El McKell

I’m thinking with where Taichi ended up, the fact that we still haven’t seen Hirooki Goto yet, that we have seen Rhea Ripley & that Sheamus did worse than 2016….top 100 is going to be 2010s NJPW heavy

6 people (at least) voted for Road Warrior Hawk but not Road Warrior Animal. And I appreciate them for it, trying to analyse which person in a tag team is actually better and rewarding them for it is an admirable endeavour.

Discord invite links have expiration dates for whatever reason: https://discord.gg/f7pf8VXz that should work.

The wrestler who I think is to 2026 what Jerry Blackwell was to 2016 is Dump Matsumoto. She finished 288th last time around appearing on 12 ballots. This time there was a lot of hype for her in the thread and in the discord, the results will show a big Dump resurgence.

With Hector Garza and Natsuki*Taiyo we're finally getting some wrestlers who got votes in 2016 who are finishing in a better position in 2026 than they did in 2016.

In some sense Terry Rudge falling so low is a shame because I'm sure everyone who loves William Regal would at least like him and they're missing out on something they'd enjoy by not watching him. On the other hand I cannot get into Terry Rudge that much at all, totally not for me, I watch him and see someone just a bit above the average World of Sport guy (so still better than Kendo Nagasaki)

Wrestling superfan who worked for Emi Sakura's promotion during the no fan era of the pandemic. She lost all her matches, was a totally unathletic endearing underdog.

I think it's honestly pretty lame to rank someone like Lulu Pencil as your number 2 wrestler of all time. You can love the booking of that stuff (which to me is why it comes off so well), you can appreciate that she does have a very likable persona, that she came across very genuine but I feel like if you watch a lot wrestling and come to the conclusion that she is the 2nd best at the performance of it of everyone you've ever seen, I think you probably don't get it.

Hard for me to understand what makes someone consider Mr. Fuji, Baron Scicula or Jey Uso a top 50 wrestler of all time. I would love to see these people post about what it is they love about these guys

Ted DiBiase is definitely better than Barabarian, but ultimately it's an opinion about wrestlers so it's not worth getting emotional over.

If your case is that Doug Somers is in on the grounds of being involved in that feud, looking good in it and doing nothing else, does that mean you also ranked Marty Janetty, who has that feud, plus has the rest of The Rockers run, plus the 1993 WWF stuff? Does this mean you ranked all the people in The Briscoes/FTR matches that you cite as approximate equals to the Rose/Somers/Rockers stuff? If some of those people are excluded, I'd like to hear why?

Ain’t no way Roman ends up top 50

Alrighty, there we go:

Dick Murdoch does so many great little things similar to Arn Anderson, but unlike Arn Anderson can also actually have great matches.

This feels like a motte and bailey, you made a very bold statement in your first statement, that you knew people would think you meant Brisco was a far better pro-wrestler and now you retreat to the easily defended position you actually meant. I think just anyone could just as easily say Brisco couldn't fill Danielson's shoes if he was put in his position in '06-'09 '13 or '24 or whatever. They're both capable of wrestling heated matches, whether that's Brisco clips in florida, Brisco vs Piper in '82, Danielson vs Morishima or Danielson vs Swerve. But I think the emotion is more palpable in Danielson and Morishima from Final Battle 2008 than any Brisco match. Jack Brisco is a capable heel, but as great as Briscos vs Steamboat and Youngblood is, I can't look at Danielson vs Roderick Strong (a horrible babyface at this time and specifically in this match) from 2006-03-31 and not say that is a better heel performance than any I've seen from Jack Brisco. Brisco is better in Japan than Danielson, but in Brisco's case it's what makes up the bulk of the footage from his peak and in Danielson's case its something nobody thinks about when the look at his career because it makes up less than 1% of it.

To me it's incredibly cut and dry between the two. Danielson smokes Jack Brisco in almost every aspect of pro-wrestling. Better execution, better babyface fire, better at creating a sense of escalating excitement in his matches, better at carrying himself like a star. This are all things Jack Brisco is pretty damn good at, but Danielson has him beat in all of 'em.

My predictions are a huge drop in general for US wrestlers who peaked between 85-94. Big improvement for joshi wrestlers. And yeah big improvement for wrestlers people don't think of as wrestlers or serious workers, your Andy Kaufmans, Bobby Heenans etc.

Who was funnier in WCW in the 2nd half of 2000? Nobody

It’s not 2017 anymore. Ospreay is above average at structuring a match to communicate a story to the audience and has been for years. Treating it like the lyrics to a Daft Punk song and ignoring it is doing yourself and Ospreay a disservice. Nobody who thinks Ospreay was the best wrestler in the world in 2022 or 2023 thinks that because he was the flippiest, because he actually wasnt. He has way more to offer. Gonna stop the criticism to say I had never seen anyone call flips “woke” before and I think that’s pretty funny. Like woke just means anything old people don’t like

Can we please not do Benoit conspiracy theory stuff in this thread

I don’t care about the person in the panda costume but I just saw it and can’t help but think that Andreza is definitely a transcription error from katakana and it was intended to be Andre The

I think you're just missing one of his available matches:

I'm probably ranking both of The Bucks, but I think Nick is going to be quite a bit higher. I think he's a really special high flyer capable of incredible feats of athleticism that so seemlessly and fluidly fit in place in totally chaotic multi man situations. He's not a lucharesu guy in reality, but he does that type of thing better than any of the Toryumon/Dragon Gate guys ever did.

I really don't get late 80s Andre. If he does a singles match over 5 minutes he has to spend large swathes of the match with dull stalling or being annoyed at the crowd booing him or whatever because he can't do five minutes worth of wrestling (see the Bret match in '89 and the JYD match in '88). In the '89 Rumble example busted quad gave, I do think the first 15 minutes built around him is entertaining, so I'll give him some credit but I don't think he actually does anything particularly good. It works more because he's huge and over and the rumble formula works than because of anything Andre is doing. If you enjoy the first 15 minutes of that match it's easy to credit Andre, because he's the focus of everything that happens. But I really believe you could put any of the other performer's brains into Andre's body and they would have done just as well. He is a fairly smart worker but I think it gets overblown by some people here. He knows what to do to make sure things don't fall apart in matches when he is very physically limited. But I think 1. most of those matches aren't actually very good and 2. His mental understanding of wrestling might be the 3rd most important factor in the trio of factors that manage to prevent a man who can't move from having consistently awful matches (that trio of factors being: He's enormous, He's over as fuck already, He understands how to work with his limitations)

I don't think Moxley is a Terry Funk clone. But I also would not agree that nothing about him feels copy paste. He kind of is a pastiche at times, not taking from any one wrestler, but like a Tarantino movie knocking off several things at once to end up being something different. He has lifted from Terry Funk, Roddy Piper, Steve Austin, Atsushi Onita and more. And in more than just the applying classic pro-wrestling techniques to his own work way. Not a dig at Mox, he's great, just an observation.