Alright, so, I recently got into this whole wrestling thing, and let me tell you, it’s a wild ride. I was checking out this year’s Summerslam, and I stumbled upon something called “star ratings.” I got curious about them and started diving in, and oh boy, it’s a whole can of worms.
First off, I learned that these star ratings were made popular by a guy named Dave Meltzer. But apparently, this system was actually thought up by Jim Cornette and his buddy Norm Dooley a long time ago. Basically, they rate wrestling matches from zero to five stars, kind of like how people rate movies. Sometimes, if a match is really bad, it even gets negative stars!
So, I started digging into how these ratings are decided. It’s not just about who wins or loses. They look at a wrestler’s win percentage, who they’ve beaten, especially the top dogs, and who they’ve lost to. It’s all about who you’re fighting. If you beat someone tough, your rating goes up. If you lose to someone who’s not doing so well, your rating drops. They do some math with all this, averaging things out and comparing wrestlers head-to-head. It’s a whole system!
After figuring out the basics, I went ahead and did the whole calculation process for this year’s Summerslam. I grabbed all the match results and the wrestlers’ stats. Let me tell you, it was a lot of number crunching. But it was pretty cool to see how it all came together, and I finally got the ratings for each match. It felt like a little accomplishment, you know?
Here’s the thing though:
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Not everyone’s a fan.
I found out that a lot of wrestlers aren’t too happy with Meltzer or this whole rating thing. Some think he’s too critical, and others just don’t like how much attention these ratings get. Some even have some serious beef with the guy, trashing him left and right online.
So, yeah, that’s my little adventure into the world of wrestling star ratings. It’s a bit of a controversial topic, but it’s definitely interesting to see how it all works. I just took the ratings for this year’s Summerslam that were published in something called the “Wrestling Observer Newsletter” and went through the whole process myself. It was a fun little project, even if it did make my head spin a bit with all the numbers!
