6 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (13 Jul - Results & Review)
1. The nWo B-Team… Er, Bloodline 2.0
It’s getting really hard to look at this iteration of the Bloodline and not picture late-stage New World Order, circa 1999.
Back then, nWo Hollywood and nWo Wolfpac reunited, creating one oversized stable that was too big to coexist. Eventually, the group split into two subsets: the main-eventers wearing black and red, and what came to be known as the nWo B-Team, wearing black and white. The B-Team was a collection of jobbers who rarely interacted with the top stars in the stable and just flailed in their own side quests.
In today’s Bloodline, it increasingly feels like Roman Reigns is the top-shelf faction by himself, with Jacob Fatu flying in in a supporting role, and then the Usos and Fatu serving as the Bloodline B-Team.
Monday night, Fatu and Jimmy Uso tangled with Royce Keys, Solo Sikoa (who pretended to rejoin the family, only to dupe them and try to take them out), and LA Knight, setting up a six-man tag (with Jey Uso joining the Bloodline) at SummerSlam.
That… is quite the motley crew standing up to the Bloodline. It’s a borderline meaningless side quest for the family, while Roman continues to exist on his own island as he holds the World Heavyweight Championship. The Usos and even Fatu interact less and less with Reigns and seem to just occupy their own realm on WWE programming.
Fatu, in particular, looks more lost by this strange fracturing of the family. He was forced into the Bloodline after losing Tribal Combat, and he’s made it clear that he only does the Tribal Chief’s bidding, but he’s suddenly started targeting longtime friend Keys on his own, lamenting a decision that he seemingly made on his own. Where is Roman ordering him to strike down anyone who stands in the family’s way?
If Jacob truly is a conflicted, indentured servant of the Bloodline, why would he start attacking other people who haven’t posed a threat to the family unless he was ordered to do so? The less Reigns and his cousins interact, the more it looks like a two-class system, with one existing at the top, and the other trading on the legacy name while occupying a slot much lower on the card.