6 Ups And 4 Downs From WWE Money In The Bank 2023

3. Timing Is Everything

WWE Money in the Bank 2023 Liv Morgan Shayna Baszler Ronda Rousey
WWE.com

Let’s get this straight: Ronda Rousey and Shayna Baszler win the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship, unify the titles with the NXT Women’s Tag Titles, and then lose the championships when Baszler turns on Rousey - all in the span of five weeks.

That’s quite the rapid turnaround, a whipsaw of events, with a shock heel turn at the end. The title change almost seems superfluous, as they’ve now been retuned to the previous champs in Liv Morgan & Raquel Rodriguez.

Of course, how this is ultimately weighed depends on how things unfold going forward, but it felt like Rousey and Baszler were settling in for a nice run as tag champs to give the titles credibility and to work together as long-time friends. Instead, it looks like they’ll be working together as bitter enemies, while the tag titles are just window dressing for this betrayal.

Hopefully, this wasn’t done just for a quick, cheap crowd pop or because Vince McMahon views Rousey as a singles star, but both scenarios are plausible.

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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.