Did WWE Just Quietly Eliminate This Decades-Old Rule?

An old rule that closed a loophole was seemingly brushed aside Monday on Raw.

by Scott Carlson
WWE Dive
WWE.com

On last night's WWE Raw, we got to see a cute spot involving the New Day trying to win a four-way tag team #1 contender's match by attempting to pin each other.

But that little scenario might fly in the face of a decades-old rule that prevents that exact sort of thing from happening.

During the tag match, Xavier Woods and Angel opened the bout, only for Angel to tag in Kofi Kingston. The two New Day members teased facing off, only for Kofi to attempt to pin Xavier, and the referee counted the fall before it was broken up.

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What's interesting is that there has been a rule in WWE preventing this sort of thing from happening for more than 20 years, known as the Outlaw Rule. On the 8 June, 1998 episode of Raw, the New Age Outlaws managed to pin each other in a triple threat tag title match. Afterwards, it was declared that tag partners could no longer pin each other to decide a match, thus closing that loophole. The rule has been referenced every once in a blue moon on WWE TV.

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While Monday's little situation was mostly played up for laughs and didn't result in the end of a match, it does raise the question of whether the Outlaw Rule has been scrubbed, or if this was just a booking decision to get a laugh.

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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.