Wrestler Rankings – March 2020

Single Wrestler Rankings: March 2020

Welcome . . . or Welcome Back to the Wrestler Rankings

It is acceptable to skip the write-up, go straight to the Wrestler Rankings below, and then come back to the write-up if you want. I know that’s what I would do, so I can’t really blame you for doing the same. That practice would also probably fire me up because reading those rankings without any context will definitely raise red flags. So, if you already made the journey to the bottom and have now come back to see why things are the way they are . . . Awesome. Hopefully I can answer the question. If not, just email me: [email protected] or follow me on Instagram.

Wrestling Rankings – So Much Data

I want to follow professional wrestling like a statistician follows baseball. I collect tons of data, pour through it all, and then share useless factoids that only I care about at fancy cocktail parties that I host for all my friends. Ok, that last part might have gone over the top. Still, my first career was all about freeing up and organizing huge amounts of financial and contract data to allow my customers to make business decisions. I want to apply those concepts to pro wrestling. The likelihood of anyone using the data is probably low, but if nothing else . . . I could use it at my fake cocktail parties.

If you click into the box scores at the top of the page, you’ll see a lot of the stats that I track from match to match. At the end of January, I compiled all my data from the first month of matches. The data left me confused, and I couldn’t derive any meaning from it. I knew Jon Moxley and Aleister Black were on a serious roll, but nothing else really made sense. I decided to be patient, let more data accumulate, and come back to my analysis in March.

Well, March is almost over, but now we have this whole global pandemic. Regardless, the major companies I follow (all WWE brands, AEW, Impact, NWA, NJPW, ROH, MLW) held 741 matches so far this year. If not for COVID-19, I assume the number would be over 1000. Those 741 matches also included 568 different wrestlers. That’s enough data to start rankings.

What Does the Data Tell Us?

Once I organized the data from those 741 matches by applying rules, logic, and weighted scores, I started to learn things. Of course, it is Pro Wrestling – a form of entertainment known for setting traps to trick the fans – so it may all mean nothing. You do have to be careful because data is harsh. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t twist data. You can spin or twist a story around the data, but the data doesn’t change. In other words, you can lie about the data, but the data can’t lie to you.

Raw Women’s Division – Wrestler Rankings

Let me give you an example of how the data messed with me. No matter how I weighted the data, I expected Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch to rank at the top of the Raw Women’s division. The data says otherwise.

Charlotte Flair is 4-0 in singles competition with one of those victories being the Royal Rumble. Surely, the only Raw woman ahead of her in the rankings must be Becky Lynch, right? No. Becky has a 3-0 record, so she rates below Charlotte. In fact, the rankings require that you average 2 matches per month. That’s something Charlotte and Becky failed to achieve in 2020, so they don’t even make the ranking. Harsh.

So now you’re asking . . . if not Becky or Charlotte, then who is the top woman on Raw? Nobody. Through three months, nobody on Raw has had enough singles matches and victories to make the rankings. Asuka has enough matches, but she only has one singles victory (so she doesn’t qualify).

In my last “I Was There” post, I wrote about how the Raw Women’s division is the best thing on the show. It seems crazy to me that I can maintain that viewpoint without having any women rank on my list.

What Else about the Wrestler Rankings is Weird?

Without the cruiserweight division, NXT and NXT UK would only have three people meet the ranking requirements (Keith Lee, Finn Balor, and Dakota Kai ).
Just one person in all of New Japan has wrestled five singles matches. That person is a young lion (Gabe Kid). He lost all of those matches and doesn’t qualify to be ranked.
There is a special rule in the rankings allowing wrestlers to be ranked when they have less than five matches if they have 2 victories and over an hour of ring time in singles competition. Nobody from New Japan would qualify without this rule.
Aleister Black has 13 matches. That’s equivalent to the total of Charlotte, Becky, and Asuka combined. What does that tell you about Black’s trajectory? Does it say something about the women?
The only WWE World Champion to rank was Bayley. The other champions (Goldberg, Becky Lynch, Brock Lesnar, Adam Cole, Rhea Ripley, Walter, Kay Lee Ray) didn’t have enough matches. Andrade (U.S. Champion) and Keith Lee (North American Champion) did have enough matches to rank.
That in contrast to AEW where the top champions (Jon Moxley and Nyla Rose) sat on top of their division. Same goes for Impact (Tessa Blanchard and Jordynne Grace) and New Japan (Tetsuya Naito).
ROH hasn’t had that many shows this year. Dragon Lee ranked because he had some matches in New Japan that I count toward his overall record.

Should I change my rules? Maybe I should to some degree, and maybe I will change some going forward. I won’t change the fact that I expect wrestlers to wrestle in order to get ranked. Maybe I’ll drop the average to 1.75 or 1.5 matches per month, but there will always be a minimum number of matches.