I can’t wait to see if Big E & Drew McIntyre can coexist (for the third straight week)

A while back, when - in the midst of the usual spate of rematches - WWE was running concurrent storylines where Raw & SmackDown’s top men’s titleholders were both refusing to accept matches with the challengers we all knew they were going to end up facing at SummerSlam, I complained it about it.

Complaints on the internet? Shocking, I know. But WWE is overusing another booking trick, and if they’re doing it...

... so will I.

Cain touched on this in his always discussion-worthy preview for the Oct. 18 Raw: tonight’s team-up between WWE champion Big E and Drew McIntyre will be the third straight Monday the Crown Jewel opponents are partners in a tag match.

It’s not exactly the same situation. The past two weeks were impromptu affairs, proverbial Teddy Long specials that developed as a result of others showing up while the two babyfaces tried to speak about their rivalry. We still got plenty of talk from the announcer crew about how or if E & Drew would be able to stay focused on their opponents (on Oct. 4 they could, on Oct. 11 they couldn’t). This week, their match was set-up in advanced, so we get the official WWE jargon on the company’s website:

After the all-out brawl that took place following their tag team match on last Monday’s Raw, can Big E and McIntyre coexist long enough to put down The Dirty Dawgs?

Using the same narrative device every week would be bad enough if this was the only storyline where WWE was using it. But they’re also using it on NXT. At least for the pairing of NXT champ Tommaso Ciampa and his Halloween Havoc challenger Bron Breakker they don’t use the word “coexist”...

They may be on opposite sides of the ring come Oct. 26, but for now, Ciampa and Breakker will unite in an effort to take down GYV. Can the tentative allies work together long enough to earn a victory, or will Ciampa and Breakker head into Halloween Havoc less than 100 percent thanks to GYV [Grizzled Young Veterans]?

Admittedly, seeing as our job requires us to watch all WWE’s programming, this kind of stuff tends to get under our skin more than it probably does for fans who can dip in and out. But if you can’t come up with something else for babyface opponents to do in the build to their big matches, maybe stop booking face vs. face bouts?

We’ll see what happens tonight, I guess. My money would be on E & Drew coexisting until after they beat Dolph Ziggler & Robert Roode.

Just like they did two weeks ago.