McGuire’s Mondays: The highs and lows of Roman Reigns and Solo Sikoa challenging Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens for the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Titles

By Colin McGuire, ProWrestling.net Staffer (@McGMondays)

Last Friday on Smackdown, two things took me by surprise. One, the show opened with almost an entire hour of wrestling. No fifteen-minute promo from someone not in the Bloodline who we half care about. No silly angle leading to a makeshift one-night program that has little to do with long-term storytelling. No nonsense. Instead, we got two triple threat matches serving as the end of the first round of the WWE Heavyweight Title tournament. And they were even pretty good matches, to boot.

The other surprising thing from the show? Roman Reigns tacitly announcing that he, along with Solo Sikoa, will take on Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens for the WWE Raw and Smackdown tag-team titles at Night Of Champions in a couple weeks. Now, this being the wrestling business, that can change between now and then. Perhaps one member of one of the teams gets written off the show and some shenanigans are forced to take place. Maybe another team is added to make it a triple threat. Shoot. There’s always a chance the match won’t even happen.

But as of this writing, on Monday, May 15, 2023, that’s the match that’s booked and that’s the story WWE wants to tell. And the more I think about it, the more I want to talk about it. So, as such, here are my highs and lows of what I believe is one of the more intriguing twists in the Bloodline story in quite some time.

HIGHS

* Well, I guess it’s worth saying one more time for the people in the back: The match announcement surprised me. In a good way, even. And WWE has a way of not really surprising anybody anymore. So, while a simple declaration of being surprised might seem simple, it means more than that. We hadn’t seen Roman Reigns since WrestleMania when he beat Cody Rhodes to retain all his titles (in, ironically enough, another example of somewhat surprising-ness). Where the Bloodline was set to go from there could have been anyone’s guess. Was WWE going to pull the trigger on the much-speculated Jey Uso/Roman Reigns program? Would Reigns move on to someone else? How would the family stay intact after the Usos lost their tag titles at Mania?

Of all the possibilities on the table, having Reigns be part of a team to challenge for the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Titles was one that hadn’t even found its way to my feeble brain until Friday night. It makes sense. While the rest of WWE competes for the lesser-than Heavyweight Championship, Reigns isn’t happy that his family lost some of the gold they had around their waists for so long. Not only does this mean he might get those belts back, but it also means that this time, those belts would join the other belts already draped over his shoulders. It’s a move that was hard to predict if only because Reigns has seemed above tag-team titles for many years. Not so, which leads me to my next high.

* All due respect to Kenny Omega and AEW, who tried to crown Omega with the vaunted belt collector gimmick a few years ago, but for whatever reason, the move didn’t do much for me. Omega’s belts were spread over multiple companies. One was Impact, and God bless Impact (because hell hath no fury like an Impact fan reading one of these Monday columns), but not even Kenny Omega could raise the company’s profile over an elongated period of time. The other was the AAA Mega Championship. That was fine and all – AAA is a hell of a sight to behold and those shows can get real wild, real quick – but AAA simply doesn’t have enough of a presence in the U.S. to warrant ballyhoo over an AEW star holding its biggest title.

My point is that the Roman Reigns installment of the belt collector gimmick is much more impactful, much more nuanced. And at this point, it’s been going on for so long that every move matters. If Reigns and Sikoa lose at Night of Champions, it’ll be a Big Deal because Roman Reigns just doesn’t lose anymore. To use a phrase the kids say, Roman’s turn as a belt collector just hits different. There’s a bigger grandiosity attached to it than there was when Omega popped up in the Impact Zone to square off with Rich Swann. Roman being half of the team that captures the tag titles will essentially mean he, himself is the tag-team champion because Sikoa has been presented as a subservient of Reigns who rarely talks, does what he’s told to do, and looks like a badass while doing it. That, of course, gets me to this final high.

* Roman Reigns and Solo Sikoa should beat Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens for the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Titles at Night of Champions. Now that WWE has put this part of the story in motion, I don’t see how there’s any other way to go. The company introduces another title. In return, they take a pre-existing title and put it around Reigns. It’s smart. If nothing else, it’s one way to keep the Bloodline story interesting at a time when I was nearly convinced that the saga had run its course and us fans were about to get tired of it. While that may be true for some, the idea of Reigns being part of the tag title picture injects a needed shot of adrenaline into the program for me.

Because, man. If that company puts those titles around those waists, it’s just one more notch in the “How the hell does WWE get out of this?” component that makes the Bloodline so compelling. Do all the belts come off Reigns at once when they come off? If so, how far away are we from that? I was of the belief that when Omega dropped one of his titles, he’d drop them all in short order, and that’s kind of/sort of what happened. With Reigns, I’m not so sure. There are ways to make him a tag champ for a period of time and still keep him strong while losing the tag belts (the Usos seem like the logical option to take those belts from Reigns and Sikoa should they win at Night of Champions, but perhaps I’m thinking too far down the road). In short, the idea to even make this match at all somehow adds an enormous amount of intrigue to a story I thought was almost entirely out of such a luxury.

LOWS

* Jamal Khashoggi. That name and his story have been enough for me to not feel great about the sports-washing Saudi Arabia has done in recent years, trying to get on the world’s good side after being a country that for decades has been a pretty bad place to be. When WWE started taking the money and running the shows there, a lot of people seemed exercised about how the company should stand up to the Saudi government and not sell out. My fear was this thought would eventually fade from the general discourse and with the inclusion this time around of Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens on the card, I do believe that fear has come to fruition. Yes, I know some political things have changed on the Saudi side, which for the first time allows Zayn to get into the country to perform as part of the WWE troupe and we can argue all day about the merits of the supposed sociological changes the country is making day by day.

But Zayn and Owens are two people I’ve grown to admire for their resolve. I believe them. Not just on pro wrestling television, but in real life. They display principle and that’s not easy to come by in a world as complicated as this. Something about them making the trip feels icky to me. There’s no two ways around it. I’m sure they have their reasons and I’m sure they’re justified and I don’t ever want to throw stones myself – we all have the ability to change our minds on things over time. But I think Zayn has done some Big Deal work for Syria with his Sami For Syria campaign – enough so that I often find it inspiring just to check in on where it stands from time to time.

And Owens, by most accounts, seems like the nicest family man in pro wrestling who never tries to con anyone into or out of anything. I’m not saying they owe anyone an explanation and I’m not advocating for them to back out; I’m just saying to know that Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn are actually going to make the trip to Saudi Arabia (yes, I know Owens competed in that weird Greatest Royal Rumble thing years ago, so it’s not his first go-around) is ostensibly indicating that there’s probably nobody left within WWE who will stand up internally to the company for making the decision to do business with the Saudi government. It’s sad. I don’t know what else to say. It’s just sad.

* Speaking of sad, another low, for as much as I’m advocating for Reigns and Sikoa to win those tag belts … well, don’t you think it’d be a little sad if Zayn and Owens only end up having those belts for about a month-and-a-half before dropping them? I wrote in this space a few months ago that the Owens/Zayn story is one of the most interesting and impressive in all of pro wrestling over the last 20 years. They finally team on the big stage, finally get some hardware and then … whoops, that’s all, folks. I’d like to see them dig into the tag-team role and have a meaningful run as champs. If they lose those belts quickly, what was this even for?

Was it to placate the fanbase who wanted to see Zayn end Reigns’s run as champion, even though WWE was most likely never going to do that? Was it a nod to Zayn for organically figuring out a way to get his portion of the Bloodline story over as hard and as deep as it did? Was it to soften the blow of Cody losing on the second night of WrestleMania? Or – and this is probably most likely – was it to set in motion the next chapter of the Bloodline saga, which may or may not include Reigns being part of the tag team that holds the titles, furthering the bubbling rift between him and at least one Uso? Whatever it is – and as intrigued as I’ll be if Reigns and Sikoa walk out as champs in Saudi Arabia – there will be a part of me that’s disappointed for both Owens and Zayn.

Because then what? Outside of Zayn turning back into being buds with the Bloodline and feuding with Owens, it’s hard to see something meaningful in either wrestler’s immediate future, should they drop those belts. That in mind, I don’t want to end this on a low, so maybe one or both of them turn their sights toward that new Heavyweight Title. And maybe Zayn finally gets a Big Time title run in WWE for once. And maybe Zayn and Owens turn out to be the best feud in the second half of 2023. And maybe in the end, despite decades of the wrestling business doing the complete opposite, everyone wins.

And above all else, the biggest winner would be the fans. Because as a lot of us have been saying more than ever recently, WWE is putting out a pretty good product for the first time in a long time. With the announcement of this tag title match, it appears that their winning streak isn’t poised to end any time soon.