WWE: Heavy Machinery fall short, but gain needed credibility

The SmackDown Tag Team Champions spent weeks calling Heavy Machinery a joke. Their performance against the champs at WWE Stomping Grounds may have helped change that narrative.

When Otis and Tucker, collectively known as Heavy Machinery, received an unexpected promotion to RAW and SmackDown Live last January, it would’ve been understandable if fans assumed the worst regarding their main roster future.

After all, this is a company that has treated their tag team divisions with, at best, indifference.

When a decorated and well-respected team like The Revival are forced to endure embarrassing segment after embarrassing segment on a weekly basis — while keeping in mind the potentially nefarious reasons behind those angles — what chance does a borderline comedy team have to get over?

Early on, those hypothetical concerns proved to be valid; the company introduced them in the creepiest way possible during Alexa Bliss’ “A Moment of Bliss” talk show on the Jan. 14 episode of RAW, and the duo has been more or less branded as goofballs ever since.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with lighthearted characters in WWE or any wrestling promotion, but in a division that has often fallen prey to Vince McMahon’s worst impulses as a booker and as a promoter, they felt like a reaffirmation of the status quo rather than a breath of fresh air.

Naturally, this made them the perfect foils for WWE SmackDown Tag Team Champions Daniel Bryan and Rowan. In the weeks leading up to their title match at Stomping Grounds, the champions made sure to point out the challengers’ status as less than ideal contenders at every turn.

Bryan and Rowan didn’t bury them by any means — with Bryan often explaining how formidable Otis and Tucker would be if they took their craft seriously — but the lines had been drawn, with Bryan and Rowan who claim that they want to uplift the division, facing a tandem that’s out to prove they’re more than midcard fodder.

In their aforementioned tag team title tussle at Stomping Grounds, Heavy Machinery may have accomplished that, despite losing the match.

The champions spent the bulk of the 14-and-a-half minute bout controlling the action with their tandem offense and Bryan’s strikes and agility, much to the delight of Tacoma, Washington crowd, who vociferously supported their hometown hero with cheers and chants of “Yes!”, “Please Recycle”, and “Buy a Prius”.

But the challengers often matched their opponents with some impressive power moves. Granted, it helped to have one of the best wrestlers of this generation bump around to legitimize their offense.

Even with that caveat, the upstart babyface duo more than held up their end, even breaking out some new moves to put over the importance of the championship match.

We even got Otis feeding off of Bryan’s “Yes!” Kicks (or whatever he calls them now) before he crushed Bryan with a sit-out powerbomb.

All of this fit snugly into the match’s overarching narrative: that the number one contenders were far from the laughingstocks that Bryan and Rowan surmised them to be.

If the match structure didn’t make that obvious, then the finish, in which the champions retained via a Bryan inside cradle on Tucker once he and Rowan exhausted most of their big moves to no avail, drove the point home.

Of course, the follow up to this will be key. The fluky nature of Bryan and Rowan’s successful title defense combined with the lack of tag team depth on the SmackDown side — at least, until Jeff Hardy returns from injury — likely means that this feud will continue for at least another month.

For McMahon and his creative team, they have a foolproof story for these four right in front of them: have Heavy Machinery inch closer and closer to unseating Bryan and Rowan as champs — with a cheap finish sprinkled in — before the duo finally get the job done and win the belts.

When this feud started, it felt like a placeholder program before the champs moved on to bigger things. But if this outing was any indication, WWE may have stumbled onto a story that fulfills Bryan and Rowan’s in-universe quest while giving Heavy Machinery the in-ring credibility they desperately need.