4 WWE Women’s Wrestling Takeaways: Rousey, Rinse, Repeat

Credit: WWE.com

With the Royal Rumble pay-per-view event just days away, WWE took one last stab at hyping the big night with Raw and SmackDown this week. Could another episode of “A Moment of Bliss” and yet another Ronda Rousey tag team match really succeed in building sustainable hype for one of the biggest shows of the year, though?

WrestleMania season is upon us and I’m getting that tingling feeling I always get at this time of year. The 12-year-old in my soul is starting to get giddy with anticipation, but to be fair this happens without fail every year, no matter how good or bad things might be going for WWE in the creative department.

I’m too loyal for my own good, I guess. And who cares? The Royal Rumble is this Sunday and I’m pumped, but this week of television was still a mishmash of predictability, awkwardness and low-key creative genius.

New Feud, Same Booking

This week we were treated to … yet … another … Ronda Rousey tag team match. Women or not, the champion being involved in some variant of tag team match five hundred times in a row is getting extremely old and I’ll be honest: I’m totally over it. I was getting pretty hyped for Ronda’s match with Sasha Banks this Sunday at Royal Rumble, and I’m still sold, but the build lost all my interest when I had to sit through another one of these matches.

How many times is this going to happen? It seems like anytime Ronda Rousey has an upcoming title match she teams with Nattie, or on rare occasion someone like Ember Moon, and faces her future opponent and a partner in a tag team match. That’s essentially the formula for building a Ronda Rousey title defense and it’s starting to feel way too similar to the way the writers, without fail, hype every Brock Lesnar title match by having Paul Heyman give a ten-minute speech with Lesnar standing beside him like a mute.

I actually really love tag team wrestling, but it peeves me when the weekly booking is so unimaginative as to see the world champion in this kind of scenario because WWE doesn’t know what else to do with him or her. This Women’s Championship match between Ronda Rousey and Sasha Banks is going to blow the roof off the place, I’m sure, but the build for every big Rousey match in the form of this repetitious weekly tag team booking is one hundred percent lost on me. Not a fan.