12 Ups And 15 Downs For WWE In 2016

10. Neutering Newcomers

anderson gallows
WWE.com

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.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.