If there’s ever one thing I’ve observed about the WWE throughout the decades, is that every now and then, you can tell when there’s a character or character(s) where it’s extraordinarily obvious that the Creative department has absolutely no ideas for. However, the performers themselves are either competent in the ring and/or are personalities that are genuinely decent, therefore they are desired to be kept on television and therefore employed, as opposed to being completely taken off of TV in general and allowed to rot in obscurity.
More notable and recent examples of this would be early incarnations of The New Day, Damien Sandow and Rusev, whom were all given pretty lame duck seeds for characters, but were all pretty decent performers or supposed good locker room guys, hence the desire to keep them at all, even if their personas were lacking in effort.
The thing is, the wrestling smark culture is smarter than ever with the advent of the internet and the ability to know what’s going on the vast majority of the time, or at least be able to talk it out with other wrestling fans and come to conclusions that differed from the days when communication wasn’t quite so simple. Subsequently, whenever the smarks have been able to identify when a wrestler or wrestlers were getting the shaft by Creative, these are precisely the wrestlers that they begin to get behind, in a defiant, contrarian manner to kind of play a chicken and egg game with the industry to put the test towards the claim that the fans make the stars and not the other way around where stars make fans.
That said, all three of my examples are cases where almost by sheer will and a relentless refusal to give up with seeds they’re sowing, got over with the fans, and to gargantuan amounts. The New Day singlehandedly resurrected tag team wrestling in the WWE in an age where countless names in the industry have stated the company’s secondary opinion of it, and have become probably the most lucrative merchandising property in the company. Damien Sandow became Damien Mizdow, the super-over stunt-double for The Miz, and probably spun more gold out of shit than anyone else before him, and Rusev took a dead-end partnership with Aiden English, and through forced-meme determination, gotten the Rusev Day gimmick over like crazy.
Unfortunately, contrary to the WWE’s claims that the fans dictate everything, getting over with the crowd doesn’t really matter if you’re not really a part of the long-term, preordained storylines. It’s no secret that the WWE has very much a molded template of what they’re looking for when it comes to the upper echelon of the company, as made evident by the staunch insistence by the company that only guys like John Cena and Roman Reigns are the only ones remotely qualified to contend for the WWE Championship, and that big names from external fame like Brock Lesnar and Ronda Rousey matter more than the products that they cultivated themselves.
The fans aren’t (always) stupid, regardless of what the WWE insists knowing what’s best for business. It’s obvious when the fans have banded together pretty well throughout the last few years for completely refusing to support or cheer for anyone that is being force-fed down their throats, no matter how competent or improved Roman Reigns has become in that span. Forcing the issue is never a good idea in almost any facet of life, and professional wrestling is no exception; the fans don’t like being told who they’re supposed to get behind.
So when wrestlers who get over with the fans but are not a part of the long-term storylines become big deals, the status quo rarely changes, and those who rise end up getting stuck into a hold pattern to where they eventually DJ Tanner wrestle (AKA jump the shark), or they’re metaphorically punished for getting over by being immediately put into a storyline that completely derails everything worked for. Or, in the case of Damien Sandow, regardless of just how much the fans wanted to see a blow-off feud between he and The Miz, just outright release the guy and bid him well on his future endeavors.
The New Day, as much as I got behind their rise, have gotten to a point where they’re so big that they don’t really need the tag team championship belts to validate their success, and the WWE is all too happy to accommodate that by keeping them out of any meaningful feuds or storylines, completely content to use them as glorified mascots of the company, as long as they’re selling shirts and merchandise no matter how many boxes of Bisquick they have to use every single show to make the hundreds of pancakes they fling every night.
Nobody wants to admit it, but they’ve long past jumped the shark, but because the WWE doesn’t care about tag team wrestling, regardless of how good The New Day is as a unit, they’re never going to rise any further, because they’re simply existing at the company’s ceiling for tag teams. The breakup is the only thing that’s really left, where Big E will probably get the nod to actually ascend, a little bit, but that’s not going to happen until the merchandise train finally starts to slow down.
Rusev, is an extraordinary worker whom I love to watch work, but it’s killed me over the last two years to see him go from this unstoppable juggernaut of a character that had the hottest feud with John Cena over the United States championship just a few years ago to where he’s a guy that jobbed to Randy Orton in like 7 seconds earlier in the year. The Rusev Day gimmick has gotten over, but the seeds have already been planted for its exit strategy, with the re-insertion of Lana into the fold, so the countdown is on before Rusev goes ballistic on Aiden English and locks him in a two minute Accolade. But the bigger question is if Creative will actually do anything with the equity that Rusev has built over the last year, or if it’s even possible without the presence of Aiden English who was as much of Rusev Day as Rusev himself is.
I feel like the best that can come out of getting over with the fans is that you become a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card replacement part for Creative to plug into an existing story as almost an experimental replacement for anyone who ever gets hurt, or is taken out as result of real-life punishment. But even then, it’s a hold pattern at best, and nothing short of a revelation in the writing team would change things from eventually getting back onto the original storylines, eventually.
Which brings me to the impetus of this particular post, eleven paragraphs in, about the introduction of The B-Team tag team of Curtis Axel and Bo Dallas. Everything about this pairing screams a sheer lack of direction, concern or care by Creative. But the thing is that both Axel and Dallas are, in spite of what the WWE has allowed them to actually do on screen, decent workers, and whether they’re good locker room guys or protected by Vince McMahon’s staunch loyalty to older greats by always keeping their offspring employed, are kept on television, even if it means being put into a denigrating pairing aptly named The B-Team.
However, I have this feeling, this hunch, that The B-Team is going to get over. Not because they’re decent workers, but they have the scent of a pairing that the contrarian smark culture of wrestling fans tend to gravitate towards, and I think they’ll eventually get support, because they’re supposed to be guys that aren’t supposed to be getting any support. Whether or not this happens has yet to be seen, but in a theoretical world where such does occur, I can’t help but preemptively feel bad for The B-Team, because they also are prime candidates to fall into the mold of superstars that don’t fit the McMahon model of top stars, and much like The New Day, have an inevitable fate to go no further than a very shallow ceiling of the tag team division at the very best.
I don’t really know what’s worse for The B-Team – getting knocked down from a tier that nobody had any intention of them ever ascending to, or never even being given the chance to rise in the ranks at all. I guess it would have to be the former, because when the day is over, if they can sell some merch, Axel and Dallas can at least make some coin before they’re eventually jobbed out. But I’d really love to see if and when the WWE licenses The B-Team shirts that are meant to look like they were made on the fly in the backstage with nothing but white t-shirts and Sharpies; but they’ll have the WWE Authentic tag sewn onto the hem, and charge $24.99 for them.
Either way, I can’t help but feel bad for the inevitable tanking of The B-Team. Both Axel and Dallas deserve better, and considering the latter was one of the greatest champions in NXT’s history, it’s a real shame that Bo-Lieve never got an opportunity to even start an ascension on the main roster. But the meme isn’t “demoted to the main roster” without just cause.
