A good looking belt mixed up in a bad feud

Trios match

Scorpio Sky & Sammy Guevara have hot potato-ed the TNT championship for months. Sky wants to put a stop to that, so the PPV card now features them & their friends.

The Road to Double or Nothing

When Scorp first beat Guevara for the belt on the Mar. 9 Dynamite, fans had already turned on Sammy & his girlfriend Tay Conti for a variety of reasons. Some read too much into the timeline of their relationship and Sammy’s previous one. Some didn’t like the public displays of affection and the “stay mad” catchphrase the deployed in response to the first group, or just recognized that as heel behavior and joined in the jeering. Some folks are just sick.

Regardless of the reasons, when the audience cheered for Sky while he recaptured the title at Battle of the Belts II, it looked like AEW was going to go with the flow and officially make the couple villains. That vibe mostly continued until Frankie Kazarian challenged his old SCU protege for the strap. Dan Lambert & Ethan Page helped Scorpio retain, then Sky swerved Kaz with a post-match apology that was cover for a post-match beatdown. Guevara & Conti made the save, and everyone was very confused about who we were supposed to be rooting for.

Along with all that, former UFC and current Bare Knuckle Fighting Championships fighter Paige VanZant had been brought in to feud with Brandi Rhodes. She left with her husband, so PVZ transferred her feud over to Conti since she’s a part of Lambert’s American Top Team, and he’s got beef with the Spanish God via Men of the Year. Tay wanted a match with VanZant as much as her man wanted to be the TNT champ for a fourth time. So they stole a bunch of belts from ATT to get the other heels to agree to a match at Double or Nothing.

Sky agreed, on the condition that if his team (with Page & Paige) won, neither Guevara or Kazarian could challenge him for the title again.

Confused? You’re not alone. It’s very hard to find anyone willing to defend this program, let alone asking for this match. But I want to say something nice, so I’ll just say that the version of the TNT championship Sky debuted on the go home edition of Rampage looks great. Can’t imagine how great it must look to folks who, like Scorp, are huge Los Angeles Lakers fans.

What to watch for

This belt...

And so you can root for this story to wrap up while booing everyone in & around the ring. Except for maybe Kaz.