What is the plan for the NXT Women’s Tag Team Titles?

On this past Wednesday’s episode of NXT, it was announced NXT Women’s Tag Team Champions Ember Moon and Shotzi Blackheart will once again defend their titles against The Way’s Candice LeRae and Indi Hartwell. Now, LeRae and Hartwell getting another title shot after losing clean to Blackheart and Moon at NXT TakeOver: Stand and Deliver, but it is reflective of the brand’s underwhelming usage of the belts.

When the NXT creative team went through all the trouble to create these titles, the idea was that WWE’s most consistent brand (which isn’t saying that much) would promote these straps in a way that its main roster counterparts seem either unwilling or incapable of doing with the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championships.

While the championships have only been active for a little over a month, that hasn’t come to fruition.

What are NXT’s future plans for the NXT Women’s Tag Team Championships?

Two episodes into NXT’s Tuesday night era, the writers have already charted clear directions for all of the other championships. “Cool” Kyle O’Reilly has stated his intentions to challenge for the NXT Championship (we even saw a brief staredown between him and current champion Karrion Kross prior to O’Reilly’s match against Cameron Grimes this past Tuesday).

Grizzled Young Veterans are fishing for another shot at the NXT Tag Team Championships, with Tommaso Ciampa and Timothy Thatcher angling for a shot of their own. Bronson Reed is still in the North American Title. Sure, some of those are also leading to rematches, but at least those wrestlers are winning matches before getting second chances instead of asking for them while mired in a losing streak.

The women’s singles division has gone a step further by, wait for it, lining up fresh challengers for NXT Women’s Champion Raquel Gonzalez (Franky Monet, Zoey Stark) along with getting Mercedes Martinez ready to challenge Gonzalez first. The creative team is also planting the seeds for a Gonzalez/Dakota Kai breakup in the near future.

This foresight, however, hasn’t been extended to the women’s tag titles; the very belts that the creative team deemed so necessary that they ran through the bad booking gamut — Dusty Finish in the Kai and Gonzalez/Shayna Baszler and Nia Jax match, handing Kai and Gonzalez the new belts a week later instead of granting them a rematch against Baszler and Jax, and having Kai and Gonzalez lose them less than an hour later — to introduce them.

The NXT writers could’ve taken some time out of their two-hour broadcasts to re-introduce some of the teams we saw in the inaugural Women’s Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic and/or script some segments where some of the already-established women on the roster pair up to win the belts.

Instead, we’re getting a storyline that seems to revolve more around advancing the “Will Indi Hartwell and Dexter Lumis get together?” storyline more than it does the tag titles.

For a brand that prides itself on being the “alternative”, positioning the tag team titles as secondary to whatever the main storyline is seems pretty in line with what fans see on Raw and SmackDown all the time. NXT hasn’t reached those cellar-level depths, but “better than the main roster” can’t become the standard for a brand that used to get so much of this stuff right, independent of ubiquitous follies on Mondays and — to a somewhat lesser extent — Tuesdays/Thursdays/Fridays.

There’s still plenty of time to correct this, but NXT still needs to do better with its women’s tag titles. If not, it’ll be time to wonder why the brand even bothered creating them in the first place.