Tribalism ruins everything, Star Ratings edition

After every WWE – and now AEW – 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 for the 2023 edition of AEW’s annual late winter event, Revolution. Here’s how our little corner of the wrestle web graded what happened in the ring on Mar. 5 in San Francisco – 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, before we discuss why we’re not putting too much stock into comparisons between our community and the other two systems for this event:

We sensed some funkiness in the Community’s Star Ratings after Full Gear, but the anomalous voting was limited to a few matches for that show. With Revolution, while it was most egregious in three high profile matches (the World title main event, Texas Death Match & Trios championship), each match on the card received a high number of zero votes.

18% of all Cageside Community votes for Revolution were for “0”. That’s almost twice the last AEW PPV, where 9.5% of Cageside voters gave Full Gear matches a zero. The three most recent WWE PLEs had smaller percentages of zero votes: Survivor Series 8%, Royal Rumble 3%, and Elimination Chamber 9%, with that last one inflated by nearly half of all votes for the non-finish between Brock Lesnar & Bobby Lashley being for the lowest possible score.

It led to some of the biggest deltas we’ve seen since we started tracking these. Some of that is due to Meltzer’s enthusiastic scoring of this show (four stars for Jericho/Starks is a particular head scratcher for this writer), but it’s just hard to believe 125 wrestling fans watched MJF/Danielson — which easily won our “Match of the Night” poll immediately after the show ended — and in good faith deemed it without merit.

But maybe they did, and our suspicions are what’s without merit. Whatever the reason, those are the numbers. They made this year’s Revolution our second-lowest rated AEW event of the last calendar year, despite being Dave and Cagematch voters’ best over the same period.

Weigh in on that below as you let us know what you think about the Cageside Community’s Ratings for Revolution.