July 2013 Question Answer When I think about this, there's two major elements whichmake it rather hard to quantify: a) How do we measure "quality of matches"? For the first question, we need some kind of performancemetrics. I chose to use "Wrestling Observer Star Ratings 3 stars andhigher" for WWF/WCW/ECW 1985-2013 which are available on thestarratingslist.blogspot.com (This, of course, does activate a host of disclaimers: thislist is based on Dave's opinion, this is only for matches that he saw and choseto explicitly rate versus a general comment such as “very good match”, this isa rating for the entire match in the context of the time, place, crowd, etc.Lastly, this is a single rating based on his opinion at that point in timewhich is given to both performers.) Alternatively, I could take something like the WrestlingObserver Awards for Best Wrestler (or Technical Wrestler) and see if there is acorrelation between age and when people place. I didn't have a database ofthose results handy. Another alternative would be harvesting my OCELOTalgorithm to look at when do you reach your highest rating relative to yourage. (I'm still building that age database for WWF performers 1970+ since thatcovers thousands of people.) Lastly, I could take a thirdly subjective listsuch as PWI Rankings 1991-current and index that with people's ages. That alsocovers thousands of people, so that list is still being built. Thus, I ended up with the original proposition: the 3+ starratings list which was already in a form that I could quickly access. Second, how do you "credit" someone for theirmatch. Last week I looked "isolating the best singles wrestlers" basedon the same dataset. One thing that jumped out to me is that depending on yourmethodology, you can get some polar opposite results depending on what matchesyou choose to include. What I mean by this is that if you look purely at singlesmatches with two competitors (A vs B), someone like Kane does poorly (onaverage his opponent will drop almost 1/2 star.) However, if you includemulti-person singles matches (things like Elimination Chamber or Money in theBank Ladder Matches), Kane actually flips to be a positive quarter-star effecton his opponents. Why? Because those sorts of matches are, in general, prettygood and each person's individual influence on the match is somewhatdiminished. Some of this is because of a flawed approach I took (whichcounts feuds and thus overcounts feuds among multi-person singles matches), butsome of it illustrates my overall quandary - how much or how little effect doesanyone really have their (already very subjective) match rating? In essence, there is the false-positive that if you get goodfeuds when you're at one age and bad feuds when you're at other one, the finalimplication might be questionable whether it's a true representation of youractual skills. Other things that I believe will play a significant roleinclude WWE's age policies (only really exceptional draws/workers usually stickaround after they turn 40) and whether it's number of years of experience orpure age that matters more. With all of that said, I took a quick look at my data to seewhat it would say. (I again reinforce that this is a great question once I figureout exactly how I want to quantify all these conflicting thoughts!) Final Dataset: 339wrestlers (wrestlers on ratings lists that have known birthdays), 1,646 matchesfeaturing at least one of these 339 wrestlers and was rated 3 stars or higher(covering three federations- NWA/WCW, WWF/WWE, ECW). Things I'm seeing: 1. There's a lot of ways to compare the data. We could look at each person and figure out where theircareer "peaks" in respect to the rest of the rated matches. We couldlook at a wrestler's performance against other wrestler's in their same agebracket. We could look at average age for a match but that is a littledistorting (a 25 year old and a 41 year old having a match together is a lotdifferent than two 33 year olds). We could look at a matrix of age ofcompetitor A versus age of competitor B. Each of these approaches can yield adifferent conclusion. 2. Tag Match versus Singles Matches likely play asignificant difference in "peak ages". My initial analysis suggests that the age 34 to the age 36corridor plays an important role, especially in singles matches (where awrestler's average star rating appears to be consistently higher than at otherpoints in their career). Age 35 is a peak for tag wrestlers with strongnegatives from 36 to 41. In general, there seems to be 33 and below is tag wrestlertime and 34 above is singles wrestler time. There's some odd outliers (huge popat age 45 for singles matches which was driven by Terry Funk, Ric Flair, DDPand HBK/Undertaker) that would need to be normalized. Second approach: Let's use the votes of many wrestling fans to isolate some of the pro wrestling leaders each year. We'll start with an archive of 1980-2002 Wrestling Observer Awards (and runner-ups)... I suggested that a Star Rating List wasn't sufficient to capture everything so we would want to look at larger list - such as the Wrestling Observer Awards Balloting. |
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