Emphasis continues to be placed on a once-dying tag team division

I reported a while back that, with Paul “Triple H” Levesque gaining more and more power backstage, basically running the company in the process, one thing he wanted to place more emphasis on was tag team wrestling. While the WWE‘s tag team division has never disappeared, it’s come very close, often featuring one or two tag teams at a time, with very few titles matches outside of television tapings.

That plan looks to be in full swing now, though, as the once dry tag team division is getting new life breathed into it week after week. In addition to more tag team matches appearing on pay-per-views, more regular teams are being formed and new teams experimented with. If you need more proof, on tonight’s episode of Smackdown!, General Manager Booker T announced that, because the tag team division was heating up once again (and if anyone’s an expert on tag team wrestling, it would be Booker T), he announced an 8-team tournament, with the winners facing champions Hell No! (Daniel Bryan and Kane) at the upcoming Hell in a Cell pay-per-view.

While there are a couple of thrown together teams in the tournament, most of them are already fairly well established. Tonight, we saw a little bit of both, as the first match took place on Smackdown! The newly-formed team of the Rhodes Scholars (Cody Rhodes and Damien Sandow) wound up defeating The Usos (Jey and Jimmy) in the first quarterfinal round match. Already, the Scholars are an early favorite to win the entire tournament.

We will see other matches over the next few weeks, and the pairings have already been announced. In the other three quarterfinal matches, the makeshift team of Santino Marella and Zack Ryder (who have teamed together occasionally in the past, but have never been a regular team) will take on International Airstrike (Justin Gabriel and Tyson Kidd), with the winner of that match taking on the Scholars in the semifinal round. We will also get former champs Kofi Kingston and R-Truth vs. The Prime-Time Players (Titus O’Neil and Darren Young), and Epico & Primo taking on the new team of Rey Mysterio & Sin Cara, another early favorite to win.

As it stands right now, I’m picking the Rhodes Scholars vs. Mysterio/Cara in the finals, with Mysterio and Cara likely moving on to face Hell No! There have been rumors of the masked duo getting a run with the belts already, so there is a strong possibility we could see new champions crowned at the PPV.