Cross Examination: The Club is Getting a Raw Deal

A lot of head-scratching things happened on Monday night.

Donald Trump told the nation that not paying federal income tax made him “smart”. Julio Jones and Brandin Cooks combined for 3 catches and 29 yards in a football game where their teams combined for 77 points. Grover Norquist wasn’t brought up during the presidential debate.

But the most baffling development (OK, besides Norquist’s tweet) was The Club losing to The New Day for a second straight night and immediately falling out of the tag team title picture.

The Club – Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson – came into WWE with more hype than any tag team since the Dudley Boyz left ECW for McMahonland in 1999. They were part of the biggest non-WWE faction since WCW shut down. They were the most prolific gaijin tag team in New Japan history, winning the belts three times and holding them for a total of 601 days.

Although many WWE fans had barely seen them wrestle as a team before, just about everyone had heard of the Bullet Club and knew that Gallows and Anderson signed with WWE at the same time as AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura, both of whom debuted before WrestleMania. The Club got off to a solid start. They feuded with The Usos, the most prolific WWE tag team of the Reality Era, and won the only pay-per-view match between the teams at Extreme Rules.

After that, Gallows and Anderson helped out Styles in his feud with John Cena while chasing the tag team titles. They lost a four-way tag team match for the titles at Money in the Bank – a fine decision, as they didn’t take the pin and multi-man matches are not ideal times to crown first-time champions – and then helped Styles pin Cena later in the show. At Battleground, The Club lost to Cena, Enzo Amore and Big Cass, with Styles taking the pinfall from Cena.

To this point, there’s no problem with Gallows and Anderson’s booking. They’re good wrestlers and solid on the mic, but we’re not talking 2011 CM Punk-level brilliance – they’d been performing exactly as well as you’d expect. They looked like up-and-comers who will hold the belts at some point in the future.

They got drafted to Raw and put in a feud with New Day. Perfect! Now these big heels who dominated in Japan are going to dominate the tag team champs and ruin their record-setting title run.

Well, not exactly. The teams didn’t even hold off until SummerSlam to have their first two-on-two match. Big E rolled up Gallows to win on Raw, and then Gallows and Anderson attacked the New Day and smashed Big E’s little buddies against the ring post, putting him on the disabled list with a “groin contusion.”

The move made The Club seem goofy, not intimidating. It wasn’t helped by the fact that Gallows and Anderson cut promos over the next few weeks showing off Big E’s “balls” in a jar and threatening to do the same to Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods. Setting aside the fact that contusions don’t cause body parts to fall off, nothing about these promos made the Club funny or scary. It’s such juvenile humor that it can’t possibly be funny in a PG setting, and seeing these big, bald, tattooed guys holding up a jar of testicles just made them seem weird.

Even with those stumbles, a Club win at SummerSlam would have made them legitimate. They got the win, but it was after Big E interfered, so New Day still had the belts. The crowd popped for Big E’s return, but not overwhelmingly so. Had The Club won the belts and continued beating down Woods and Kingston before Big E came out, Gallows and Anderson would have gotten more heat, and Big E would have gotten more cheers.

Nevertheless, the Club was still belt-less, and they didn’t get pinned or submitted at SummerSlam, so they rightly got another shot at the belts. But before that, there was the awful Old Day segment.

Yeesh. These guys are more entertaining in the first 3 seconds of a Talk’n Shop episode than they were in this.

On Raw the next week, The Club cleanly won a non-title match to officially get a rematch, which, at Clash of Champions, they lost thanks to Francesca interference when the ref wasn’t looking. The next day on Raw, they lost cleanly, knocking Gallows and Anderson out of the title picture.

It’s understandable that WWE wants New Day to hold on to the titles for as long as possible to break Demolition’s record. However, that mindset is hurting the rest of the tag team division. Enzo and Cass, who are just as over as New Day, weren’t even on the Clash of Champions card. The new No. 1 contenders, Cesaro and Sheamus, weren’t a tag team until Monday. The other two tag teams, Golden Truth and the Shining Stars, are primarily comedic teams and won’t ever be legit challengers to the belts without a gimmick tweak.

The Club has taken the worst of it, though. They came off decidedly worse in the New Day feud, and as heels, they won’t get any sympathy out of it. Now their only path forward is likely a continuation of their feud with Enzo and Cass, which should be entertaining but is a feud that should last a while, because neither team has anyone else to work unless Cesaro and Sheamus stick together after losing to New Day. That’s a feud that should be happening during WrestleMania season, with the dominant Club cruising after ending New Day’s reign with the upstart Enzo and Cass determined to prove themselves. That’s a feud that could co-main event a Raw PPV and be a highlight of WrestleMania.

Alas, this isn’t Smoky Mountain Wrestling, and tag team wrestling isn’t a priority. After the Tokyo Dome matches, the Talk’n Shops and the hilarious Highspots shoots, the prospect of two former Bullet Club members teaming up in WWE was tantalizing. Unfortunately, if Gallows and Anderson continue to be booked like they have been, we may end up looking at their NJPW time and realize that’s when they peaked.

Wrestledelphia.com staff writer Evan Cross can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter at .