Wade Keller mentioned in his latest audio update that the team of Cade and Murdoch were no more. Vince McMahon apparently decided that he liked Murdoch, didn’t see anything in Cade and so put Murdoch in the singles ranks and sent Cade to the dog house. For a supposed "chosen one" Trevor Murdoch hasn’t fared too well since splitting up from Lance Cade. His only moment of not looking like a fat jobber was when he offered his services to Vince as new Raw GM when he was made to look like a stupid fat jobber for thinking he was qualified for that role. I rather liked Cade and Murdoch as a team. They had the whole "odd couple" thing going for them – the glitzy cowboy Cade and the ugly cowboy Murdoch. But after a few wins and the tag belts they were jobbed out and the rest is history. Vince McMahon has decided that tag teams are a joke and should be treated as such. He’s wrong. What follows aren’t actual Vince quotes but they represent the beliefs he apparently has towards his wrestling company.

"If someone is good enough to be a singles star then I want them in the singles division."

In other words, why put someone in a tag team when they have the potential to be a superstar on their own? Sound reasoning you might think. Scott Steiner was undoubtedly held back by his less able brother and wasted his prime years in a tag team which had done everything it was ever going to do by the early 90s. But contrast that with three of WWF’s biggest players in the late 90s boom period – Shawn Michaels, Davey Boy Smith and Bret Hart. Imagine the Rockers, Bulldogs and Hart Foundation had lasted as long as Cade & Murdoch did as a team. Would any of those three have become anything in WWF had they been thrown into the singles division after three months? I doubt it. It took those years in a highly entertaining tag team division for fans to embrace these under-sized men. They weren’t six-four and two-eighty, they were awesome wrestlers and through the tag division they got to show that. Fans saw them as championship calibre wrestlers and the size barrier was broken. Without the tag team division (and without it getting pushed as one of the three biggest things in the company, along with the WWF title and the IC belt) none of those three superstars would’ve meant anything in WWF.

"Tag team wrestling doesn’t draw money."

Well obviously it doesn’t if you make it a jobber division. Looking back to the 1980s you had the Hart Foundation vs. British Bulldogs feud main evening many of the non-Hulk Hogan house shows. Over in the NWA the wars between the Rock and Roll Express and the Midnight Express (throwing in combinations of Russians, Horsemen and Road Warriors) drew sell-out crowds across the Crockett Territories. Japan and Mexico reagularly headline shows with tag team matches, Vince McMahon senior ran a "tag team territory" for many years. Like everything else in wrestling it is what you do which ultimately determines whether something can work. If they’d told everyone in early 1987 that Andre the Giant could barely move, was drunk the whole time and had done a bunch of jobs recently as he knew his career (and probably his life) were coming to an end, the Wrestlemania III main event wouldn’t have seemed so special. They didn’t do that – they played it up and made fans desperate to see it. It’s called "promoting" and it is what wrestling promoters used to do before Vince McMahon went mad. When your tag team champions are doing 2-on-1 jobs for singles wrestlers it is no wonder they don’t draw when placed against two men for the titles.

"No one wants to watch tag team wrestling."

In this era of TV ratings being more important than the number of tickets sold we have to distinguish between what people will pay to see and what people will watch for nothing because they enjoy it. The high point of Smackdown’s five years on air (certainly the highlight since the ‘brand extension’ neutered it as far as the big stars go) was a three way tag team feud between Angle/Benoit, Los Guerreros and Edge/Rey. This was Paul Heyman’s booking at its finest. The tag belts were involved, numerous classic tag matches were shown on Smackdown and on PPV, and the fans really got into the programme. It was the best tag team wrestling WWE had seen since the aforementioned Harts-Bulldogs matches in 1986. Heyman understood tag team wrestling and knew how to squeeze every ounce of action, drama and emotion out of every match. Then Heyman was removed and replaced by Stephanie’s lackeys and it all fell apart. I don’t think anyone has cared about the belts ever since. Five of the six men involved (all except Chavo Guerrero) went on to bigger things (though some had already tasted main events) but they all appear to have relished the chance to do some actual, gosh-darned wrestling for a change.

"The only belt belts that mean anything is are the world title titles"

The tag titles aren’t alone in being dismissed as worthless pieces of tin. The IC title, the US title, the cruiserweight title and the women’s title are junk 95% of the time. If by some miracle one of those belts suddenly gets over (the most recent example is Ric Flair winning the IC title from Carlito) the promotion does its best to kill it (Flair’s feud with HHH is not only non-title but is basically about how worthless the belt is). It is rare that Vinces McMahon and Russo agree on anything but both seem convinced that wrestling title belts are just props and are irrelevant relics of a bygone age (before Vince McMahon shocked the world by revealing that it is all a work). As if to prove a point, the TNA (NWA) tag belts were involved in one of the most anticipated and pushed matches on their last pay per view as the Dudleys (Team 3D) faced America’s Most Wanted for the titles. Far more people cared about seeing that match than the NWA title bout between Jeff Jarrett and Rhino. Rather than seeing the logic in that, McMahon would no doubt reply with one of the following –

That’s just the minor league – what do they know about Sports Entertainment

That’s what you get for making Jeff Jarrett your world champion

The fans are wrong

Who is "TNA"?

Wrestling is (or should be) about variety. Big guys, small guys, a couple of hot women, some comedy, a bit of blood, maybe a gimmick of some kind, high flying, wild brawling, singles, tag teams, science, chaos, cheating, authority, anti-authority, victory, defeat and at the end of it the paying customers should leave feeling happy. Having a tag team division which pits jobbers against each other in boring matches for worthless belts is a waste of time. Either kill it or cure it. If Vince can be bothered he’ll regain a valuable part of his show. Otherwise he might as well retire the belts and decree that tag team wrestling is something top stars do occasionally to produce a TV main event that doesn’t interfere with singles PPV matches, not a division in its own right. He’ll be missing out on the next Hart/Michaels/Bulldog but why should he care when he has Big Show, Kane and Snitsky?