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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 Great Balls of Fire (Sun., July 9, 2017) from the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas. 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 Great Balls of Fire 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 full match list. Below each staff member's name, the number "1" is a correct prediction and the number "0" is an incorrect prediction. The rightmost column contains the overall predictability rating for every match, and the very last row shows the overall accuracy of each individual staff member.
Heath Slater’s match with Curt Hawkins is omitted because it was not advertised ahead of time, and so no predictions were made for that match.
The line for Dean Ambrose’s match can be interpreted as follows: “4 out of 6 predictions for Ambrose’s match were correct, which is a predictability rating of 66.7%.”
Staff Predictions for Great Balls of Fire
| Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Kyle | Rev | Polls | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Kyle | Rev | Polls | Total |
| Neville vs. Tozawa | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 50.0 |
| Rollins vs. Wyatt | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 16.7 |
| Enzo vs. Big Cass | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 83.3 |
| Cesaro & Sheamus vs. Hardy Boyz | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 83.3 |
| Bliss vs. Banks | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 50.0 |
| Miz vs. Ambrose | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 66.7 |
| Reigns vs. Strowman | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 16.7 |
| Lesnar vs. Samoa Joe | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 83.3 |
| 62.5 | 50.0 | 50.0 | 75.0 | 50.0 | 50.0 | 56.3 |
These numbers add up to 27 correct predictions and 21 incorrect predictions, which means the overall predictability rating for Great Balls of Fire is 56.3%.
This lowers the overall predictability rating for 2017 WWE PPVs from 58.1% down to 57.9% (246 correct versus 179 incorrect predictions). For comparison's sake, the overall predictability rating for 2015 WWE PPVs was 63.4% and the for 2016 PPVs it was 61.1%.
The staff of Cageside Seats had an okay night with predicting the winners at Great Balls of Fire. How did you fare, Cagesiders?