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, the latest stadium event, and annual biggest party of the summer. Below you’ll see how our little corner of the wrestle web graded what happened in the ring in Nashville on July 30 — 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 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.
But in order to not make this all about Meltz, we added another fan-voted rating to the mix - this one from Cagematch. That site uses a ten point scale, so we’ve halved their ratings for ease of comparison.
Here’s what that all looks like:
No comparison to make on two of the matches; since the United States and SmackDown Women’s title bouts didn’t break the five minute mark, neither the Observer or Cagematch grades them. Other than that, these pretty much line up. Being within a half star of someone else’s rating is generally agreeing on the match with a few quibbles or purely personal positives and negatives. The only matches where we were farther apart were McAfee/Corbin (where we were more generous than either Meltz or Cagematch’s voters) and the Tag title match (which Cagematch was more critical than the other two ranking systems).
The stand out of the night — which also ran away with our “Match of the Night” poll from immediately after the show — was Roman Reigns & Brock Lesnar’s Last Man Standing match. It’s also our sixth highest rated WWE or AEW match of the year.
By average match rating, this was Dave & Cagematch’s highest rated WWE show of the past year. Which you can see in our rundown of scores for all of those since last year’s SummerSlam:
If we wouldn’t rated the two sub-five minute matches, the Cageside average would have gone up to 3.85... which would have made it our highest rated WWE show of the past year, too.
Do Cageside’s Community Ratings match up with your personal ones? Any final thoughts on SummerSlam?
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