Reel

Has there been some sort of grand re-evaluation of Mistico, or is it really just the last 4 years at the top of CMLL?

Ikeda and Ishikawa in Battlarts, outside of Ishikawa being positioned higher, are pretty equal in my mind. The differentiator for me between Ikeda and Ishikawa is what they did when they branched out. Ikeda went to NOAH and was OK. Ishikawa went to Canada and trained Santino's students and had better matches with trainees than pretty much Ikeda did in NOAH.

I mean, this is not exactly the case. Does Sakuraba mean more to the sport? Yes. Was there a point where Sakuraba was the best fighter in the world? Probably, I’d be interested in really looking at that argument. Is being UFC Heavyweight Champion a bigger accolade than anything Sakuraba actually accomplished in a sense? Almost undoubtedly yes.

Suzuki’s run at the top of NOAH, when Bushiroad was running it, was one of the more disastrous runs in recent memory.

There is nothing more deleterious to my enjoyment of modern wrestling than the stand in the middle of the ring, elbow each other in the traps, and makes faces stuff. It is beyond parody at this point. If we give points to Sabu for influence then we should take them away for this that spot. And Ishii still hasn’t dropped yet

Nobody watched the Roddy stuff in Evolve then? Reading a lot about him in terms of his stuff in the major tv promotions, good hand, solid worked, charisma vacuum. But his run at the top of Evolve, or even his run as PWG champ is exceptional stuff. Check out the match with ZSJ from Evolve 25, I think or any of the stuff with Drew, he can be much more when he isn’t playing 3rd or 4th banana to his lesser friends.

2 things on the topics of the day: 1) So a friend of mine has watched all the Pancrase footage, he does video recaps on YouTube, Gentleman’s Combatives. His estimation, and he admits this number may be low, is that there are 9 works in the first 3 years of Pancrase. Now there are fights where one guy wasn’t planning on winning, but just 9 matches where both guys went out there not trying to win. 2) Nominations are gate keeping, yes. You are keeping people who don’t fit the criteria out. Frankly if you’ve only known about GWE for a few months, I’m not sure not being able to vote for literally whoever you want is a bad thing in the slightest. If you’re a part of the process and invested, you can get your people on the ballot, otherwise your beholden to someone else, that’s a feature not a bug.

He doesn’t do the Les Kellet Lariat anymore, and he does some shitty looking MMA inspired stuff, but I don’t think he’s fundamentally all that different outside of his place in the pecking order for the promotion and his propensity to bleed.

I would say that Moxley and Mone are pretty much exactly the same as they were in WWE, just 40 plus years of varying degrees of FED BAD have made it impossible for some people to admit that anything good could happen there. Obviously I’m in the minority on that belief given the results.

Ok, so where’s the line? Is Semmy Schillt a pro wrestler? Is Jose Aldo a pro wrestler? They have matches in Pancrase. The answer is no, obviously. Is Matt Hume a pro wrestler? Is Jason DeLuchia a pro wrestler? I don’t know, it’s not clear enough to say Pancrase is pro wrestling.

I think the Frank Shamrock being nominated for Pancrase matches is generally not great, and I don’t have a great answer for how to avoid it, and you just have to be comfortable with having no good answers I suppose. So we all seem to agree that, like, Volk Han is a pro wrestler, I think we can all agree that, Georges St.Pierre isn’t. But is Shannon Roth, a guy who has a rep of essentially being willing to lose an MMA fight on purpose, and essentially ‘worked’ with Dan Severn more than once under the premise of it being an MMA fighter? Is Tony Bonello, or Heath Pedigo, or any guy who has a bunch of dubious wins on his MMA record? Are those guys pro wrestlers? I don’t think so, but Pancrase, especially early on, is that the same thing? I don’t know and so don’t know how you make that distinction.

If there was a greatest wrestler poll and you couldn’t vote for Carlos Colon, then that poll is 100% pure garbage.

Just when I was losing all hope, Jericho missed the Top 100. There is still hope for the young people after all.

I’ll say it, that #1 vote is bad, like it just is and the fact that we don’t just say that and move on and instead act like it’s as valid as voting for Tenryu has, in my mind hurt this discussion, but we CAN and SHOULD just say that the vote is bad and move on and leave it there.

The name that sticks out to me as people wishing was nominated, and I'm sure there are many more, but this is the one that stands out, having seen it a few times, is Sherri Martel. I can see the case for her, I can see people voting for her, but what would she have finished, given what we've seen so far? 328? I don't think nominations did any real harm, and as many have said, having a, hopefully permanent or at the very least stable, home for the discussion of wrestlers and a way to enforce the footage requirement is much more of a plus than any minus that comes out of the nomination process.

Boy, that Nigel placement makes it increasingly hard to believe that having matches in AEW isn’t good for like 30 votes.

The original impetus, I believe was to guard against troll votes. I believe some WCW best matches poll got a #1 vote for some Rip Rogers match, which had never been brought up or discussed. I think nominations are good, and I know there are wrestlers people would like to vote for, but if no one thinks about nominating them, or can’t give 3 match recs and a sentence explaining the nomination, then how Great can they be.

I read all of that, I promise, I don't know what all the direct address and neurological talk was all about, really, but I think we more than likely have pretty similar views of the thing. It has never been about the final list, really; it is about watching the footage to make your own list, about watching a ton of stuff so as to get a better picture of wrestling, to identify what it is you like about wrestling, what you value, so on and so forth, but at the same time, I can't help seeing some of these reveals and the general trend and think 'are we really all doing the same thing here?' And again, thats a ME thing, not a general thing.

PAC getting over 100 votes has sort of crystallized my thoughts on all of this. In 2026, the biggest portion of people who are heavily engaged in wrestling are AEW fans. I’m being a bit hyperbolic here, but to watch AEW regularly sort of requires a belief that what you are watching is not just good, but exceptional, it was similar with New Japan before this, it’s this way with a lot of modern wrestling depending on what circle your in, and it’s this way with a lot of things, like you can’t just like Radiohead, you like Radiohead because it’s the greatest music ever released. This is what it is, is it a bias? I suppose so, but ranking anything is to expose your bias, bias in inherent and integral to this. I am pulling an example from 2016, and perhaps it’s cherry picking, but he was the name that stood out to me as illustrative, Brian Pillman. We have hundreds of more voters this time around, and yet Pillman got less total votes and dropped precipitously. Now, I didn’t vote for Pillman, I barely considered him, but nothing has changed for Pillman since the last vote, he’s been dead the entire time. I don’t even think we’ve uncovered much of anything Pillman in that time. In 2026, he lost votes, and lost an even greater percentage. So why? Part of it is that there were bound to be new wrestlers, part of that is that his biggest boosters aren’t really around this time, But is it just that? I don’t know, that’s sort of the heart of this. My sort of working theory is this: in 2016 the people who watched the most wrestling were not that engaged with modern wrestling, they may have watched it, liked it, but it wasn’t the main thing they were invested in, they were more backward looking. In 2026, the average voter is more actively engaged with modern wrestling, chiefly AEW, and in a forward looking or at least current way. When I watch AEW or modern wrestling on the whole, I don’t particularly like it, I think the modern popular style has drifted too far from what it is I like about wrestling. I certainly don’t see it as the greatest era in the history of pro wrestling. That’s a me problem, but it does explain how Dean Ambrose is gonna crack the top 100 and Kikuchi won’t sniff the top 300.

So Garvin was the highest guy with no Top 25 votes, and I'm pretty sure everyone in my top 25 will be somebody's number 1, so there's a pretty good chance my 1 will be my only high vote also.

Sarcastic or not, Roman wouldn’t be in my top 5 worst or undeserved #1 votes thus far.

This is sort of where I'm at. I'm not saying there isn't bias inherent in any list, I'm not saying that anyone's ballot isn't reflective of who they think the greatest wrestlers are. Still, in my, increasingly less interested view of the current discourse of pro-wrestling, it seems matches get exceedingly hyped and are given high star ratings because they are kind of long and feature wrestlers that the person likes. So you watch the weekly TV, and you end up with 300 4 star matches at the end of the year, and it is hard for anyone not wrestling today to compete with that kind of resume, unless they are canonically great, have decades of hype, support, and lore behind them.

So here’s a sort of serious question which I’ll admit is sort of a troll: Based on these results, and the people still left to drop, in 6 years has AEW assembled the greatest roster of talent ever assembled while also producing enough great matches to significantly boost, if not form the entirety of, the cases of the majority modern wrestler in the top 200? Is the output of that company that great?

Just wanted to take a second and thank @Grimmas for everything they are doing for this project. I'm sure the double ballot thing is frustrating, and making for some tedious and annoying work correcting the list, and I'm not entirely sure I wouldn't have just handwaved it once we got this far into the thing. So, thank you for your commitment to this super nerdy thing.

Man, Mil Mascaras jumping up while almost every one of his peers drops or stays stagnant is a trip. Is JBL and the like mentioning him on commentary, and guys talking about him never taking off his mask on shoot interviews, enough to boost his case? Is it just The Destroyer match? Are there a good chunk of people who opened up a random PWI and used it to make a list?