WWE NXT’s Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic: What to watch for in its 2026 return

One of the most newsworthy items from WWE programming this past week was the announcement that the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic is returning. This Tuesday on NXT, the 16-team tournament, originally created in 2015, will kick off its 11th iteration. Earlier this week, NXT GM Robert Stone went on Busted Open Radio and announced the first entrants: the NXT Tag Team Champions, Vanity Project, and the AAA Tag Team Champions, the Wagner Brothers. NXT announced six more teams, including multiple former champions, on their X account yesterday, and went right back and announced the complete field this morning. With the action set to kick off in less than 48 hours, let’s look at the Dusty Cup’s history and what it suggests about who might win the 2026 edition. Dusty Classic’s origins date back to the late 80s In the late 1980s, one of the National Wrestling Alliance’s (NWA) marquee events was the Crockett Cup, a tag team tournament established in honor of Jim Crockett Sr., founder of Jim Crock