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Every time a WWE pay-per-view (PPV) event is on the horizon, the staff of Cageside Seats offers predictions for all of the advertised matches on the card. This data can be used to calculate a simple predictability rating for any event.
Five different staff members predicted the winners for the matches that took place at Hell in a Cell 2016 (Sun., Oct. 30, 2016) at the TD Garden Arena in Boston, Massachusetts. Staff members received credit for a correct prediction of the winner of any match, even if they were wrong about the context of that victory.
The Cageside Seats match preview articles for Hell in a Cell 2016 also offered polls allowing Cagesiders the chance to weigh in with their predictions.
The following chart contains the prediction results for every match. The leftmost column includes the winner(s) of each match. Below each staff member's name, the number "1" is a correct prediction, the number "0" is an incorrect prediction, and no prediction data was available for the empty spaces.
| Geno | Sean | Cain | Kyle | Rev | Polls | |
| Dorado's team | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | |
| Reigns | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Bayley | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| The Club | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Owens | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Kendrick | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Cesaro, Sheamus | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Charlotte | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Geno's predictions for the first two matches were "Flippy stuff" and "Pain," respectively. One could easily argue that he was indeed correct on both accounts, but for the sake of this analysis I had to omit those predictions from consideration.
Here are the predictability ratings for each match. The entry for Kendrick’s match can be interpreted as follows: "5 out of 6 predictions for Kendrick's match were correct, which is a success rate of 83.3%."
- 100.0%: Kevin Owens vs Seth Rollins (6-0)
- 100.0%: Roman Reigns vs Rusev (5-0)
- 83.3%: Bayley vs Dana Brooke (5-1)
- 83.3%: Enzo and Big Cass vs Gallows and Anderson (5-1)
- 83.3%: TJ Perkins vs Brian Kendrick (5-1)
- 80.0%: Alexander, Sin Cara, Dorado vs Gulak, Daivari, Nese (4-1)
- 0.0%: New Day vs Cesaro and Sheamus (0-6)
- 0.0%: Sasha Banks vs Charlotte Flair (0-6)
A disqualification (DQ) in a championship match can occasionally cause some chaos in these results, and that is evident with yet another DQ in a New Day championship match. For now we base our predictions on the question of "Who will win?" rather than "Who will be champion?" DQ's can cause a lot of incorrect answers for the former question.
These numbers add up to 30 correct predictions and 16 incorrect predictions, which means the predictability rating for Hell in a Cell 2016 is 65.2%. This raises the overall predictability rating for 2016 WWE PPVs from 61.5% up to 61.8% (359 correct versus 222 incorrect predictions). For comparison's sake, the overall predictability rating for 2015 WWE PPVs was 63.4%.
Here are the individual results for each staff member who offered predictions:
- 75.0%: Sean Rueter (6-2)
- 75.0%: Cain A. Knight (6-2)
- 75.0%: CSS Match Preview Polls (6-2)
- 62.5%: Kyle Decker (5-3)
- 50.0%: Geno Mrosko (3-3)
- 50.0%: ReverendKain (4-4)
The staff of Cageside Seats had a good night with predicting the winners at Hell in a Cell 2016. How did you fare, Cagesiders?