WWE Raw: A.J. Styles and Omos should hold the tag titles for a while

In their inaugural match as a duo at WrestleMania 37, A.J. Styles and Omos unseated one of WWE’s most successful teams, The New Day, to become the new Raw Tag Team Champions. The match itself was built around the intrigue of how Omos would look in his first official match. He wasn’t asked to do much, and it helped to have Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods act as human pinballs for him, but the big man passed his first in-ring exam.

Now that Styles and Omos hold the belts, the usual questions now follow. How will this work? Will their matches be any good? Who will they face first? How long will their reign last?

The Raw tag team division’s mercurial state makes at least three of those questions difficult to answer, but the last one should be the easiest to figure out.

A.J. Styles and Omos should hold the Raw Tag Team Championships for a while.

While fans have only seen it in action in one match, Styles and Omos potentially have an interesting formula that should mesh well with the handful of teams on the Raw roster. Much like Owen Hart and Yokozuna in the mid-1990s, Styles — the workhorse of the team — can take all the bumps and handle the meat of most tag outings while Omos comes in for limited stretches and runs through his power moveset.

If WWE plays this right, they could use this to establish Omos as a sort of an impenetrable fortress that keeps the rest of the teams away from the tag team titles for a few months, which would give the team that eventually beats them a significant boost in credibility, even if Styles gets pinned for the gold, as it still means a great deal to beat a star of his caliber.

If WWE chooses to put the belts back on New Day after some time has passed, that could work, too. A story where Kingston and Woods pick up some momentum before trying their hand at beating Styles and Omos again and beating them would qualify as the sort of long-term storytelling that is often missing from WWE’s main roster product.

Of course, that scarcity of tag teams combined with the overabundance of WWE’s televised hours could mean that this could last for a couple of months before the promotion moves on to something else. And, on the other end of the spectrum, that mix of tag team paucity and oversaturated time allotment means that having Styles and Omos run through all the teams with little difficulty isn’t optimal, either.

For this to work — assuming this is the direction WWE takes — the creative team has to find the balance between pushing Styles and Omos as a formidable team while building up a stable of viable contenders (aka basic wrestling booking).

If WWE can pull that off — I know, big if — it could lead to productive results for Styles, Omos, and the rest of the tag team division.