Hey Scott,
As AEW tries to balance both a traditional two-person tag division as well as a trios division over 3 hours of national TV, I suspect that problems might emerge keeping both divisions fully stocked with capable and credible contenders.
In my experience, trios titles only really work in a few situations. When they are the only title that is held by multiple people, they act as tag belts (i.e. what Lucha Underground did). When they are used alongside traditional two person tag titles, I have found they only really function in two ways. You can do what Lucha companies (and New Japan) do and just have the trios titles mean nothing and have them passed around like a pack of camels and basically they're a prop for some group, or if you have a heavily stable based company you can use them to give shine to one stable that probably isn't holding a top singles or traditional tag title (also you need to regularly run trios matches so the match format matters).
Now, while there is room to explore and innovate, I do think that its inevitable that one of the tag divisions is going to be ignored. Right now we've seen how the top teams in AEW are gearing up towards the trios division and the Acclaimed were left with, well…the Ass Boys. Managing titles is hard, WWE had split divisions for their tag belts and that basically always ended up with one of SD or Raw having total bums compete for gold.
I don't know if I have a grand thesis here, but maybe less belts would be better.
Thanks,
I think I got scalded by the burning hot take of “maybe less belts are better”. And yes, that’s proven every week that they book title matches on Rampage and Dynamite and ratings for the shows continue to drop anyway. They very much need to consolidate.