Let us warm up with taking a look at how wrestling's biggest annual event has developed over time. We'll do this over multiple posts. In this first post we'll use very simple statistics regarding the number and duration of matches on the different Wrestlemania cards (all data comes from wikipedia.org).
Let's get some basic stats out of the way first:
- A total of 311 matches have taken place at Wrestlemania over the last 30+ years (not counting matches on pre-Mania Sunday Night Heat or the Kickoff shows)
- The number of matches on an average Wrestlemania card is 10 (9.7 to be precise)
- A total of 3277 minutes (that's roughly 2 days and 7 hours) of bell-to-bell action since Wrestlemania I
- The average Wrestlemania match takes 10 minutes and 34 seconds which is actually a bit more than I would have expected ...
- Longest match: Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels at Wrestlemania 12 (1996) with 1 hour and 1 minute
- Shortest match: The Rock vs. Erick Rowan at Wrestlemania 32 (2016) with a whole of 6 seconds ... I like the Rock as much as the next guy but that was just plain stupid and made Rowan look like a total dork!
Let's look at the key trends:
- There is a clear trend to longer matches (on average) at Wrestlemania - at Wrestlemania 30 the average match took 16 minutes and 30 seconds compared to a meager 6 minutes at Wrestlemania 1.
- The obvious outlier here is Wrestlemania 12 with Hart and Michaels totally boosting the average match length with their Ironman classic.
- When it comes to the number of matches we see a peak in the 1980s and more or less random variation ever since. So the increased overall time that Wrestlemania takes up is used for longer matches on average, not more matches. That's a good development, if you ask me!
That's it for this post. Very basic still, but I'm saving some cooler stuff for later. ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment