When a WWE pay-per-view (PPV) event is on the horizon, the staff of Cageside Seats usually 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.
Six different staff members predicted the winners for the matches that took place at Survivor Series (Sun., Nov. 18, 2018) from the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. 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 Survivor Series 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, the number "0" is an incorrect prediction, and empty spaces indicate that no prediction data was available. 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.
The line for Daniel Bryan’s match can be interpreted as follows: “5 out of 7 predictions for Bryan’s match were correct, which is a predictability rating of 71.4%.”
Staff Predictions for Survivor Series 2018
Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Claire | Kyle | Stella | Polls | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Claire | Kyle | Stella | Polls | Total |
Raw vs. SmackDown (Tag teams) | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 100.0 |
Raw vs. SmackDown (Women) | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 42.9 |
Rollins vs. Nakamura | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 14.3 |
Authors of Pain vs. The Bar | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 71.4 |
Murphy vs. Ali | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 42.9 |
Raw vs. SmackDown (Men) | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 85.7 |
Rousey vs. Flair | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 71.4 |
Lesnar vs. Bryan | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 71.4 |
Total | 75.0 | 50.0 | 62.5 | 50.0 | 50.0 | 75.0 | 75.0 | 62.5 |
These numbers add up to 35 correct predictions and 21 incorrect predictions, which means the overall predictability rating for Survivor Series is 62.5%.
This increases the overall predictability rating for 2018 WWE PPVs from 57.4% up to 57.8% (419 correct versus 306 incorrect predictions). For comparison's sake, the overall predictability rating for 2015 WWE PPVs was 63.4%, in 2016 it was 61.1%, and in 2017 it was 61.6%.
Shinsuke Nakamura’s loss to Seth Rollins fooled nearly all of us. After losing so many WWE Championship matches to AJ Styles earlier this year, it looked like the US Championship would provide an opportunity for Nakamura to still do great things in the upper card of SmackDown. Yet it feels like Nakamura is somewhat struggling to regain his footing as a top star.
The other takeaway from these results is that matches that don’t count sure are easy to predict!
The staff of Cageside Seats had a decent night with predicting the winners at Survivor Series. How did you fare, Cagesiders?