Similar to the women’s tag title match from the kickoff show, there wasn’t much of a storyline behind the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Championship contest, and nobody expected Tyler Bate and Pete Dunne to get the win. Unlike the women’s tag title match, however, there’s an argument to made that they should have, which is rooted in the question of what The Judgment Day is doing come WrestleMania, and the question of what the hell WWE is doing with the men’s tag belts.
The Judgment Day spent the majority of the period between WrestleMania 39 and Survivor Series: War Games 2023 running roughshod over “WWE Raw.” The group appeared to be nothing less than a main event act, with Finn Balor earning multiple World Heavyweight Championship matches and Damian Priest winning the Money in the Bank briefcase. Since Survivor Series and their (admittedly excellent) storyline with R-Truth, however, The Judgment Day hasn’t been pushed so much as they’ve been pushed aside. With the recent returns of Randy Orton, CM Punk, and The Rock, there’s suddenly a lot less room at the top of the card, and their most popular member, Rhea Ripley, hasn’t even been appearing with them recently. If the Judgment Day is going to retain any kind of momentum at all, they could use more than just another tag title defense at WrestleMania.
Meanwhile, here’s a list of everyone who has held men’s tag title gold in the last two years: Priest, Balor, Cody Rhodes, Jey Uso, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Jimmy Uso, Randy Orton, and Matt Riddle. Aside from the current champions (who, as mentioned, were pursuing singles gold before teaming up for tag title matches) none of those men is part of an active WWE tag team, with most of them operating as extremely popular singles stars who stand above the tag team division. The tag titles, as a result, are in a strange limbo where they’ve been held primarily by wrestlers who are bigger than the tag belts — a limbo that’s evident by the fact that they are still technically unified, but are the only championships not to be rebranded away from the red/blue “Raw”https://www.wrestlinginc.com/”SmackDown” branding.
It’s past time to either separate the two sets of tag titles or properly unify them, and it’s way past time they were held by an actual tag team and competed for in the actual tag team division. Bate and Dunne were far from the perfect team to end The Judgment Day’s reign, but they’re the exact kind of team who needs to, and soon.
Grade: B-
