Cageside Community Star Ratings for Money in the Bank 2021

After every WWE 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 from Money in the Bank, the event WWE bumped to the summer to close out the ThunderDome era before heading back to the road next month. Here’s how our little corner of the wrestle web graded what happened in Fort Worth on July 18 - 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’s 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.

So we added another fan-voted rating to the mix, this one from Cagematch. That site uses a ten point scale, so in calculating the difference between our score and theirs, I halved the Cagematch rating.

Here’s what that all looks like:

We seem to have avoided the, uh, irregularity we had in the Hell in a Cell ratings where the Natalya/Mandy Rose Kickoff match was flooded with positive votes. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a women’s match our Community rated a lot higher than others, though.

In this case, it was the Women’s Money in the Bank Ladder match. Cagesiders didn’t love it - it was the second lowest rated bout on the card, even lower than the “Match of the Night” poll would have predicted. But the three stars we gave it was more than one star over Meltzer and Cagematch’s rating, the biggest difference between our evaluation and the others.

On average, Money in the Bank was our highest rated PPV of the year at 3.5. It’s also the third straight show we’ve been able to say that about - the previous high was Hell in a Cell’s 3.49, and before that it was WrestleMania Backlash’s 3.43.

Do Cageside’s Community Ratings match up with your personal ones? Any final thoughts on Money in the Bank?