Has WWE Hit The Reset Button On The Real Americans?

[Jack-Hammer]

Since their formation, The Real Americans have meshed well as a team. Both Cesaro & Swagger have good technical & mat skills and both are pretty formidable in terms of power, especially Cesaro. As far as their success as a team, it's been somewhat mixed as they've won some matches & lost some matches. At HIAC, they lost to Los Matadores, which is something that pretty much everyone expected to happen anyhow. Twenty for hours later on Raw, however, they had a surprisingly strong & competitive match against Cody Rhodes & Goldust in a nontitle match. Even more surprising than the match being competitive was Swagger & Cesaro picking up a clean win, giving Cody & Goldie their first loss as a tag team.

I was expecting Swagger & Cesaro to have a rematch with Los Matadores in ending with the same result or the heels picking up the win to set up a rubber match later on. Since the rematch didn't happen, maybe they've decided to scrap the program and build The Real Americans into a consistently strong team and viable challengers for the tag titles.

There's a report from F4WOnline.com that might support that guess. According to the report, WWE has penciled in a Fatal Fourway match for the tag team titles is planned for Survivor Series. Cody & Goldie will defend against Rollins & Reigns, The Usos and The Real Americans.

I doubt Swagger & Cesaro will walk away with the titles, but I'd very much prefer them being booked as strong contenders for the titles and a strong team altogether. They're too good, in my eyes at least, to be wasted on what essentially amounts to a semi-comedic feud against Los Matadores. After a couple months of strong & consistent booking, maybe they'll wind up with a run for the titles given that, reportedly, Cody & Goldie are set to break up around or at the Royal Rumble with Goldie turning heel.

 

[LoudClearVoice]

I completely agree and I think that Colter is just too good to managing an irrelevant team. Time to take the Real Americans out of the tag team jobber status and elevate them to contenders. Individually, they're not that great but as a team, I like them and Colter is gold. I think they need Colter doing a promo before or after every match of theirs. The other team doesn't have to be foreign, he can just rip on them and say they're not real americans for whatever reason. Other than the Shield, none of the other teams can really talk or have anything interesting to say.

 

[ASKane]

I think The Shield are done. The booking and win for the Real Americans, the Wyatt Family attacks and the Shield tension during the promo are all leading to The Shield breaking up. The Real Americans are becoming the top heel team going for the titles, The Wyatts are getting the same style of push the Shield debuted with and I think WWE can only do this if the Shield are moving out of the way.

 

[Hard Hit Prince]

First of all I for one am super excited for the WWE tag team division, mainly because every team has great workers that can put a quality match up easily and yes, I'm putting Tons of Funk is this predicament. However the push for Swagger and Cesaro isn't what I would call a reset or a sudden realization that both guys are very talented workers, no, no... the real reason is that they realized that they need viable heel tag teams to go after the titles, once The Shield is taken out for good and since The Wyatts are busy, using the Real Americans was pretty much last resource.

I mean it's good for what it is, but don't expect it to be something worth watching or whatever. Obviously it's not good for the hierarchy of the division to see the champions being beat by a team that lost to a fairly new one without giving the showing that Goldust and Cody gave. It was something that I didn't enjoy from yesterday's Monday Night Raw but as I said, I feel like that was a need to give some other team valuable time and at the same time turning them into viable contenders once The Shield gets out of opportunities.

I also think that obviously Antonio Cesaro is the focus of the team and that more exposure will make the break up even better once Cesaro turns babyface, which I expect to be sooner rather than later. The Real Americans didn't reset, just got a little push that I expect not to turn into anything more than some wins on free tv with nothing on the line.

 

[Dirk]

I love the Real Americans, but not in an ironic way.

That vignette with a similar voice to the Jack Daniels ad and the yellow flag (you know the one) was heartwarming, even for a non-American like myself. They're great in the ring and Uncle Zeb could just as well be Father Christmas... I think they have a lot of potential to be a face team.

I get the feeling that because they are an older team than LM or the Wyatts and because they didn't have the same booking as The Shield, there isn't enough buzz to go around for these two (three) Real Americans.

 

[The Eighties]

The Real Americans were put over strongly against the PTP and Tonnes of Funk over the last few weeks and then got a big clean win over The Rhodes last night, so it does seem as if they are graduating them from perennial jobbers to contenders, as long as we forget the blip of losing to the new comedy team.

I think if Zeb modifies his spiel a bit then this could see The Real Americans as the team to dethrone The Rhodes by the end of the year, especially if The Shield are split up.

Personally I'd be cool with that, I think Cesaro and Swagger look like they have worked hard on being an actual team as opposed to being two singles guys killing time until hey can get another singles push, and their matches are usually pretty good.

 

[Rhodes2TheFuture3313]

The Real Americans are very over as you could hear off of the screen the positive reaction they got when their music hit. This is good for all parties. A fresh feud for Cody & Goldie and Swagger & Cesaro finally get a shot at the titles as they've been maybe THE BEST tagteam in the WWE since MITB.

 

[chicagokmc]

Wouldn't be surprised if the Shield interferes, helping facilitate losing the belts to the Real Americans. This sets up the Real Americans - Los Matadores feud that's been simmering (and continues the Shield/Rhodes issues).

 

[Slash-LN]

They aren't done with Los Matadores by any means. Even during their match last night the commentators still continued to talk about their issues with Los Matadores.

You just can't have the same matches week after week so they have to mix it up. On top of that you have to have both teams pick up wins against other teams to remain credible.

There's a weird situation going on right now because Los Matadores was feuding with 3MB then started feuding with Real Americans randomly and then last night picked their feud with 3MB back up. So they a lot going on right now.

I don't know if it's the WWE pushing the reset button on Real Americans or if it's not knowing what they want to do with Los Matadores.

 

[The Butcher]

I wouldn't go so far as to say that WWE hit the reset button on The Real Americans. Not yet, at least. This is really one of those situations that I'll have to see play out, because it could go either way. The feud with the '92 Santanas makes sense from a gimmick perspective, and a Zeb Colter vs. El Torito match seems like something they wouldn't pass up. Jack and Antonio getting that win over the Rhodes Bros. was a curious decision, but it's very possible that it was merely done to give Zeb's boys a good win after losing to Los Matadores. I'm with Slash; it's hard to tell what WWE's got planned at this point.

 

[justinept]

If the WWE hit the "reset button" on The Real Americans, then it would be just another knock against the WWE writing team. Hell, just that they let The Real Americans go over the Rhodes brothers on Raw deserves much more criticism than it has received this week - but alas, the WWE writing team has been booking for mediocrity for years. So them playing that card on Monday was probably just written off as par for the course.

None of this is to say that I dislike The Real Americans. I think they have a tremendous gimmick that hits on a very hot-button issue. I think Zeb Coulter is one of the best mouth pieces in pro wrestling history. I think Cesaro is one of the most talented in-ring performers in the WWE, and that Jack Swagger's size and athleticism combination is as impressive as any wrestler in the company.

But not 24 hours before the WWE writers decided that Cesaro and Swagger were the "right guys" to get the first victory over the tag champs, I watched them get embarrassed by a gimmicky tag team and their "pet bull." I watched that and I thought they'd just been buried by a joke of a tag team - and their ungodly awful "pet bull" - and that we'd seen the end of them as a formidable threat in the division. For me, when El Torito took down Cesaro at the pay-per view Sunday night, it killed any credibility that team had.

For them to come back the next night and take out Cody and Goldust was just God awful booking that made the tag champs look incredibly weak. But hey, it makes sense in the WWE landscape --- one team has been booked to look weak, the other team has been booked strong, so let's balance the equation and have the weak team go over the strong team. That way, they'll all look mediocre. And that, ladies and gentleman, is why the WWE can't create stars. They're booking everyone for mediocrity.

 

[Mustang Sally]

As far as their success as a team, it's been somewhat mixed as they've won some matches & lost some matches.

In other words, they're a mid-card team that's getting the job done. Finally, the company has stopped trying to push Jack Swagger as a main event wrestler, something they did twice in his WWE tenure. While a top-notch technical wrestler, he simply could never inspire sufficient interest as a personality, even though WWE tried their best.

Antonio Cesaro has a similar problem. He can do some super things in the ring but just isn't that compelling a character.

So, WWE did the logical thing; they teamed the two, gave them a big-mouthed rebel to speak for them (which instantly overcame a weakness possessed by both wrestlers) and, most significantly, recognized that this team belonged on the mid-card, not the main event.

Good things have resulted, and a tag title or two may yet come their way. Nothing wrong here.