You've probably heard it before – Vince McMahon isn't a fan of tag team wrestling. That's a damn shame, actually, because tag team wrestling is an integral feature of wrestling products in general. WWE's tag team division has seen a plethora of pairings come and go through the years, and while many of these teams had inspired gimmicks that stood, or still stand the test of time, there have also been a ton more whose gimmicks were simply "meh." Though that doesn't mean another team (or another member to replace someone who isn't clicking) couldn't have salvaged the gimmicks and played them better.
In order to qualify for this list, the tag team needs to be an actual one, and not an ad-hoc pairing of Superstars who mainly compete in singles, regardless whether they won tag team belts or not. Their gimmicks, while mostly uninspiring in the truest sense, don't have to be bad gimmicks in every case – in some of our examples, we'll be looking at good or potentially good gimmicks that were played by the wrong guys. We may also include a faction or two in this list, provided they competed in the tag team division, or if the third member is a female wrestler.
Having said all that, let's get down to business and look at 15 WWE tag teams whose gimmicks could have been much better if they were played by another team.
15 Titus Worldwide
Titus O'Neil is a great fit to lead a faction/tag team like Titus Worldwide, but that's just about it. As of this writing, he's a prime candidate to be given a pink slip, and so are the two people he's aligned with – regular tag teammate Apollo and "statistician" Dana Brooke. It almost seems as if Titus Worldwide exists to job to other tag teams, and it doesn't matter if it's another babyface team – just look at Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt, for instance.
While good on the mic and fairly charismatic, O'Neil isn't good enough in either department to prop up someone like Apollo, who's just as deficient in those two areas as he's solid in-ring.
Perhaps if WWE reunited Titus with Darren Young, or presented Brooke as an actual wrestler within the faction, this wouldn't have been a problem, but with Young on the way out as Titus Worldwide was forming, this, unfortunately, wasn't an option.
14 The Hype Bros
The Hype Bros were pretty over with audiences when they first made a splash in the main roster following the 2016 brand extension. Looking back, that was mostly because fans were glad to see Zack Ryder actually winning some matches, months after he was seemingly back to his old lower-card role following his one-day Intercontinental Championship reign. As for Mojo Rawley, fans generally found his in-ring skills limited and his character grating; despite WWE's best efforts to push him for his size, he's just not connecting, even after he turned heel on Ryder late last year.
Rawley will mainly be remembered by the WWE Universe for two things – one, he made the least out of his Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal victory than any other winner (yes, even less in one year than this year's winner, Matt Hardy), and two, he's buddies with Rob Gronkowski. Ryder would have been better off paired with the returning Curt Hawkins, not for an Edgeheads reunion, but rather because these two real-life best friends could have made a better Hype Bros without Mojo's annoying antics. (Heck, it might have even saved Hawkins from his awful "Fact Man" gimmick and losing streak record!)
13 Team Angle (Luther Reigns And Mark Jindrak)
Ideally, Luther Reigns and Mark Jindrak could have benefited by working alongside someone who had an interesting character, impressive grappling skills, and solid promo work. Alas, both men remained as colorless as ever as Kurt Angle's henchmen, and it wasn't like they were anywhere close to the Olympic gold medalist in terms of workrate. Reigns and Jindrak would soon fall out with each other onscreen, and by mid-2005, they were both out of the WWE, with Reigns notably quitting after he wasn't allowed to form a stable with Christian and Tyson Tomko. (No, that wouldn't have worked either.)
The failure of Reigns and Jindrak to get over as Team Angle doesn't mean that heel Kurt didn't need any lackeys to do his dirty work.
In fact, he had a much more talented, better-suited pair working for him before Messrs. Not-Related-To-Roman and Almost-An-Evolution-Member. Those two, of course, were Charlie Haas and Shelton Benjamin, who both shared an amateur wrestling background with Angle, and enjoyed some success in the tag team ranks as The World's Greatest Tag Team.
12 The Mean Street Posse
As WWE was introducing its Universe to the rest of the McMahon family, it was decided that Shane McMahon needed some backup, and what better backup than his real-life childhood friends? Yes indeed, Shane-O-Mac did indeed grow up with Rodney and Pete Gas, and in concept, it wasn't a bad idea to introduce two spoiled rich kids wanting to get down and dirty in the ring. Unfortunately, it was a bad idea to have two green guys play the roles, even if they were Shane's actual friends.
WWE did try to give the Mean Street Posse some legitimacy by repackaging enhancement talent Jason Ahrndt as Joey Abs, but he was just too much of an unknown commodity to make the group an interesting one. Perhaps they would have had a shot if WWE got two legit workers instead of one, then portrayed them as Shane's kayfabe childhood friends, but since they didn't, the Mean Street Posse is mostly a punchline for fans looking back on the worst of the Attitude Era.
11 Furnas And LaFon
This is a tricky one. Doug Furnas and Phil LaFon were two technically-skilled wrestlers, with the former being the team's powerhouse, and the latter being the main technician of the duo. Both used their real names in the ring, but that's exactly why this entry is tricky – this list, after all, focuses on tag teams that could have gone over if other wrestlers played the roles. But Furnas and LaFon were so devoid of personality that it was hard to get behind them, talented as they were in the ring.
Nearly two decades later, however, we saw that such a pairing could work (at least in NXT), as American Alpha had a very similar setup in place. Both were great workers, and both had complementary skillsets, as Jason Jordan provided the muscle and Chad Gable was the undersized technician. Sure, they didn't exactly set the main roster on fire before they were broken up on account of Jordan being revealed as Kurt Angle's "son," but at least they definitely not as forgettable as Furnas and LaFon turned out to be.
10 Men On A Mission
They were an African-American tag team led by a rapping manager/mouthpiece, and their goal was to spread positive vibes to the WWE Universe. No, we're not talking about The New Day, but we wish we were. For those who don't remember, Mo and Mabel didn't have much to offer by way of grappling or mic skills, and while they were turned heel after their kid-friendly characters predictably went stale, that heel turn ultimately transformed into WWE giving a green-as-grass 500-pounder a main event push. With all due respect to the late Nelson Frazier, who played Mabel, that wasn't a very good idea.
If you come to think of it, The New Day are essentially Men on a Mission, rebooted in such a way that they're very over with modern audiences.
(Of course, it wasn't always like that.) They don't rap as much as they chant "New Day Rocks!" and enter the ring to Big E's gospel-inspired exhortations, but they're still all about the "power of positivity." (And breakfast food.) Best of all, they're actually skilled in the ring and on the mic, which more than makes up for WWE not getting it right the first time around with M.O.M.
9 The Vaudevillains
The Vaudevillains are widely considered to be the quintessential example of a tag team that was over and successful in NXT, but simply didn't connect with main roster audiences. Yet they actually had a very solid, promising gimmick, a throwback to the early 20th century, right down to their appearance and wrestling style. But even if they didn't accidentally end up injuring Enzo Amore soon after their main roster debut, they probably wouldn't have been relegated to job duty anyway.
It would seem that the problem lay in one of the team's members – it wasn't Aiden English, who, by most accounts, is a hard worker and well-liked individual backstage.
Instead, it was Simon Gotch, who, as he claims, wasn't exactly friends with English. In fact, he didn't get along with too many people backstage, which is why he had no problem walking away from the WWE early last year. This gimmick could have had legs, but only if English was teamed up with someone he gelled with onscreen and offscreen.
8 Deuce 'N Domino
The 1980s were a great time to look back on the early days of rock 'n' roll and that time when American carmakers tried to outdo each other in the tail fins department. Films like Back to the Future, Stand By Me, and even the original TV movie adaptation of Stephen King's It (technically a 1990 film) all paid homage to the '50s and early '60s in the right way. As such, Deuce 'N Domino (and original valet Cherry) probably arrived on the main roster with those gimmicks a good two decades too late, and by 2008, they were being managed by Maryse, with WWE not minding the disconnect one bit – '50s greasers entering to a contemporary dance-pop ring theme.
Personally, I liked this gimmick, but not too many other WWE fans did, and it was mainly because their gimmick came along at the wrong time. It also would have been better if they had a better wrestler in Deuce's place – as we've often pointed out, Sim Snuka didn't exactly take after his father as an in-ring competitor.
7 Rhythm And Blues
Now how about a '50s-inspired tag team that actually debuted in the right decade, right around the time that movies and TV often hearkened back to the decade of Elvis Presley and James Dean? Following his record-breaking reign as Intercontinental Champion, the Honky Tonk Man was paired, almost at random, with another one of Jimmy Hart's clients at the time, Greg "The Hammer" Valentine. With the new tag team in place, Valentine started dyeing his hair black and dressing like Elvis, but even Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder could see that this was a poor fit.
If you consider the gimmicks they were best known as, Honky and Valentine were like night and day, the former being more about flash and dash, the latter being a curmudgeonly (in and out of the ring apparently) sort who was best known as a technical wrestler. This team could have worked better if Honky was partnered with someone else, maybe even Marc Mero, who could have appeared in the WWE years before his actual debut and worked his Little Richard-inspired Johnny B. Badd gimmick.
6 The Allied Powers
Let's see where Lex Luger was in 1995, after he proved to be hardly the same charismatic worker Hulk Hogan was, after his limited tools spelled an unceremonious end to his main event push, after that silly feud with Tatanka over who sold out to Ted DiBiase. With creative having little for Luger in the mid-card, he was paired up with Davey Boy Smith in a team called The Allied Powers, and that didn't work either – they were often close, but not quite there when it came to winning the tag team titles.
The reason WWE didn't choose to push The Allied Powers as tag champions was obvious – Luger and Smith didn't have much chemistry, and the pairing of two musclebound guys with similar power-based move sets just wasn't interesting enough.
Perhaps the gimmick would have worked a few years prior when having a great look was far more important, but that would be contingent on either Luger or Smith being replaced by someone else who meshed with the other. Or another combination of an American and British wrestler.
5 All Those 'New' Tag Teams In The '90s
In the mid- to late 1990s, the WWE seemed to have an obsession with "new" versions of classic tag teams. With Shawn Michaels moving up quickly in singles, Marty Jannetty formed The New Rockers with Leif Cassidy, who was a clean-shaven Al Snow combining the names of two '70s teen idols. Jim Cornette introduced us to "Bombastic" Bob Holly and "Bodacious" Bart Gunn, aka The New Midnight Express. Dennis Condrey, Stan Lane, and Bobby Eaton those two weren't. We also got to see The New Blackjacks, as Messrs. Mulligan and Lanza were replaced by Barry Windham (Mulligan's real-life son) and Bradshaw, with both men dyeing their hair black and rocking thick black mustaches.
You get the idea here – the originals were so good, so why fix something that isn't broken, or in The New Rockers' case, why anchor the new version on someone who didn't have anything close to his ex-partner's skill and charisma? It shouldn't surprise any of you that none of the aforementioned teams lasted anywhere as long as their original versions.
4 The Beverly Brothers
Similar to the Mean Street Posse several years later, The Beverly Brothers were introduced to WWE fans as a pair of spoiled young men from the upper crust of society. It was probably a good idea to team them up with The Genius (Lanny Poffo) as their manager – sure, he wasn't as compelling as his brother, the Macho Man, but he played his role well. That wasn't the case with Beau and Blake Beverly, who were so flat and unremarkable that they're very easy to forget, even for those who watched WWE's product in the early '90s.
This was a gimmick with potential, and if you fast forward to the present, you'll see guys like EC3 who perfectly play the role of entitled "one percenters."
But the Beverlys – Wayne Bloom and Mike Enos in real life – lacked the personality to make the gimmick work, and they were reduced to glorified enhancement talent right around the time their WWE stints were wrapping up.
3 Los Matadores
Yes, that's right – Puerto Rican bullfighters in 2013. We're seriously talking about Puerto Rican bullfighters in 2013. Renaming Tito Santana "El Matador" and giving him a bullfighter gimmick toward the end of his WWE run was such a disservice to the man, so what made WWE think the gimmick would work in the "Reality Era"? Undeterred, WWE repackaged Primo and Epico, renamed them Diego and Fernando, with their Puerto Rican heritage being the big elephant in the room, and gave them a mascot in El Torito, whom we guess was over with the kids.
Obviously, most everyone else thought Los Matadores was a bunch of bull.
Naturally, people saw through the silliness of the gimmick, and even if WWE got a couple of Mexicans or Mexican-Americans to play Diego and Fernando, we're still not sure it would have gone over. The gimmick definitely would have worked, however, if it was launched in the cartoonish 1980s, and not in the current era.
2 The Young Stallions
Sometimes, if you're a WWE jobber, good things happen to those who wait. That's what happened to Paul Roma and Jim Powers in the late '80s, as WWE decided to give them a break after a couple years of them laying flat on their backs and counting the lights. Theirs was supposed to be a feel-good story, a pair of underdogs finally making good and getting their hands raised for a change. There was one little problem, though – Roma and Powers hated each other.
Granted, this was not a gimmick that had much of a shelf life. If you took away Roma and Powers' previous place in the card, there wasn't much to write home about for The Young Stallions. But if WWE really wanted to give a slight push to a previously jobber tag team, they might have done better with a pair of guys who didn't have the Stallions' good looks or well-defined physiques – Duane Gill and Barry Hardy, anyone? That would have certainly beat WWE's failed Toxic Turtles experiment that came a few years later.
1 The Ascension
Oh, you know this one's going to be easy. The Ascension is an uninspired gimmick because they're essentially ripping off Demolition and the Legion of Doom, and the gimmick can work with another tag team because the aforementioned Demos and Road Warriors already made it work, decades ago. Hell, the Powers of Pain were even more inspired as Demolition/Road Warriors clones, and that's despite the fact they were made up of the Barbarian and Warlord, the former an average-at-best worker, the latter outright terrible in the ring.
Although they dominated NXT's tag team scene, holding the Tag Team Championships for almost an entire year, The Ascension were toast almost from the moment they made their main roster debut.
It was almost as if they were set up to fail for being derivative facepaint-and-spikes ripoffs, and now that they're barely on television, it might not be much longer before WWE wishes Konnor and Viktor the best in their future endeavors.