Remember that point last year when every wrestling nerd you knew felt the need to describe NXT's women's division as "stacked"? One year later and the concentration of the best women's wrestlers seems to have moved to somewhere else within the WWE landscape — namely, the increasingly busy women's tag-team scene.
Look at the main-eventer names we've seen fighting over the tag belts since the turn of the year: Rhea Ripley and Iyo Sky, Charlotte Flair and Alexa Bliss, Asuka and Kairi Sane, even Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez back at Saturday Night's Main Event. Then there's the smaller teams that have thrown their collective hats into the ring, like Nia Jax and Lash Legend, Bayley and Lyra Valkyria, and Giulia and Kiana James.
Stacked is one word for it — but overcrowded would be another.
At various points over the past month, it's felt like every second former champion has had their head turned toward the women's tag titles — a prize that most of them ignored until quite recently, and which featured only on a minority of PLEs last year.
There is some precedent, since we've seen these multi-team tag feuds on the men's roster before. It was only a year ago we had that fun segment when "SmackDown" general manager Nick Aldis literally needed a Sharpie and a whiteboard to map out the various ongoing rivalries. But there was a big difference — those were mid-carders and established tag teams. Eight of the women we've seen in these tag matches in recent weeks used to be world champions.
To make matters worse, the two actual world champions on WWE's women's roster — Jade Cargill and Stephanie Vaquer — have both been short of worthy opponents. Cargill went more than three months without a single defense of her title after beating Tiffany Stratton in November. And Stephanie Vaquer has spent much of the past three months butting heads with Nikki Bella — a part-timer who never looked like a serious contender.
What's happened in the tag scene during that time?
Well, for a start, you had RhIyo win the belts back on the Netflix anniversary edition of "Raw." That has since led to a slow-build feud with Flair and Bliss, a team whose whole "Can they really work together?" gimmick has been running for almost a year now. What has it produced so far? Well, there was that one cutesy segment in the Rumble.
Despite ongoing tensions with Flair and Bliss, RhIyo have instead been defending their belts against a host of other teams, appearing on both "Raw" and "SmackDown." By now, the star-studded tag match between WWE's two biggest teams is starting to feel like one of those future matches WWE teases out for ages without actually taking steps to make it happen. (Cody Rhodes vs. Randy Orton, for example.)
Presumably, RhIyo vs. Flair and Bliss is in the works for WrestleMania, which might be no bad thing. I've suggested before that it could even be an outside contender for the main event of Night 1. We've seen Rhea Ripley smash expectations at 'Mania twice before (vs. Flair in 2022, and last year's award-winning triple-threat), but she's never been given her chance to close the show. Maybe this is finally her chance.
The problem, though, is the longer you string this thing out for, the higher the expectations will be when it actually happens. If the end result is going to be a run-of-the-mill PLE tag match — huge entrances, slow build-up, lots of finisher spots, an ending that generates tension between the losing team — fans might feel the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
The other issue is what you do afterward. The usual expectation with these big-name tag teams is they'll eventually implode. Indeed, WWE has been teasing the tensions between Flair and Bliss since the first moment they actually teamed together — which probably means it will be the other side who breaks up sooner, thus giving Triple H the chance to gloat about fooling us again.
Either way, you're still going to end up with at least two of your biggest stars holding those tag belts. We've seen that happen before with various big names — Bianca Belair, Randy Orton, even Cody Rhodes was briefly a tag-team champion during his side-quest year in 2023 — and it rarely leads to anything particularly memorable.
Who knows, maybe it will be different this time. By the time we get to Backlash in May, we should have an answer to that question. Given how much time they've already invested in this storyline, you have to hope WWE has some kind of plan for the long term.
Because surely they wouldn't be doing all of this if they didn't … right?