Fantasy Booking – Part 2 – Tag Team Championship

In part 2 of my fantasy booking experiment, we’re going to discuss the tag team championship. This one is going to be easy because you are absolutely reading that correctly. One, singular.

For a division of professional wrestling that WWE has so heavily worked away from (outside of NXT for the most part), there’s no excuse for there to be 3 different sets of tag champions on the men’s side of things, and unfortunately its rumored that NXT is going to adopt a women’s tag belt of their own, which I’m also against because, again, they don’t have actual tag teams. They put together these rag-tag pairings of singles wrestlers because they are lazy with creative, so I have a much simpler solution that I think makes a lot of sense and takes some of the pressure off really having to work a ton of creative.

Wrestlemania should feature a tag team triple threat ladder match. All six men in the ring at one time, a newly designed, unified set of tag belts hanging above the ring, one TAG TEAM to rule them all.

Following Wrestlemania, the formula should be pretty simple, the winning team should defend their title on their own brand each week, sort of an “open challenge” if you will. This will give the opportunity for creative (Vince) to see what of the random pairings actually have a good feel to them. I don’t want anyone to think I’m shitting on “The Dirty Dogz” here, Ziggler and Roode work really well together because they are both long-tenured talented individuals who find a way to make pretty much anything they’re given function, but that pairing was just a matter of not having anything else for them to do/being too lazy to write more creative to fill the SEVEN HOURS of TV time you have every week of the year (not counting PPV weeks).

The two brands that do not house the belt should hold tournaments throughout the course of each month, with the winners of each brand’s tournament meeting at the next PPV. Since the PPVs are never evenly spaced, this gives the opportunity for you to cater the bracket sizes to how much time you actually have. These tournaments should play out a lot like the Dusty Cup. You’ll have the one or two actual tag teams that exist, then you can also try out new pairings and find ones that work (like Ciampa-Thatcher). One PPV sets the challenger for the next PPVs title defense. This gives you the opening to work at least a little creative build without having to overthink anything. You get an injury on one of the teams, the tournament runner ups can swap in. I’m even giving you an out when someone gets hurt here.

And do not waste our time with a ton of promos here. Turn tag team wrestling into a showcase of talent again. Let tag team matches be something for the purists who want to tune in each week and see at least one or two incredibly well performed matches. And look at it this way, when you find teams that work together well, you have new tag teams that can work tag division for a while. When they don’t work, you’ve managed to showcase the singles wrestlers on a roster entirely too large and you can start seeing more and more of each of the guys in the back. See who has a crowd following. See who can get themselves over by putting on a show. Nobody fell in love with DIY because we knew who Gargano or Ciampa were. Nobody fell in love with DIY because of promos. We fell in love with what we saw them do each time they were given 5-10-45 minutes in the ring. And clearly being a solid tag team does not minimize your chances of individual success later, once you’ve gotten yourself over within the tag team. Look at the Hardyz, Edge and Christian, Booker T, DIY. And sometimes you find something magical, like Breezango (even though they don’t get much TV time anymore).

All of this to say, if you’re going to be lazy with creative, stop trying so damn hard. We love good wrestling just as much as we hate badly written creative.

But the one damn thing I’m going to fantasy book here is that whatever teams get the title shots, let them be the actual teams for a while until you establish a track record with the newer pairings you cook up. I’m ok with a team of Shane O’ Mac and Mustafa Ali as long as you find a way to make it make at least a little bit of sense and they put on a show when they are in the ring. You don’t have to have The Hardyz or the Young Bucks or The Revival FTR, but you will have to put your faith in the audience to help you know when something works and when something is over, which I know is something you have a hard time with.

So that’s my fantasy booking for the Tag Team Championship. Any thoughts?