Cageside Community Star Ratings for AEW All Out 2022

After every WWE - and now AEW - PPV, we ask you all to rank each match on the show using the star rating system made famous by Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer.

The results are in for the 2022 edition of AEW’s annual Labor Day weekend show, All Out. Here’s how our little corner of the wrestle web graded what happened in the ring on Sept. 4 in Hoffman Estates, Illinois - and how our subjective grades compare to Meltzer’s.

Many have asked “why Dave?”, which to me is fairly obvious. Love, hate, or don’t care about him, the Observer Star Rating is the proverbial industry standard. No one else’s are tracked by Wikipedia and other web outlets. You can’t place online bets on what grades other pundits will give big matches.

But in order to not make this all about Meltz, we added another fan-voted rating to the mix - this one from Cagematch. That site uses a ten point scale, so we’ve halved their ratings for ease of comparison.

Here’s what that all looks like:

Perhaps fitting for an event that will be remembered more for the chaotic aftermath than the show itself, scores are kind of all over the place. The systems can’t even agree on the match times... the Observer and Cagematch don’t score bouts that are under five minutes, but Dave weighed in on the TBS title & Starks/Hobbs matches even though they didn’t hit that threshold.

The Tag title thriller easily won our “Match of the Night” poll immediately after the show ended, and it was also the highest rated match in all three systems. Meltzer & Cagematch were also high on the main event; my hunch is that the week’s news drove down our score on Moxley vs. Punk, but we’ll never know.

Not sure we can entirely blame the show’s average match rating on that, however. All Out was the lowest AEW show of the year for both our community (3.04) and the Observer (3.16). It was third for Cagematch, with Double or Nothing scoring lower. Even before the newly crowned World and Trios champions brawled backstage, this was one of the weaker PPVs Tony Khan & company have served up in the company’s brief history.

Do Cageside’s Community Ratings match up with your personal ones? Any final thoughts on All Out (the on-screen wrestling portion of the show, anyway)?