Charting The Territories

Last week, I looked through the data we had for 1966 and surmised that there were definitely "missing" cards, and in all likelihood some of them were from weekly towns. This week, I'm going to see if I can do anything to narrow down the possibilities of what towns they might be.

As mentioned previously, I have the lineups for 456 cards for the territory in 1966 (actually, I found one more since posting that so we're at 457 now). One of the questions I would like to try and answer is: how complete is the data? Can we "prove" how many cards we're missing; more importantly, can we prove the existence of a weekly town(s) that we don't have any data on.

One of the questions I have asked myself about using SPOT ratings is: what is the optimum period of time over which to calculate them? Since wrestling has no offseason, there are no fixed start or end points. A wrestler's SPOT rating is the average of numerous data points, thus it can be calculated for any length of time. So far we've looked at a yearly SPOT rating, but can we learn anything by using a shorter period of time to calculate it?

Let's take a look at some of the other wrestlers who had bookings in the territory in 1966 but did not meet the 'minimum # of matches' threshold to be included in the SPOT ratings.

Here's a look at the wrestlers that filled out the lower portion of the cards in Tri-State in 1966.

Here's some info on the mid-card wrestlers for Tri-State in 1966.

Here's a closer look at the upper mid-carders for Tri-State in 1966.

Here is some brief biographical information for the wrestlers in the Main Eventers category in 1966. Not too detailed, just a little who's who, what territory guys came here from, where they went after they left, etc.

This blog is going to take an in-depth look at the territory run by Leroy McGuirk (and later Bill Watts). Commonly known as Tri-State Wrestling, the promotion actually ran cards in parts of five different states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas) by the mid-60s.