I do think part of drawing is the guys who are headlining, probably the biggest part, but I also think there are extraneous factors that do make a difference that are rarely brought up in such discussions. It's hard to discuss anyone's drawing power at a high level unless you are talking about someone iconic like Hulk Hogan or Steve Austin. Most headliners have good periods and bad periods, good towns and bad towns, good opponents and bad opponents, etc. To me, to really look at drawing, you have to also look at things like ticket prices, weather, the local economy, crime where the arena is located, air conditioning and heating in the building, the booking of the last show in the building, night of the week and time of the year. I think you also have to, when possible, even look at differences in how the show was advertised. Maybe the last show did 10,000 with primarily television advertising. This time, most advertising was on the radio and the show did 8,000. You can't really blame that on the performers. Maybe a market lost syndication, or it was moved to a less desirable time slot. That stuff of course requires a lot of deep digging.
I remember reading a story that fascinated me. Sting vs Luger headlined a show in Raleigh, NC, on New Year's Day in January 1990 that did the best WCW gate in that town in 18 months. The WWF noticed and hired away their local promoters who were longtime Carolinas mainstays. Their assigned mission was to fight dirty. Within weeks, WCW lost one of their syndicated shows in Raleigh, and the other show was moved to 3am. WCW came back three weeks later and attendance dropped by 75% with a Flair-Luger main event. Looking at those numbers with no context, you'd come away thinking Flair's time on top was up and that he needed to be replaced with Sting when that really didn't tell the whole story. And sadly, I think, mostly because of necessity and lack of information, that's often how we look at drawing. We have less information and come up with faulty conclusions. For every story like that, there are probably 50 or 60 more.