7 Best WWE Tag Team Rivalries Of The Past Decade
Where does The Usos Vs. The New Day rank?
Tag team wrestling in WWE has enjoyed a mini-revival over the last 12 months.
From NXT to both main roster shows, fans have been treated to a standard of matches and storytelling not seen since the golden age of tag team wrestling in the early 2000s, when The Hardy Boyz, The Dudley Boyz and Edge and Christian made the division must-see TV.
Leading the way in 2017 are The Usos and The New Day. SmackDown Live’s two premier teams produced a Match of the Year candidate with a brutal Hell in a Cell encounter on Sunday, as Jimmy and Jey regained the WWE SmackDown Tag Team Championships. It was the fourth time that the titles had changed hands between the two teams since 23 July 2017.
Their truce on SmackDown this Tuesday night, and the crowning of new number-one contenders - Shelton Benjamin and Chad Gable - signalled the end of their summer-long rivalry, which ranks as one of the best the tag team division has seen in many years.
Which other feuds over the past decade are responsible for this tag team renaissance?
7. The Wyatt Family Vs. The Usos
After years of being an afterthought, the WWE Tag Team Championships had recently been elevated by the likes of Team Hell No and The Shield when the responsibility fell on the shoulders of two up-and-coming teams to carry the division through the summer months of 2014.
The Usos had just won the titles for the first time, dethroning the New Age Outlaws on RAW - and their tribal dancing, face-painting gimmick had yet to irritate fans as it later did.
Luke Harper and Erick Rowan were also a fresh team. They had only been exposed to the main roster for 12 months, and were branching away from Bray Wyatt for the first time.
The two pairings put on a really good match to open the Money In the Bank pay-per-view in 2014, and then stole the show at Battleground with their 2 out of 3 falls encounter, both of which were won by The Usos. The action was hard-hitting and fast-paced, with Harper in particular making the most of the time given to this rivalry (their nearly 19-minute match was the longest on the Battleground card) to showcase his still-untapped potential.
WWE should have booked a third instalment at SummerSlam and put the Wyatt Family over, because Harper and Rowan deserved a run with the titles and have never been as hot since.