a Dudley Invitational tag team tournament there for the past few weeks. And, I can safely say that it is some of the best tag wrestling I have seen in a while.

They have great teams there, and that was before the tag tournament.
Beer Money Inc., LAX, Motor City Machine Guns, and The Dudleys just to name a few.

Now a new team has come out of nowhere and has been surprisingly good, The British Invasion. TNA had Doug Williams on its roster for over a year and didn’t use him once. They just didn’t have anything good for him, and they knew he would die in singles wrestling.

So they teamed him up with former Gladiator, Brutus Magnus. And they added some muscle to the group too, to add an intimidation factor.

I feel they will do very well there as a tag team for some time.

And they are relatively young too, so they can be there for the next five to eight years and make sure tag wrestling is something to see. And even more teams have shown promise there too.

The WWE thinks because they are the top dog that anything they do must be right. And they clearly feel singles wrestling is the way to go, and fans are not interested in tag wrestling anymore.

While they will have tag titles, it will mainly be a stepping stone for wrestlers. They will not be great tag team specialists, they will just win the belts and get some recognition.

Then when the WWE feels they are ready, they will end the tag team and push both or one of them to singles wrestling.

We have seen it too many times from them; they even tried to do it to the Dudleys if you remember. Neither Bubba nor D-Von shine in singles wrestling, but they still do in tag wrestling.

The fact is, pushing stars out of their tag teams can be a bad idea, because some can shine in singles at the same time easily while still being great in the tag division.

Just look at Edge and Christian or Matt and Jeff Hardy. All won singles titles while still being active in their tag teams when they won many of them.

Of course, they did a few angles where they betrayed each other (Matt and Jeff had a spectacular such story line just this past winter and spring).

But, if you look back all won tag titles together, yet still won singles gold, too. Perhaps not World Titles at this time, but just about every other title.Yet, they remained viable tag teams for many years.

People like watching tag wrestling. For some reason, the WWE does not accept that. As I mentioned before, that it is somewhat dying there.

JR mentioned in a recent blog that you cannot throw teams together and expect to have a great tag team.

And while I agree with that, the fact is that you do not have to do so. You can gradually get them together, starting in the developmental promotions.

Obviously some are not good to begin with. Then you have a team like Miz and Morrison, two guys who were rather new to the big leagues. Morrison, of course, had been one half of MNM and won three tag team titles in his rookie year alone.

Miz and Morrison are arguably the best new tag team the WWE has had in a while now.

They were seemingly the only great tag team at the time. So, the WWE pushed them hard. It was good to see, because those guys treated us to some great tag wrestling. And they were heels, on top of that. Yet fans loved seeing them together.

However, the WWE followed their recent MO: they made them part ways, and since they were so popular from the tag team, people knew who they were. They received pushes when they broke them apart. Again, that was textbook WWE.

They put them together just enough to get them bigger in the company and then tore them apart and put them in singles.

I can say without any doubt, that this team saved Miz’s career. Morrison was destined for greatness in the WWE anyway and has all the talent in the world; he could be in the World Title mix within the next couple of years.

He has been a great singles star before, winning many singles titles, such as the Intercontinental Title and ECW Title.

However, Miz needed more popularity and heat as a heel to save his job.

Now, he is not doing to bad on RAW. And Morrison is doing quite well on SmackDown. But the tag team ranks took a big hit.

The WWE has other teams, of course. The Colons are the current champs. There is Cryme Tyme, Priceless/Legacy, and now they re-formed the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Tag Team” in Shelton Benjamin and Charlie Haas. This might look curious, but it makes some sense.
Benjamin has been a singles star for some time.

But with two big time heels on SmackDown in Edge and Chris Jericho, and the pushing on Dolph Ziggler to be a third top heel on the show, Benjamin needs this team (right now) just as much as Haas.

While he is one of the best athletes in all of the WWE, Shelton needs more heat from the WWE Universe in order to move on to the World Title picture in my opinion.

So, re-forming this group will help out the tag team wrestling the WWE lacks and will help them both in the future. Of course, I see them breaking apart in within a year or so.

One group I am really high on is The New Hart Foundation. I believe this is the article that Leroy saw, triggering his question. I don’t think he knew quite how passionate I am about the tag team ranks, and hope my answer didn’t bore him out of his mind!

The NHF tag team has the potential to be great for the WWE in my mind. First off, they have great technical skill in the ring, and secondly, they remind me of the original Hart Foundation.

Tyson Kidd reminds me of Bret Hart and D.H. Smith reminds me not only of his father, the British Bulldog, but of Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, too. They have some inspiration from Neidhart’s daughter, Natalya.

They have all graduated from the Hart Dungeon, too. And the wrestlers who come out of there are usually great; I can’t remember one who wasn’t.

Bret and Jim had singles success; of course Bret had more, becoming a multiple-time World Champion. But they stayed together for many years throughout their careers.
So, they didn’t end the Foundation right off and push them to singles wrestling. Which I hope will not happen here, either.

While both could easily be in singles wrestling, and do well, there is no doubt that they will do well in tag wrestling, too. That is where they could shine for the WWE right now. Being new, they need to get the WWE Universe on their sides.
After seeing ECW this past Tuesday, they look like THE tag team in the WWE right now.

I feel that they have received good advice from the old Hart Foundation. They knew what it took to be a good tag team obviously. So, if they can be anything like the original HF, then we will see one of the best teams in WWE history.

That is the state of tag wrestling to me. I would love for the WWE to utilize tag teams more; they do have potential in some teams on the roster right now. However, currently TNA is on the mountain top when it comes to true tag wrestling.