Reel

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?

It wasn’t a comment on you, just the state of wrestling, and seemingly the wrestling a lot of people enjoy.

There may be no bigger demerit for modern wrestling than needing a guy to run a dollar store pizza cutter on someone’s forehead to add verisimilitude

There have been two names thus far that have made me feel really out of step with the sort of ‘general consensus’ that this project is pointing to; the first was Kikuchi being so low. I still think that’s the most dissatisfying reveal yet. Now Nick Gage, a guy who I thought about nominating because I thought he warranted discussion, but couldn’t think of 3 matches I would stand by as the resumé for a great wrestler. I’m sure there’s someone who will tell me about believability and aura and vibes, but as a wrestler, I don’t know man.

A real mix of wrestlers I considered and hated leaving off and modern names I wouldn’t even really put in my top 50 of the any year in the last decade. Kikuchi is officially the first real gut check for me, I had him at 55. Feels like he got slighted in a way no one else on my ballot did.

I don’t think that’s the right Carl Malenko picture

The Snowden book? Or is there some other book, because like, that’s essentially self-published.

Oh, I’m not saying there weren’t people voting using a different criteria 10 years ago, just that the more people that vote, the more you get.

Vince getting votes is, to me, a sign of how far we’ve drifted from the original conception of the project. Personal proclivities aside, if you made a list of the greatest characters in wrestling, or some sort of ranking of holistic value to a wrestling promotion, I can see Vince cleaning up. For a list that is supposed to be based on in-ring footage, boy I can’t think of too many mechanically worse wrestlers.

I would love to hear from the person who ranked Stan Stasiak 15.

Oh, I still put her at 100, but I just think the farther it goes, the more absurd it becomes. We’re already at a point where there are too many wrestlers below her that I hold in a fairly high esteem. I’m just a little bit uncomfortable with playing a part in that.

The longer we wait for Megumi Fujii to drop, the more I regret the nomination. I nominated her purely so that I could put at 100 on my ballot, as a sort of comment on the small sample size shoot-style cases, Han and Tamura namely. The more wrestlers we get that rank above her, the more I think it was misguided to include someone who we know only had three matches.

I believe there’s a Google Drive floating around with most of them.

I think there are very specific cases where nominations put people on the radar that wouldn’t have otherwise been there, and I think that having to justify a nomination and provide 3 matches is a low enough bar so as not to be a significant barrier to entry. Not being able to vote for, say Terri Runnels, is a small price to pay for not being involved in the process, in my view.