Bayley says WWE can do more with the Women’s Tag Titles

Alongside Sasha Banks, WWE SmackDown star Bayley will forever hold the distinction of becoming the first-ever WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions (this new version, not the ones the Jumping Bomb Angels and The Glamour Girls fought over in the 1980s). But those championships have endured a lot of inconsistent booking since that fateful night at Elimination Chamber 2019.

At best, WWE has treated the tag titles as a prop that serves as a means to advance singles programs — or bog them down. Sure, fans have seen some bright spots, but the belts have mostly represented the company’s erratic booking of the women who aren’t at the top of the pecking order and general contempt for tag teams.

Suffice to say, WWE has barely explored the possibilities the Women’s Tag Titles would bring to the product, a sentiment Bayley has also echoed.

Bayley says that the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championships could be used better.

Appearing on Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions podcast, Bayley said that she wanted her and Banks’ second tag title run to last longer than it did and talked about how the increased and improved usage of the belts would be a boon to the women’s division (h/t to Fightful’s Jeremy Lambert for the transcription):

"“I still feel like there’s so much more they can do with the tag division. We had so much fun in our second run because that was what we really wanted to do and I wish it could have gone on longer. Just to be a couple of idiots on every single show. I wish we could have done NXT and Raw more. That was how we wanted the tag titles to be represented. Now they have them in NXT. It’s awesome. We were on house shows every week and we’d get thrown in tag matches just to get everyone on the show. We just did a tag match, but we never learned the psychology of tag team wrestling. Once we did that, we sat down with [Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler], learned from them and fell in love with it. It made me want to fight [for the tag team titles] even more. It also gives something for all the girls to do. It also makes you fall in love with wrestling in a different way.”"

Bayley and Banks’ first reign with the titles lasted only 49 days before they lost them to The IIconics in a Fatal Four-Way tag team match at WrestleMania 35. The duo won the titles back in the June 5, 2020 episode of SmackDown, this time as heels, usurping Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross as champions. However, this run with the belts was mainly a pretense to advance the impending singles feud Bayley and Banks would engage in throughout the fall of that year.

Their second reign reached 85 days (as recognized by WWE) before they dropped them to Shayna Baszler and Nia Jax — the latest incarnation of the “squabbling singles wrestlers teaming up” trope at the time — at Payback 2020.

You can hear more of what Bayley said on the podcast by clicking this link.