On the night she became a WWE women’s tag team champion for the first time, Ronda Rousey issued an open challenge to the company.
Rousey and her longtime close friend, Shayna Baszler, won a fatal four-way match on “Monday Night Raw” to become champions, defeating the teams of Raquel Rodriguez and Shotzi, Bayley and Io Sky and Sonya Deville and Chelsea Green.
In a conversation with The Post afterwards, Rousey was quick to point out that none of these teams are on the level with herself and Baszler, and that she doesn’t see much other formidable competition on the horizon.
“Well, the lack of competition is really the problem,” Rousey said. “I mean, we want to be the most active champions out there. I want to be able to defend this title every week and even twice a week on both ‘SmackDown’ and ‘Raw’.
“But with how dismally shallow the women’s division is right now, there’s not enough women around here to keep us busy for a month. And so that’s the biggest challenge that we have is to get this company to actually care and invest into this tag division.”
Rodriguez and Liv Morgan, who had to vacate the titles because Morgan sustained a shoulder injury, could be a fun program once Morgan returns, but that’s probably at least a couple months away.
The team of Bayley and Sky would be a good matchup for the tag team belts on paper, but their Damage CTRL faction is currently teetering on the brink of dissolution in the WWE storylines. They have been together the longest, while the other two teams were put together recently.
Most of WWE’s top females stars such as Asuka and Rhea Ripley are singles champions or tied up in other storylines such as Becky Lynch being in a feud with Hall of Famer Trish Stratus. Charlotte Flair has taken time off from the company since her loss at WrestleMania 39 in April.
There are a number of star women’s wrestlers who are no longer with WWE, including Sasha Banks, Naomi, Nia Jax, Ruby Riott and Mickie James, all of whom could have been a part of worthy teams for the tag champs if they were still with the company.
“It was like the entire women’s division just got stripped clean,” Rousey said, referring to the time between when she left WWE in 2019 to become a mother and returned in 2022.
“And now we’re the women that are the women that are left trying to piece together, you know, stories and a division, a tag division with around 10 women or even less on each roster. I mean, we’re trying the best that we can to make chicken s–t into chicken salad, and we made some amazing chicken salad (Monday night).”
Rousey and Baszler have known each other for a decade, since they were training for UFC, and Baszler was instrumental in recruiting Rousey to WWE.
Rousey said that the two have been lobbying WWE for “years” for the chance to wrestle together, since even before the women’s tag belts existed.
The history of WWE is littered with tag teams whose friendships in storyline could not endure the trials and tribulations of their programs, but Rousey is not concerned in the slightest that theirs might encounter a similar fate.
“No, I think that’s the one thing that really sets us apart from every single person, every single tag team in, in the history of this company is that we’ve, we came here already tested and we came here already closer than anyone’s ever been,” Rousey said.
“We’ve literally fought together, bled together, cried together everything. And so there’s nothing that’s going to tear us apart, especially not a fantasy-land company like this.”