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When Jey Uso defeated Bron Breakker for the Intercontinental Championship, it rubbed many a member of the WWE Universe the wrong way.
Sure, the idea of the title change made some sense; WWE pulled the exact same card with Breakker in NXT using Dolph Ziggler in the Uso spot, and Shawn Michaels did the exact same thing with Trick Williams and Ethan Page over the past few months. Still, when you look at Uso's title reign in full, holding the belt for 28 days with a single successful defense before dropping it back to Breakker? Well, that's straight out of the Vince McMahon playbook.
For a month, WWE would hype up Uso, sell some Yeet-themed merch – he sells a ton of merch – and thank him for 15 years of service, and in return? In return, Uso got to say he was a singles champion in WWE, the 91st performer to hold the IC Title in WWE history, and could then return to The Usos as The Bloodline storyline starts to heat up a bit more.
Does it make Uso look better that he couldn't win the IC Title based on his own merits and instead had to be given a title reign with just a single defense? No, if anything, it makes him look worse because he couldn't rack up a few more wins to make things look legit before handing off the belt.
Does it make Breakker look better? Again, no, as he, too, only had one successful title defense, and just when it looked like the second-generation Steiner was going to establish himself as a Gunther-esque force worthy of a year-long title reign, his reign came to a crushing end.
So really, what was the point of any of this? Because right now, it feels like the goal was to make the 188th Intercontinental Championship reign have the name Jey Uso next to it, and in the future, be it a year, five years, or 50 yards in the future, fans will look back at the title's lineage and see his name in the list, likely when his grandchildren are running the show under The Bloodline moniker alongside an AI hologram of Paul Heyman. Right now, that might feel incredibly cynical, but hey, if Paul “Triple H” Levesque wants to play the long game, he will ultimately be proven right in the end.
Jey Uso was already hyping up an Usos reunion before RAW
In the lead-up to his IC Title loss to Breakker, Uso sat down for an interview with Metro UK where, for better or worse, he let it slip that he was interested in reuniting The Usos for brand new tag team matches against the Motor City Machine Guns and the Lucha Brothers, when they eventually land in the promotion.
“I would like to – and if I did go with the Motor City Machine Guns. I would like, I would like for my brother to do [it with me]. I would like to do it with Jimmy because I feel like with Jimmy -Sami [Zayn] is easy too, but I feel like with Jimmy, man, we are the best tag team in the world. We’ve done everything,” Uso told Metro. “But I feel like if we did have a comeback, man, I would like to run with those guys [Shelley and Sabin], a couple guys from NXT, maybe the Lucha Bros. But they gotta walk through this door.”
Were The Usos ever going to stay broken up forever? No, this always felt like a way to heat up a group that had rapidly run out of steam by the end of their 622-day reign with the SmackDown Tag Team Titles. But handing Jey a month-long title reign before the inevitable happened felt more like charity than anything that made anyone come out better in the end, which is sort of the whole point of a professional wrestling storyline.
