Last Word on Sports reached out to Travis Stowe to give a detailed analysis on the Royal Rumble. This is Part II. You can read Part I here.
Time between Eliminations
The events between eliminations has always interested me. It has always seemed to me that the eliminations tend to come in a flurry at the end of the match (rightfully as many of the wrestlers would be beaten and exhausted at this point) but there always seems to be a flurry of eliminations mid-match as well. I wanted to see when the flurry of eliminations happened in this match:
In this graph, the higher the dot, the longer it was in between eliminations. You can see that there are two stretches where eliminations are coming quite quickly. There is one at the end, as expected, and the other occurred from elimination 5 to 12. After this is a section I like to call the “comic relief section”. From elimination 13 to 21, a combatant would come in, cause a ruckus, one or two people would be eliminated, then we’d wait a while for the ring to fill up a bit. Sometimes its El Torito, sometimes it’s JBL, but really this is just a passing of the time until we can get to the final chapter of the event.
Finishers
It always seemed to me that there were far more finishers in the rumble than in an average match. I looked into this as well. I took a sample of 5 matches from NXT to get a base of how many finishers typically happen in a match.
Removing elimination attempts and entrances, we’re left with 533 events. Of these, approximately 5% of maneuvers were signatures or finishers. This matches closely with typical matches. I have only a small sample of other matches to compare to, but it seems that the average volume of finishers and signature moves is about equal to what we would see in other matches. Finally, a hypothesis proven wrong.
Successes and Reversals
Since we’ve moved on from eliminations, let’s take a look at some of the actual fighting and wrestling. I’m always fascinated by how often a wrestler successfully completes their maneuvers. One has to be careful not to be reversed too often during the rumble or you’ll find yourself out of position and about to be clotheslined to the floor.
Nine wrestlers managed to never get reversed during the match. Cesaro stands out as having conducted 30 actions without being reversed once. That said, we saw earlier that he had nine elimination attempts without a success. He clearly has a lot to learn about this match. Very skilled, but his efforts were in the wrong place.
Dolph Ziggler stands out to me as well. He had the lowest success rate of any wrestler of the group, tied with El Torito.
The other side of this coin is how good at reversing the participant is.
The two luchas are at the top of this list, which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. It’s interesting to see that Batista and Rusev are next. Their bruiser style makes their ability to reverse attacks very dangerous.
Rest and Relaxation
Lastly, I’ve heard people mention that they felt like CM Punk laid around for nearly half of the match. I didn’t keep track of the time between events, but we do have good tracking of the time each wrestler was in the match. I combined this data with the match’s events to see if CM Punk was as active as the rest of the combatants. It’s important to note that the actions total is both attacks and attacks-upon. This will give the best depiction of if a wrestler was resting a lot or not.
There are some very interesting data points here. The first is that it does appear that Punk rested a lot more than others. At 2.8 actions per minute, Punk was the lowest of anyone. The weighted average actions per minute was 3.77, nearly one more action per minute than Punk. Of course, it is now well known how beaten up he was at this point in his career, so I can hardly blame him. Furthermore, from a strategy perspective, why not rest as much as possible? It clearly served him well, as he was able to make it nearly to the end of the match. The other MVPs of the match are all also near the bottom of this table.
Lastly, this metric does a great job of depicting the “flurry” combatants, those participants that showed up, caused a bunch of trouble then quickly got eliminated. These guys are nearly all at the top of the list.
Royal Rumble Conclusions
With a more in-depth analysis of the event, a better picture is drawn. We can see the successful competitors and those that failed. We can see the stories in more depth and support the conclusions that we have made. I think that using stats like these is a fun way to look at the WWE world and try to bring something new and unique to a world that needs a fresh look.
