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In GCRN WarZ Ep 28 we begin the Tag Team Wrestlers Tournament! OptimusSolo, TV’s Mr. Neil, Matthew Stewart, and DJ Valentine are your fatal four way of wrestling fans, who are here to kick off this WarZ Tournament that pits 32 Wrestling Tag Teams against each other! Listen in as we break down the merits of each team, and just how a match between them will end up. #UNLEASHTHEWRESTLINGGEEKINYOU and VOTE for who you think is the BEST OF ALL TIME WRESTLING TAG TEAM!
View the GCRN WarZ Wrestling Tag Team Entrants on our Facebook page HERE!
Geeks:
Kevin “OptimusSolo” Thompson
TV’s Mr Neil
Matthew Stewart
DJ Valentine
UNLEASH THE GEEK IN YOU and listen to us at the following links:
Man some major recent tag teams are missing. I would be APA over Doom also no New Day? They rock haven’t you heard.
Kev can expand on this more, but we were trying to fight the recency bias when crafting the 32 contenders. It’s hard to cut the numbers down to only have 32 entrants. I mean if we went crazy and have 64 entries…. then new day might have made it! LOL! Thanks for listening and commenting as always!
Unfortunately, I think there’s another issue at play here. At the time Doom was a major tag team, wrestling wasn’t anywhere near as popular as it was when APA were around. It’s as much not a recency thing as it is a market size thing. Heck, APA isn’t even all that recent.
As much as I hate to appeal to popularity, it’s kind of the nature of the beast here. The success of the talent is almost entirely determined on how popular they are and not by how many belts they won. You can have teams like Doom, Public Enemy, the Smoking Gunns and even the Quebeccers who won belts, but I don’t think I would have considered them for such a list. The belts aren’t real.
What is real is that APA had a connection with the audience in a way that Doom never had. They were on fire with the audience. You had way more people watching in the late 90s than ever before, because the product was way better. That has to count.
I have to agree with the commenter on this one.
I will disagree with one statement “because the product was way better” – IMO the product between 1997-2000 was utter garbage. (Hence why WCW went out of business etc). The product was never better than about 1987-1997. It’s had some good moments in the past 10 years as well but the late 90s was not good. It just wasn’t.
We’re talking 1989 WCW versus 1999-2003 WWF. I dunno. Other than Ric Flair going against guys like Sting and Steamboat, I don’t see much going on for WCW in that particular era. I would still put that latter WWF era over it. In some cases, I think I would agree that the earlier WCW product had some high points, with better in-ring work. But overall? No way.
For argument sake, If we compared 1989 WWF to 1999 WWF, I think there’s no question that the early days win hands down. I just don’t think WCW had much going on at the time. Just within that particular era itself, I would have picked a team like the Killer Bees or Strike Force over Doom.
Also, my timeline of quality is a little different than yours. They (WWF) handed the lead writing position to Vince Russo around 1996, if I’m not mistaken. For the entirety of his tenure, I was almost completely checked out of WWF. Then he brought that crap to WCW, although I won’t COMPLETELY blame him for the fall of that company, seeing as there are far too many people to blame. I just did not care for his “crash TV” approach to content, and that’s exactly why that period is not remembered very fondly to me.
I can tell you the exact moment when WWF became watchable again (for me, anyway). It was the night Chris Jericho showed up on Raw.
Oh my god, I zoned out and completely forgot that the whole reason we’re comparing Doom to APA is because Ron Simmons was in both teams.
Actually, on that point alone, I think it’s no question that the latter team is vastly superior. Farooq was a much more solid character in his latter WWF days versus his tenure in WCW.
We may not be as different as you think. I was strictly talking about wrestling as a whole in the late 80s and early-mid 90s, not just WCW. I also hated the Vince Russo era big time. He single handedly made me stop watching wrestling altogether. I’m not nearly as big a fan of the wwe attitude era as most. I far prefer the era’s that came before and after. WCW was all about NWO era for me. I really didn’t watch a ton prior to that.
I understand where you are coming from. New Day was considered as they did make 2 of the reference lists I looked at. However, I find it really hard to include groups in these types of lists that are currently still establishing their place in history. It’s too easy for people to vote for who is in the public eye at this exact time and in my opinion time will tell when and where they should ultimately rank.
As far as APA…they were on the outside looking in. They for sure would have been in if it were a 64 team bracket (as would New Day most likely) On a personal note, APA did nothing for me and I was not a big fan, but I promise that is not WHY they were left off. With only 32 slots a lot of teams were left off as is the nature of the beast.