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Howdy.

AEW is a professional wrestling promotion that produces a weekly top five of its fighters, for the sake of having a more formal system of “top contenders” and giving wins and losses some more meaning. I like wrestling, I like data, I like attention, and as a big college football fan as well I know that any entirely subjective ranking system needs a batshit crazy computer model to keep it honest.1 So I made a computer model for AEW, to go along with their subjective system. View the results here and read the explanation below.

A quick intro to “skill levels”

This system is designed to produce a skill level - a numerical rating of relative competitive strength - for each wrestler who has entered an AEW ring.

Everyone starts with a rating of 25 when they debut. When they win a match, that number goes up; when they lose, that number goes down or stays the same. You get more of a boost for beating someone with a higher rating and endure a bigger decrease if you lose to someone who sucks. This also counts for tag team matches, although because the credit and blame gets spread across all participants in those, singles wins tend to move the needle more. What you’re seeing is the result of feeding every AEW match listed on Cagematch.net into this system.2

Note that the number itself is kind of nebulous; one “point” doesn’t really mean anything, and shouldn’t be thought of as much more than “higher number = better.” Early on, the roster mostly split with the protected guys over 25 and the less protected guys below, but now with all the matches on Dark it’s really more like most regular members of the roster are above 25 (and many are past 30) and the top guys really start at the 35+ levels.

What am I looking at?

On the dashboard linked above, you’re looking at two distinct things. On the left of the page is the as-of-date rankings, which show you where the ratings were at on each day since the first AEW event in May 2019. This can be scrolled through with the date slider in the top left corner. On the right is a yearly progression of rankings for every wrestler to ever compete in an AEW ring. viewing all of the lines isn’t super useful, but try unchecking “All” from the dropdown on the right and picking two or three of your boys to compare. Additionally, the rankings “reset” (to an extent) at the beginning of each year, so the option to see specific years is available as well.3

Is this meant to “expose” AEW’s rankings in some way?

No it is not! It’s just meant to be a quick way to see who’s getting hot and who isn’t, and really should be taken with the context of the promotion.

As an instructive example - the rankings amongst singles women’s wrestlers right now (5/10/21) has Jade Cargill and Ryo Mizunami between Britt Baker and Shida. If you looked at that and nothing else, you’d conclude that Baker’s #1 contendership is false. But Jade’s ranking is on the back of effectively one very strong win on a still-pretty-short résumé, and Mizunami already had a title shot earlier this year. So, y’know, I think it’s fine.

How does this translate to tag team rankings?

That’s a good question that I am still trying to figure out myself. Anyway!

Biggest Upsets in AEW History, by Skill Level

Ignoring debuts.

  1. AEW Dynamite #11: Big Swole (13.97) defeats Emi Sakura (29.31)
  2. AEW Dynamite #76: Rey Fenix (26.32) defeats Matt Jackson (37.91)
  3. AEW Dynamite #29: Orange Cassidy (17.53) defeats Jimmy Havoc (29.05)
  4. AEW Dynamite #39: The Jurassic Express (avg: 25.93) defeat MJF & Wardlow (avg: 37.02)
  5. AEW Dynamite #26: Shawn Spears & Sammy Guevara (avg: 19.64) defeat Cody Rhodes & Darby Allin (avg: 30.66)
  6. AEW Dark #89: Serpentico (11.94) defeats Sonny Kiss (22.74)
  7. AEW Dynamite #83: Brian Cage (31.40) defeats “Hangman” Adam Page (42.18)
  8. AEW Dynamite #10: Kris Statlander (19.42) defeats Hikaru Shida (29.97)
  9. AEW Dark #82: Michael Nakazawa (13.07) defeats Mike Magnum (22.92)
  10. AEW Dynamite #85: Miro (34.12) defeats Darby Allin (43.91)

Highest Rated Wrestler Each Day Since AEW Dynamite #1

Lowest Rated Wrestler Each Day Since AEW Dynamite #1

Click here to look at all the rankings since May 2019.

Credits

This ranking system is a modified version of TrueSkill, which was created by Microsoft for the purpose of matching XBox Live players competitively and developed as a Python package by Heungsub Lee. I built out some additional functions to make it easier to add and save results, and then made some tweaks to make the outputs make more sense in the context we’re working with here. But in any case, this is a non-commercial project intended to be in line with Microsoft’s license for the system.

I scraped all the data I use on this from CAGEMATCH; back them on Patreon here. To learn more about All Elite Wrestling, visit your local library.

My Github’s here if you really wanna see my code logic. That fantasy playoff odds calculator is three versions out of date, please don’t use it, I’ll put the latest version up next month maybe.

  1. Also, y’know, quarantine, pandemic, insanity, free time, etc.↩

  2. Except for unsanctioned matches (because they don’t count! They never happened!) and battle royales (traditionally don’t factor into W-L records, too much of a mess to bother with).↩

  3. Longer explanation of the reset - it takes whatever the wrestler was ranked on 12/31 of the previous year and moves it halfway back to 25, and resets the sigma/error bars of the skill level - which narrow as matches are added to the system - back to the “new wrestler” value. So the reset keeps the ordering of wrestlers the same to start but makes it much easier for guys to change rankings quickly with a hot start to the year.↩