The Smark's Shoot Standings (S3): Voter survey results and tweaks for the 2014-15 season

For the last two years here at Cageside Seats, we've run a weekly fan vote for the best performer of the week prior. We keep track of the results, and use them to build an annual "performer of the year" ranking.

A "smark's shoot standings", if you will.

Throughout its existence, the only shows that have been considered were nationally televised ones: WWE's Raw, Main Event and Smackdown, TNA's Impact Wrestling and pay-per-view events held by either of those companies. With the advent of WWE Network and more streaming pro wrestling content like Ring of Honor (RoH)'s weekly television show, it seemed time to ask if we should broaden our scope.

So on March 12th, we created a survey so that YOU, The Smark's Shoot Standings (S3), could help determine the future of The S3.

The results are in, and our crack team (me) has analyzed them and we're ready to make some announcements about the third season of voting, which will start on Monday, April 7th with the Raw after WrestleMania 30.

That's fairly conclusive, and we will allow votes for appearing on WWE Network within the voting week. Don't fret, non-WWE watchers. We heard your concerns and have a plan to try and address them. Keep reading.

Not quite the mandate that the Network question passed on, but still a solid majority. Performers from ROH TV will be eligible in season three, with a bit of a handicap. Read on...

This one is the very definition of down the middle/don't care, and, for now, we'll stick with our current one post-per-week for voting and results schedule. If there's ever any evidence that having a Tuesday or Wednesday results post separate from the voting post would garner The S3 a higher profile, it will probably change. But barring that, we don't want to punish DVR watchers who don't get a chance to see everything they want to before voting.

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The comments in our survey post and on the survey themselves raised a couple of concerns about adding new eligible shows to the mix. The two primary ones were (1) it would make for a really long poll and (2) the non-WWE shows will get lost in the shuffle.

There were a few requests to split the S3 into a WWE ranking and a non-WWE ranking. Unfortunately, history doesn't suggest that we'd get that many votes in the 'TNA and others' version (and I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to do both), so...

The poll will continue to consist of only nationally televised shows like Raw, Smackdown and Impact. In order to vote for Network content like NXT or internet content like RoH, you will need to create an account and place a comment vote.

We're also going to tweak the scoring a bit to give voters more flexibility and control, which can be used to defend your non-McMahon-employed favorites, among other things.

The poll will now be scored in the same way that annual votes are scored. Receiving the most poll votes will earn a performer ten points, receiving the second highest vote total nine and so on down to the tenth highest vote-getter receiving one point for the week.

Additionally, comment voters can use an additional slot on their ballot. Straight-forwardly, this means you can now vote for your first, second, third and fourth favorite performances of each week. Practically, it keeps everyone on a ten point system and allows comment voters to split up ten weekly points however they want. If you vote for four performers, your #1 will receive four points, #2 three, #3 two and #4 one. If you want to get wacky and give them all to one person or split them ten ways...hey, it's Your Standings.

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Well, what do you think? Obviously, we can't please all of the people, all of the...blah, blah, blah. But I think this expands our little interactive exercise without alienating anyone, and tries to address some legitimate concerns.

Time will tell if it just leads to more blowouts, or disenfranchises TNA workers, or...who the heck knows. But in the two years since we started doing this, the civility and general not-being-a-dumbass way that Cagesiders have participated (or quietly and without rancor not participated) in the S3 has been a testament to what a cool little corner of the internet wrestling community we have here at cSs.

And regardless of how season three goes, I fully expect that to remain the case.

Love you guys! And don't forget to vote tomorrow and Monday, when we'll surely be flying down the page at 100 posts an hour (and we did hear folks concerns about that, but unless we start getting thousands more hits each week, there's not much to be done about it).