WWE Is Where Good Tag Teams Go To Die

I need to get something off my chest, and it’s been building for a while now. WWE is, on paper, the most powerful wrestling company that has ever existed, and somehow they cannot consistently put together tag team wrestling that makes me want to keep watching.

Let’s start with the most obvious example. Damian Priest and R-Truth are your current WWE Tag Team Champions. Their official team name is “Wepa Up.” I want to be fair here, their title win in March was genuinely a fun underdog story.

But step back and ask yourself how we actually got here. This wasn’t a built team with chemistry developed over months of storyline work. It was two guys who happened to be friends backstage, thrown together, who then won a number one contender’s spot almost as an afterthought.

Now look at who’s actually left to challenge them. Beyond Priest and R-Truth, one wrestling outlet covering the division this spring described it bluntly as “a pretty steep drop off.” Fraxiom gets more attention on NXT than the main roster these days. Angel and Berto showed up in a single backstage segment amid rumors they might be leaving entirely. The War Raiders got a brief cameo. The Miz and Kit Wilson are floating around as a thrown-together pairing of their own. That’s genuinely close to the entire active SmackDown tag scene right now.

Compare that to what WWE had and chose not to use. The Motor City Machine Guns signed in October 2024 with real pedigree, the first team in history to win championships across WWE, TNA, ROH, and NJPW. They won the WWE Tag Team Titles within a week of their main roster debut, then had a genuinely great feud with DIY over those titles into early 2025.

Then DIY itself fell apart. Tommaso Ciampa left the company, and reports indicated Johnny Gargano had a legitimate on-screen breakdown processing it. That’s two of the more reliable tag acts on the roster gone within months of each other, one through release, one through a partner’s departure.

The Machine Guns didn’t fare any better after that. Title opportunities came only sporadically. They got pushed off the WrestleMania card two years running. By April, they were released entirely, with reports suggesting AEW is their likely next stop.

The New Day is gone too, and that one stings even more given their pedigree. Thirteen championship reigns, second-most in company history behind the Dudley Boyz. Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods walked away after being asked to take a pay cut on a deal that was supposed to run through 2030.

Eric Bischoff said publicly that tag teams simply aren’t as profitable for WWE and TKO anymore, since running a team means paying two performers for what’s often the same TV time as one singles star. That’s a real, specific explanation, not just fan speculation. It’s coming from someone who’s actually run a wrestling company.

But if that’s genuinely the financial logic here, the Priest and R-Truth pairing makes no sense at all. Go back to the top of this article for a second. Priest is a former World Heavyweight Champion. He spent the better part of a year in an actual program with Aleister Black before Black got released.

If WWE is supposedly avoiding tag teams because they’re not worth the resources, why take one of your bigger singles stars and fold him into a tag team in the first place, instead of just keeping him in the singles picture where Bischoff’s own logic says he’s more valuable? You can’t tell me this is a cost-saving move and then spend a former World Champion on it.

So either the budget explanation isn’t the whole story, or WWE itself doesn’t fully believe it, because the booking keeps contradicting it.

Fine. Even if it’s only part of the story, I have a real question. Where is the cheap, young talent that should be filling this exact gap?

This is supposedly the era of the best developmental brand in wrestling. NXT is constantly praised for churning out main roster-ready singles stars. So where are the tag teams coming out of it? Andre Chase, a two-time NXT Tag Team Champion, had just revived the Chase University stable in April, and he was released days later. Axiom paired with Nathan Frazer as Fraxiom, showed real chemistry, and then got buried on a brand that barely gets a tag team segment some weeks. I genuinely struggle to name another team that’s come up from NXT in the last couple of years and actually been built into something on the main roster.

We used to get teams like the Rockers, the Hardy Boyz, or Edge and Christian, young guys given years to develop chemistry and an identity together before they ever sniffed the main event. If WWE genuinely believes singles stars are the better financial bet, the obvious counter-move is to develop tag teams cheaply in NXT and let them grow into must-see acts the way those teams did. Instead, the one recent example of exactly that, Chase, got cut loose almost immediately.

And then there’s the Street Profits, who might be the most frustrating example of all, because the talent has never been the question. Angelo Dawkins and Montez Ford are charismatic, athletic, and have been around long enough to prove they can work. They’ve just never gotten the serious, extended top-of-the-division push that turns a good team into a defining one. They show up, they look good, and then the story moves on to something else.

So where does that leave things? Reports this spring indicated WWE was actually aware of the problem, reportedly working internally to fix a division even insiders describe as stagnant. I hope that’s true, because right now the actual state of the division is Priest and R-Truth at the top, a steep drop-off behind them, the Usos as basically the lone act with real pedigree, and a graveyard of teams who got built up and then either released or quietly buried. If the company that invented modern tag team wrestling as a TV product can’t fix that with the resources it has, I guess we’ll just have to watch AEW.