An early sign that unifying the titles was a bad idea

The Bloodline (Roman Reigns & the Usos) vs. Drew McIntyre & RK-Bro

WrestleMania Backlash is looking weak.

This isn’t to say certain matches won’t be good and a couple programs aren’t interesting. But on a whole, this card screams “Skip me.”

Some of that blame could be laid at the feet of the unified WWE championships.

Roman Reigns winning both men’s titles at WrestleMania, in essence unifying them, always felt short sighted. (Reports seems to back that up.) Roman is on a legendary run, and it’s not as if he doesn’t deserve the accolade. And the image of him with a physical strangle hold on the titles is great. But it’s going weaken the overall product that doesn’t have much room to spare as it is.

Tonight’s underwhelming show is a prime example.

Normally, a WWE premium event will have at least a men’s title and a women’s title match to help anchor the show. They have about 12 shows a year so this helps make them feel somewhat worth while. Even if Roman wasn’t defending his title (which to be fair, he does often), the Raw champion normally would.

Now that they’ve merged the titles, they lack options for marquee matches for these shows. Now they’re teasing merging the tag team titles as well. Those titles are represented in a six man tag involving Raw Tag Team Champions RK-Bro teaming with Drew McIntyre against Roman Reigns the SmackDown Tag Team Champion Usos. That’s four title tied up in this one match where none of them are being defended. The sole title match on this show as of writing this is Charlotte Flair defending her SmackDown Women’s title against Ronda Rousey. That leaves WWE to carry a show with programs built around stories without titles, which is not a strength of this promotion.

The 6-man tag match is probably going to be entertaining, but it carries no stakes. It has all the intrigue that any random tag match on Raw or SmackDown does. At the same time, it monopolizes four titles.

This isn’t going to be a problem that confines itself to WrestleMania Backlash, especially if the Usos eventually unify the tag team titles. To be fair to Reigns, he defends his title at almost every pay-per-view. It’s not a Lesnar situation where the title may disappear for awhile. But if there’s any reason the title isn’t defended, which Roman is banged up and needs to miss a show or the story just doesn’t call for it, that special event is suddenly less special.

Unifying the titles isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But WWE has shown a dearth of creativity and it’s easy to envision they opt not to fill the void left by losing a major title. They could tell some strong stories to help make up for the lack of a title match. But there’s a good chance they won’t. And this isn’t even getting into the fact that Raw is a show that needs to have a title to help justify its three hours.

As for this 6-man match here and now, it’ll be fun. RK-Bro is super over. The Bloodline are killing it. I still enjoy the goofy Scottish Warrior. But it holds little stakes and it could portend a string of less exciting Premium Live Events in our future.

The Bloodline will face RK-McBro tonight at WrestleMania Backlash, starting at 8 pm ET on Peacock in the United States and WWE Network everywhere else. Keep it here at CagesideSeats.com for all your WrestleMania Backlash coverage.