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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, even when I’m two months late in reporting the results.
Seven different staff members predicted the winners for the matches that took place on November 21 at Survivor Series 2021. 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 these matches. The leftmost column includes the match list. Below each staff member’s name, the number “1” is a correct prediction and the number “0” is an incorrect prediction. Empty boxes indicate where 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 Charlotte Flair’s match can be interpreted as follows: “5 out of 8 predictions for Flair’s match were correct, which is a predictability rating of 62.5%.”
Staff Predictions for Survivor Series 2021
| Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Claire | Kyle | Stella | Marcus | Polls | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Claire | Kyle | Stella | Marcus | Polls | Total |
| Nakamura vs. Priest | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 25.0 |
| Lynch vs. Flair | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 62.5 |
| Raw Men vs. SmackDown Men | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 12.5 |
| 25-Man Dual Brand Battle Royal | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 50.0 |
| RK-Bro vs. The Usos | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 50.0 |
| Raw Women vs. SmackDown Women | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 75.0 |
| Big E vs. Roman Reigns | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 100.0 |
| Total | 42.9 | 42.9 | 71.4 | 57.1 | 57.1 | 42.9 | 57.1 | 57.1 | 53.6 |
These numbers add up to 30 correct predictions and 26 incorrect predictions, which means the overall predictability rating for Survivor Series is 53.6%.
This decreases the overall predictability rating for 2021 WWE PPVs from 70.7% down to 69.1% (418 correct vs. 187 incorrect predictions). For comparison’s sake, the overall predictability ratings each year from from 2015 through 2020 were 63.4%, 61.1%, 61.6%, 58.7%, 63.7%, and 65.5%, respectively.
Now here are the voting percentages from the Cageside community polls for the winners of these matches:
- 30%: Shinsuke Nakamura
- 74%: Becky Lynch
- 44%: Raw Men
- 31%: Omos (19% Styles, 18% T-BAR, 6% Cesaro, 5% Ricochet, 5% Zayn, 16% Other)
- 63%: RK-Bro
- 40%: Raw Women
- 70%: Roman Reigns
As we all know, Damian Priest is practically unbeatable in singles matches in main roster WWE, so his count out loss to Shinsuke Nakamura on the Kickoff show was hard to see coming.
The two traditional Survivor Series elimination matches collectively fooled a lot of people. It’s tempting to predict one brand won’t win both matches, but Raw dominated the battle for brand supremacy once again. The community voters fared better than the Cageside staff on the men’s match, whereas the Cageside staff outperformed the community voters on the women’s match.
Battle Royal matches can often be difficult to nail down considering how many wrestlers are involved, but when Omos is in a match, we typically know that he is going to win. It looks like plenty of community voters had fun with this one, with 18% rallying behind former RETRIBUTION member T-BAR, who rarely ever gets television time on Raw and was an extreme underdog.
And of course, Roman Reigns beating Big E in the main event was very easy to predict, because Roman Reigns never loses on PPV.
Survivor Series was the final WWE PPV event of 2021, so the overall predictability rating for the year is 69.1%. That makes 2021 the most predictable year for WWE PPVs going back to the start of 2015, blowing away the next highest result of 65.5% in 2020.
Roman Reigns’ record-breaking run as Universal champion definitely inflated the overall predictability rating for 2021, but it’s worth noting that 2021 was still a very predictable year even without the Tribal Chief. Matches that included Roman Reigns had a predictability rating of 89.2% (66 correct vs. 8 incorrect predictions), and matches without him had a predictability rating of 66.3% (352 correct vs. 179 incorrect predictions). That latter result is still higher than the overall predictability rating of 2020 (65.5%), which was previously the most predictable year by this metric before 2021 blew it away.
The staff of Cageside Seats had a mediocre night with predicting the winners at Survivor Series. How did you fare two months ago, Cagesiders?
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