On this week’s episode of Keepin’ It Strong Style, we were discussing EVIL and his recent main event match from Dominion. During our discussion, The “Young Boy” Josh Smith brought up that he believes that EVIL’s match quality is related to the length of his matches. We asked our listeners to help us analyze Josh’s theory. Two of our listeners stepped up to challenge and helped us with the research.
Embedded below you’ll see two documents. The first document is a Google Spreadsheet created by one of our Georgia girls, Rachel (@isluvatendrthng). Her document features 43 of EVIL’s singles NJPW Matches with Dave Meltzer’s and Cagematch Inmates’ star ratings. The second document was created by Reddit User gingerninja666. On their chart it plots out the quality of EVIL’s matches in relation to his match length, using data from Cagematch.
From these charts, we see that the average time for EVIL’s 10 best matches is 21 minutes. However, the average time for his 10 worst matches is 19 minutes. Even though the match times for his 10 best and worst matches are only a few minutes off, there tends to be a sweet spot from 15 to 27 minutes. That sweet spot has not proven true recently. Three of his last five singles matches ranged from 18-21 minutes and were not well received by Cagematch inmates or Dave Meltzer.
With this data, it’s hard to conclude that EVIL’s match quality is solely related to the length of his matches. Match length is one of the factors along with his opponent, match style, and outside interference. EVIL is capable of having great matches. However in this new main event role he’s been giving his matches have been drawn out and revolved around plunder, cheating, and outside interference. I understand that he is a heel now and wants to get heat. But if the cheating, interference, and match length were reduced and the focus of his matches was the action in the ring, I believe he could have some great matches on this run.
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