8 Reasons Why WWE Women’s Tag Division Has Failed
If you think new champs will revitalize division, you haven't been paying attention.
As a general rule, tournaments are awesome. However, we might need to add a corollary that when the tournament is being booked by a company that can’t do long-term storytelling and it’s a tournament for a title that has long been neglected, the rule doesn’t apply.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Naomi and Sasha Banks walked out on WWE during Raw last Monday, leaving their WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship titles behind. The duo have not publicly stated why they’ve walked out, but reporting so far suggests that they were frustrated with how they were being booked, both as champions and as talent overall.
If you’ve been paying attention to WWE the past few years, it really shouldn’t be a shock that wrestlers are frustrated with how they’re booked inconsistently, but it should be doubly obvious when talking about the women’s tag champs, which might be one of the worst-booked titles and the most horrid “division” in the company.
WWE have stripped Naomi & Sasha of their titles and announced on SmackDown a tournament to crown new champs, which is laughable considering there literally are two active teams on the main roster.
The WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship has long been snakebit and set up to fail, right from the jump. Let’s take a look at the reasons this division has been doomed.
Let’s get to it…
8. Cutting Boss ‘N’ Hug Connection Short
Really, this could have been the #1 entry, but we should start by identifying the first true warning sign about the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship.
Sasha Banks and Bayley basically willed the tag titles into existence as the next evolution of women’s wrestling in WWE. At the time in early 2019, the women’s roster was pretty robust, with nearly 30 active wrestlers on Raw and SmackDown, plus another 15 or so women in NXT. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to establish new titles that would give a bunch of women something to feud over and something else to offer the audience.
After becoming the inaugural champs in an Elimination Chamber match in February 2019, the Boss ‘n’ Hug Connection defended the titles successfully at Fastlane, then put them up for grabs in a four-way match at WrestleMania 35… and lost.
This isn’t to say that Sasha & Bayley should have held the titles for a year or something like that, but you put brand new titles on arguably two of your best wrestlers and had a chance to really establish this new championship, and you hot-shotted them to… the IIconics. (More on them later.)
Pulling the rug out from under the women who pushed for these titles in the first place – and at WrestleMania no less – felt like a bad idea at the time, and feels more like an omen now.