Your Criteria/Process/Method at the Start of the 2026 Cycle

[elliott]

2 hours ago, Clayton Jones said:

Two years ago I said I'd check in with thoughts on my criteria as it became more clear to me. About 300 matches later (which is about 100 less than I hoped for, but that's life) I feel like a few key traits are emerging for me that help define greatness as it relates to this project. For me thus far, the greatest wrestlers are almost always present. This doesn't always mean great at improvisation, but staying engaged in the moment, with the crowd, with their opponent. The greatest wrestlers know when to make themselves look great and when to make their opponents look great and often can do both at the same time. And the greatest wrestlers always leave you wanting more, at least through their prime. That's a pretty basic set of criteria after two years, but it's where I'm landing right now on what moves the needle for me.

My biggest struggle is peak VS longevity, because I know I'm extremely biased towards the latter, but don't want to discount the great cases for the former.

 

Basically for these reasons, Austin Idol for the top 25! 

[Clayton Jones]

Absolutely Ma Stump Puller, Tenryu is someone who benefits so much from a project like this. Checks every box imaginable and somehow always has something great you're still discovering for the first time.

[Matt D]

2 hours ago, Clayton Jones said:

For me thus far, the greatest wrestlers are almost always present. This doesn't always mean great at improvisation, but staying engaged in the moment, with the crowd, with their opponent.

This resonates a lot with me. The names that come to mind for me are Funk, Tenryu, Casas, Rose. The guys you never want to look away from because you'll potentially miss something, because they're always in the moment and always acting and reacting to what's happening around them. (For current wrestlers, Athena is the one who is living and breathing it for me in that same way). What names are on your list along those lines?

[Clayton Jones]

1 hour ago, Matt D said:

This resonates a lot with me. The names that come to mind for me are Funk, Tenryu, Casas, Rose. The guys you never want to look away from because you'll potentially miss something, because they're always in the moment and always acting and reacting to what's happening around them. (For current wrestlers, Athena is the one who is living and breathing it for me in that same way). What names are on your list along those lines?

You nailed some of the names that have had the strongest showings with this criteria for me so far (except Athena but I really like that observation). Rose is someone who I have no problem putting peak above all else for because his peaks are among the best ever when it comes to what I'm looking for. The easiest names to back up this kind of case for are the more expressive ones, Hokuto, Masami, Piper, Bock, Kingston, Kandori, and Thatcher are some that glancing over my notes have jumped up for me with this criteria. But even some of the more subdued greats like Grey, Akiyama, Satomura, Ishikawa, Jack Brisco I think are exceptionally strong at this "don't dare look away" factor like you said. And a few who I'd guess I'm a bit higher on than most that I think excel along these lines are Shelley, Bate, HARASHIMA, and Strickland, just throw out some of my less "safe" candidates who I'm still analyzing my cases for.

[SAMS]

Just chucking this little update out there for anybody who's interested.

My previous approaches felt like they leaned way too hard into output, and when trying to compile any kind of list, I resorted to just looking at my match star ratings. I just felt like that too often resulted in me attributing credit in the wrong places. Just because somebody was involved in a 4* match for example, doesn't mean that they delivered a 4* performance. Likewise, somebody could give a 5* performance in a match that only ended up being in the 3* range due to a myriad of factors (booking decisions being the obvious one). I want my rankings to be based on the performances a wrestler delivers, or their input, over anything else. Also, anybody familiar with Thinking Basketball and Ben Taylor's work, especially his top 40 best careers list, will know that his system works on a player accumulating championship value over the years. I'm sort of continuing in the same vein with my approach, with wrestlers accruing in-ring value instead.

For each year project I complete, I plan on categorising wrestlers into 4 tiers. Those are "World Class", "Great Worker", "Flashes of Greatness", and "Notable". The titles of the tiers don't really matter, but essentially it works to organise those who made tape for that year in a pyramid style structure. Each tier has a weighted value, which gets applied to each wrestler within that tier, then simply I'll add up the total for each year of a wrestler's career to get their final score. Ideally this will give me a general baseline and a strong idea of which brackets I want to place each person, but I want to be open enough to move people around as I see fit for the final rankings.

I think it was in the GWE launch party podcast, but Grimmas raised the point of how to balance somebody who was say, a 7/10 for a long time, against somebody who was 10/10 but for only a few years. I guess my way to address this is weighing the higher levels to a degree that the results don't over index on longevity, while also still rewarding those who are able to carve out long productive careers. In my case the bottom tier "Notable", is worth a single point, then the next tiers are worth 5, 10 and 15 in order. In my case the "Flashes of Greatness" tier is probably closest to 7/10. Somebody would have to have 15 years of this quality to equal 5 years as "World Class", which intuitively feels fair to me. 

My system is likely hugely flawed, and I'll almost certainly tweak it as I move forwards, but I like to think it'll allow me to have some sort of consistency as I assess different wrestlers over different years. Ultimately this project is supposed to be fun and I love lists, I love numbers and I love spreadsheets, so it kind of allows me to combine them all at once. 

[Grimmas]

I have found this process of doing years individually, ranking top 25, and then making a master list based on those awesome. I still have many years to finish, I won't do them all by 2026, but my overall list is already something that would be acceptable to submit and will only get better the more years I do. I post them on the blog. Very happy with this method, then at the end I won't have to struggle, it's a simple points thing.