6 Ups And 8 Downs From WWE Elimination Chamber 2017

2. Truncated Tag Team Turmoil

usos american alpha
WWE.com

Sometimes, more is not necessarily better.

In a likely effort to give more tag teams a PPV slot and make the SmackDown Tag Team Championships look more competitive and desirable, (all) six tag team competed Sunday in a tag team turmoil match, which was five short, successive matches ending with American Alpha successfully defending their titles.

But while the matches meant that more tag teams got to showcase their talents, it prevented American Alpha from really standing out as the top duo. Instead of five mini-matches, they could have booked one 15-minute tag battle with the Usos or a triple threat tag match with an additional team and let Jason Jordan and Chad Gable pull fans in.

Instead, the tag champs showed up second-from-last and beat the Usos in a short bout with a rollup, then got pummeled by Jimmy and Jey before rallying against the Ascension to defend their titles. It felt more like a time-filler than a courageous title defense.

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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.