Dakota Kai and IYO SKY finally win the Women’s Tag Titles
On the Sept. 13 episode of WWE Raw, we saw Damage Control’s Dakota Kai and IYO SKY receive their second crack at winning the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship in a rematch against champions Aliyah and Raquel Rodriguez.
Kai and SKY got this second chance due to a “controversial” finish when these teams met in the finals of the tag team title tournament several weeks ago, as Aliyah scored the pin on Kai despite Kai not being the legal participant.
This time, the heels left no doubt. With one Kai-chiropractor to Aliyah, the challengers righted the wrong and brought home the gold. Of course, the decision to put Kai and SKY over her does make you wonder…
Why didn’t they put the titles on Dakota Kai and IYO SKY during the tournament finals?
If WWE aimed to get Rodriguez (who the promotion apparently likes and wants to push) and Aliyah over with a surprise title win, it should’ve booked them to beat Kai and SKY clean in the tournament finals. Instead, it gave them a flukey win to “protect” the more star-studded team (which ultimately does nothing for anybody).
They also should’ve held the belts for at least several months as opposed to this several-week run where they wrestled short, forgettable matches against patchwork teams that did little to dissuade fans from viewing them as weak titleholders.
In short, WWE accomplished nothing with the upset win outside of keeping the fans guessing with finishes. Aliyah and Rodriguez have no more credibility with the audience than they did before they won the belts and now WWE has to work even harder to restore the momentum Kai and SKY lost with their unexpected loss.
The weeks WWE spent attempting to legitimize the babyface champs could’ve gone to a pair of heels that are also hoping to establish themselves as a reliable upper midcarders, wrestlers who have only been in front of a main roster audience for a few weeks. Showcasing them as champions would’ve helped them much more than holding off for a few weeks while believing that it has time to build them and the tag titles up.
To be fair to WWE, though, it does. No one should fault it for wanting to highlight as much new talent as possible, and the idea of conditioning fans into buying into unpredictable finishes isn’t a bad idea.
Also, if Kai and SKY hold the titles for a year and put on, as Sheamus would say, banger after banger after banger, no one will remember this blip on their path to reviving those titles (especially whenever Sasha Banks and Naomi return to feud with them).
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But for a company that is still trying to convince wayward fans to return with the promise of shrewder, more efficient booking, this seemed like a very wasteful gamble to make.