The State Of The NXT Tag Team Division

With the call up of Heavy Machinery and a lack of well built tag teams, Scott Mcleod takes a hard lok at the state of the NXT tag team division.

A few weeks ago it looked like NXT was teasing Heavy Machinery as the Undisputed Era’s next challengers for the NXT Tag Team Championship.

I assumed this match was going to be built for Takeover Phoenix but instead the match took place on this week’s NXT. Heavy Machinery put in a good effort taking advantage of their strength to toss Roderick Strong and Kyle O’Reilly around.

Undisputed Era didn’t need to rely on interference to retain instead taking advantage of the smallest opening. Undisputed Era end the year as they began, as NXT tag team champions, which I think says a lot about the current state of NXT’s tag team division.

I’m not discrediting Undisputed Era as champions because Fish and O’Reilly have experience as a team and O’Reilly has developed good chemistry with Strong. Also the longer they have the titles the more dominant the look.

Having said that, I have to think the reason they’ve held the titles as long as they have is because there aren’t a lot of credible teams to take the titles from them. Heavy Machinery could have been a good shock win but now this is the second time they’ve failed to take the titles so it’s unlikely they’ll get another shot foe a while.

War Raiders were probably supposed to be the next challengers and maybe would be the team to finally take the titles from Undisputed Era. It’s been building to that for months but the team being injured in War Games which hindered their plans. It feels like Heavy Machinery were rushed into what was going to be War Raiders title match. Depending on the severity of the injuries War Raiders could get the shot at Takeover.

Undisputed Era can’t hold the titles forever and will have to go up eventually. When they do what teams are going to be left? Street Profits, Oney Lorcan & Danny Burch, War Raiders and Heavy Machinery are all faces. The only real heel team I can think of are the Forgotten Sons who after a few more months of build could be great heel tag champions. Mainly cause they’re the only current heel team.

I think War Raiders would be better as heels. It would make them more interesting as champions they new dominant heels everyone’s trying to dethrone. Better than what they are now which is big guys with beards who like vikings.

The Mighty had potential but Nick Miller recently parted ways with NXT. At the moment the tag division is looking very thin. They need to really build up some teams from people who are currently in the Performance Center.

Looking at the current state of the division makes me wish Mustache Mountain had stuck around longer. I get it they want them to be big parts of NXT UK but with the taping schedule they could have done both for a while. It also wouldn’t have made their NXT Tag Team Championship win feel like more than a cheap pop in the UK.