It was almost inarguable at one point that AEW had the best tag team division in North American pro wrestling, however over the last year or two that’s become less the case as the company’s trios title scene has cannibalized and diminished the value of their cornerstone attraction.
Early in the company’s history one of the notable features of its programming were the highly contested tag team championships, which made sense with one of the founding cornerstones of AEW being the multi-time, multi-company tag team champions in the Young Bucks. During that period, and to their credit, they went out of their way to set the division up and establish other teams. For example, they bowed out in the first round of the tag team title tournament to crown the first champions with a loss to Private Party, which setup the finale of the Lucha Bros and SoCal Uncensored.
From day one, the tag team title tournament established SoCal, the Lucha Bros and Private Party as focal points of the division, accompanied by first round losers Jurassic Express and Best Friends. That’s without mentioning the arrival of Santana and Ortiz.
Of those teams, only Santana-Ortiz, Best Friends and Private Party never held championship gold as a duo, and moreover have not held gold either in trios or in ROH.
These were the AEW tag team champions in order prior to the establishment of the AEW trios titles:
- SoCal Uncensored
- Kenny Omega and Hangman Page
- FTR
- Young Bucks
- Lucha Bros.
- Jurassic Express
- Young Bucks (2)
- Swerve in Our Glory
During Swerve in Our Glory’s reign, the trios titles were established and won by the Elite at All Out 2022. The motivation behind the establishment of trios championships can be up for debate, but with Omega and the Bucks as the first champions that removed the Bucks from the division and siphoned off its overall value.
Following the trios titles’ arrival, these were the tag team titles reigns in order:
- The Acclaimed
- The Gunns
- FTR (2)
- Starks and Big Bill
- Sting and Darby Allin
- Young Bucks (3)
These lists on their own aren’t too alarming, however when you look at the trios title history the company trended toward shifting a number of its tag teams into the trios division. At varying points, these teams could have been in the tag team division:
- The Elite (Omega and Young Bucks)
- Death Triangle (Pac and the Lucha Bros.)
- The Elite (2)
- House of Black (Malakai Black, Buddy Matthews, Brody King)
- The Acclaimed (Castor, Bowens and Gunn)
- Bullet Club Gold (Jay White and the Gunns)
- The Patriarchy
Straight away you see that outside House of Black and the Patriarchy, every team is partially composed of former tag team champions. That summarily means that in order to kickstart and continue to prop up the AEW trios division, the company in effect cannibalized its own tag team division. The end result of that decision has been that neither division has really excelled, and neither has been truly great at the same time. One or the other has simply just been good, but never both. That’s because rather than actually define what AEW wanted its trios division to be, in hindsight the company (seemingly) simply set it up as a vanity vehicle for the Elite while FTR and others carried the tag team division. As a consequence, the trios division at least by all appearances has only felt like it had sound direction while the Elite were in the mix; this isn’t to say the reigns of the teams that followed were inconsequential, but it’s more to do with a feeling at least in my eyes that the division was missing a top-down mission statement as to what the division was supposed to be as an attraction and less so at the fault of the teams who made the task work. For example, I would argue the Acclaimed, BCG and Patriarchy are good champions and carved out a niche for the belts on TV, but that doesn’t equate to an overall purpose.
Summarily I would argue that the teams that should have been featured in the trios division became afterthoughts on TV, while the teams that should have been orbiting the tag team titles were mostly pulled into the trios picture. For example, there was a point where SCU, Best Friends, the Dark Order, Matt Hardy and Private Party, or Top Flight and Action Andretti should have been in the trios picture as mainstays, and they simply weren’t. Let them be anchors in the division alongside your attractions like House of Black, or like the Patriarchy can be now, among others, and let that be the identity of the division. Additionally it could have been used to showcase more up-and-coming talent like the Top Flight members to help them gain momentum. However because the divisions have been in flux, with the trios being harmed much more than the tag team division since either the Bucks or FTR have always been around the top of the pecking order, the trios division lacks an identity and operates more like a waystation.
Although the divisions are beginning to be more demarcated, it’s still too early to say the divisions are both raised up and on equal footing in terms of prominence. Looking strictly at AEW and not ROH, the divisions need to clearly define who is in which division, which teams call which home and then install a hard rule that those teams are nowhere near the champions unless it actually makes sense. For example, if the Patriarchy are the trios champions, no combination of the team should be vying for the tag team titles. What’s the purpose other than to feed into the Patriarchy story? Whether that makes sense is subjective.
Conversely, the tag team division needs to be reformatted. If we’re going to stick with the two sets of belts (trios and tag) AEW needs to start building up its young teams again. That means bringing up Top Flight and Private Party, teams that are either still young and need the opportunities or who have been around and not had a fair shake. And while that takes shape, I think Saturday night’s time limit draw to put the Acclaimed, FTR and Young Bucks in a trios match for the tag titles at All In is a good move because a) it nixes another FTR-Bucks rematch and keeps that backpocketed, and b) gives the Acclaimed a jolt to be on the main stage with the two best teams in the company if not the world. This match can be a jumping point for what’s next, which I think is most likely either the Acclaimed or Bucks coming out with the titles next weekend. Being truthful I think we’re partially seeing this to either see a title change or retention without having the Bucks or FTR pin each other, but regardless it’s an opportunity the company needs to make good on.
(AEW badly needs to avoid wasting opportunities to establish teams as tag team mainstays. While they didn’t exactly squander Penta and Fenix, they definitely didn’t maximize their potential in the tag team ranks and now it seems they’re WWE bound.)
In terms of the long term health of the division, I’m expecting the Bucks to retain and then feud with the Acclaimed to help rebuild them toward a second title reign; I think they benefit the most from this match and a longer feud with the champions. As for FTR, I think if we’re building the division up they’re the perfect team for that right now alongside a team like the Kingdom who just lost their ROH titles. Then you still have the Gunns who can figure into either depending on whether they best fit with Juice in trios or back in the tag division.
Both divisions need direction and focus. They need to be defined by the stories told and the teams that tell them; that’s the benefit to having fixtures in the divisions with defined roles. What they do not need is more of the same as has been commonplace the last two years. The divisions cannot simply exist, and arguably the company is at its best when it diversifies its wrestling and makes its attractions distinct and not formulaic or watered down.
The company needs to rebound, and establishing its divisions and defining them in terms of why we should care about them and the people who compete within them is the step that needs to be taken. They’re on the right track, but we need to see them go full bore. For example, many people who watched the Monday Night Wars will tell you WCW’s focal point was the nWo, but they might also point out that the cruiserweight division was one of its primary attractions. People might tune in for the latest nWo twist, but they’d get treated to something that was fairly unique at the time. Tag team and trios wrestling are not nearly as novel or action-orienteted outright, but for example what could be done is keep the tag team division as a menagerie of different styles but still keep it structured. Conversely, perhaps the trios division could become more free-form and adopt tornado tag rules as the norm. It would make the matches more fluid and exciting and uncuff the wrestlers taking part.
The divisions need identities and purpose, and distinguishing one from the other could help move both forward. At the moment, in my opinion, there’s very little difference between them other than having two extra bodies at ringside. AEW needs to define the teams involved with each, thereby defining their roles depending on what the divisions need and the stories that are being told. That should be their baseline going forward.
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