The Hype Bros are taking their sweet time breaking up

WWE likes to call SmackDown Live the “land of opportunity,” which is really just a way for the promotion to book wrestlers in number one contender matches even if they’ve been languishing in obscurity for weeks, or even months. It’s also a cheap way to get the entirety of the women’s and tag team divisions some TV time each week, by simply throwing all of them into a match together with the winner earning a title shot.

That’s what happened this week, as Chad Gable & Shelton Benjamin (winning but not around all the time), Breezango (doing amazing work in Fashion Files — whenever WWE decides there’s time for it — but not much else), The Ascension (never around, other than occasional appearances in Fashion Files), and The Hype Bros (they lose so much the team is in crisis) had a Fatal 4-Way to determine who would be next in line to challenge The Usos, who just defeated The New Day to win the SmackDown tag team titles at Hell in a Cell.

As noted, The Hype Bros were involved despite the fact that they’ve been losing so often they’ve openly pondered their future, wondering what they need to do to turn things around. This has resulted in the two coming close to turning against each other, because when things go wrong it’s easiest to point the finger at literally anyone else.

During the aforementioned number one contender match from this week’s SmackDown Live, they inched ever closer to the inevitable breakup:

And got even closer when they took it to social media after:

It’s absolutely an issue that WWE books the tag team division this way but perhaps we should simply be grateful one of the teams is getting a legitimate story involving at least one compelling character. Mojo Rawley, when he drops the “HE AIN’T HYPE” schtick, shows a surprising depth we should hope WWE will take the time to explore. That likely won’t happen as long as Zack Ryder is hanging around.

Tick tock.