13 Ups And 16 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2019

12. Raw’s Sad Tag Scene

royal rumble preshow tag
WWE.com

This is going to bear mentioning until things improve, but Raw’s tag team scene is embarrassingly bad.

WWE acknowledged that Akam, one-half of former champs AOP, is on the shelf. You’ve got The Revival mired in this weird funk of battling Lucha House Party, losing to tag champs Bobby Roode & Chad Gable under dubious circumstances, and just drifting despite being one of the best tag teams on the roster.

What we got Sunday night was a kickoff show curtain-jerker pitting Roode & Gable against the makeshift team of AOP’s Rezar and Revival’s Scott Dawson. The stakes: If the frankensteined team won, then both teams would get future title shots. Naturally, we got heel miscommunication, and the champs won, vanquishing Rezar and Dawson.

So we have no #1 contender, and two teams (well, one member of two teams) were made to look inferior. Wonderful.

As an aside, remember when Authors of Pain and Revival were tearing it up in NXT alongside #DIY? Yeah.

Advertisement
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.