Cageside Community Star Ratings for SummerSlam 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 SummerSlam, WWE’s first Big 4 PPV in front of packed house since Royal Rumble 2020. Here’s how our little corner of the wrestle web graded what happened in Las Vegas on Aug. 21 - 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:

There’s general agreement across all three systems, notably about how SmackDown’s two main men’s matches saved the show from being more critically reviled. The Universal title match and Edge vs. Seth Rollins got the most votes in our “Match of the Night” poll after SummerSlam ended, and they also got the best ratings in the days that followed.

We agreed on the night’s worst things, too. The WWE title and Alexa Bliss/Eva Marie bouts were among the lowest scoring matches across the board, although Bliss’ win fared much better with our voters than it did with Meltzer (the two big differences between Cageside and The Observer came from contests featuring women; as usual, Dave was much kinder to Charlotte Flair’s match than we were). Meltzer didn’t even rate our least favorite match of SummerSlam, Becky Lynch’s seconds long SmackDown Women’s championship squash of Bianca Belair.

With a 2.73 average match rating, SummerSlam was the first show this year Cagesiders rated lower than three stars. It was also the lowest rated show of the year for cSs and the WON’s rating systems, finishing below the previously floor-setting Fastlane.

Do Cageside’s Community Ratings match up with your personal ones? Any final thoughts on SummerSlam?