12 Ups And 15 Downs For WWE In 2016
10. Neutering Newcomers
The emergence of Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows after WrestleMania XXXII was a genuine “mark-out moment,” with the team showing up to establish dominance over the tag team division. It looked like the former Bullet Club members were ready to take over WWE’s tag ranks.
Instead, we saw the duo get stuck with a losing proposition: Try to out-funny the New Day, the clown princes of the tag team division. The result has a groan-inducing feud that turned legit killers into goofs. (And this came after making them second bananas in AJ Styles’ feuds.) Only toward the end of the year did the writers seem to try to get Gallows & Anderson back into the motif of simply beating people up.
We don’t know yet how things will play out with the Club, but you have to consider the early fumbling as a pretty glaring mistake.