6 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE No Mercy 2016

6. Strange Booking In Tag Title Match

rhyno uso
WWE.com

Someone is going to have to explain this one, because it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

When Heath Slater and Rhyno won the new SmackDown Tag Team Championships at Backlash, it felt like a feel-good story that gave Slater his job and paid off a nice angle with the One Man Band being disrespected and finally breaking through. But it never felt like something that was going to be long-term in any way.

So when the recently turned Usos, who are also feuding with up-and-comers American Alpha, challenged Sunday for the tag titles, the result seemed perfectly clear and logical: Usos capture the tag titles (possibly through nefarious means) and then go on to fight Alpha over the titles. Simple, easy and correct.

But instead, Rhyno Gored his team to victory, leaving the Usos with a second straight loss to the makeshift tag champs, which doesn’t help their standing either. Perhaps we’ll see a rematch on SmackDown, but this was a missed opportunity to pull the trigger.

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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.