It’s time to re-consolidate the WWE and NXT Women’s tag divisions

Over the last few weeks, WWE has apparently caught the unification bug. The promotion has already booked top heel Roman Reigns to merge the WWE and Universal Heavyweight Championships via his win over Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 38. The same will happen with the Raw and SmackDown Tag Team Championships.

Whether these developments are building to the end of the second brand split remains to be seen, but given WWE’s struggles with creating singles AND tag team stars, merging those respective titles makes plenty of sense.

In fact, WWE shouldn’t stop there. In terms of the tag teams, the integration efforts should extend to the main roster and NXT women’s tag divisions.

Knowing how thin the WWE and NXT women’s tag team divisions are, the promotion should look into merging both of those championships.

Much like the men’s tag divisions, all one needs to do to argue for unifying the NXT and WWE women’s tag titles is point to the lack of depth in both tag divisions. The main roster tag division had even gotten to the point where it only had one team — the then-champions, Carmella and Zelina Vega — before WWE smushed together a bunch of random women to face them at WrestleMania. Putting the titles on Naomi and Sasha Banks hasn’t fixed this.

Down in NXT, the scarcity of duos manifested itself in this year’s women’s Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, which featured a grand total of two full-time teams in the eight-team field. The creative team then made things worse by booking the winners to essentially say “Yeah, we actually don’t want the tag titles. We’d rather go after the singles title as individuals”. This was after winning a TAG TEAM TOURNAMENT, mind you.

And lest you think that this was a consequence of the brand transitioning to its current technicolor iteration, the more-beloved black and gold version struggled to get the titles over, too. After all, the titles were introduced as a result of a convoluted Dusty finish and then took the titles off the first champions less than an hour after literally handing them the belts. It’s not exactly the booking strategy you want to employ to prove how much better you could handle a women’s tag division.

In short, the WWE should’ve never split the main roster and NXT tag divisions, to begin with. Much of what made fans so intrigued when WWE originally introduced the Women’s Tag Titles was the possibility of seeing dream matches between NXT and main roster stars. Of course, WWE never really cashed in on those potential bouts, but deciding to eliminate any chance of those encounters happening wasn’t the way to rectify that.

Instead, you have two divisions that feel more diluted than they already did. Now, this also speaks to WWE’s general inattentiveness to tag team wrestling. Knowing that, it’s safe to say that simply squishing the women’s tag divisions back together won’t force WWE to competently book the tandems. The teams will still need wins and time to tell full stories — as well as, you know, actual teams — to alert the fans that the tag matches are worth their time and attention.

But if WWE had one fewer belt to worry about protecting and more teams to work with between Raw, SmackDown, and NXT, it might make that task a lot easier.