Charting The Territories

This month on Stats 101, we will look at Ronnie Garvin's 1971 run in LeRoy McGuirk's territory using the statistics we have developed to measure a wrestlers' role in the territorial era.

This month on Stats 101, we will look at Bobby Shane's 1971 run in the Gulf Coast territory using the statistics we have developed to measure a wrestlers' role in the territorial era.

This month on Stats 101, we will look at Bob Backlund's 1974 run in the Amarillo territory using the statistics we have developed to measure a wrestlers' role in the territorial era. Backlund was still a rookie when he went to Amarillo in early 1974 to wrestle for the Funks. In his first week there, he beat Terry Funk to win the Western States Heavyweight title. It might seem like Backlund was in for a big push. The reality, however, was slightly different.

In January 2022 we launched a new statistic called FLW, which stands for Feud Length in Weeks. It is an attempt to “measure” feuds in professional wrestling during the territorial era in a way that the output is easily understandable. This post goes into detail about how this stat was created, why it was created, what it can and can’t do, and how to best interpret and analyze it.

In many ways, I view Charting the Territories as an ongoing beta test of the statistics I have created. I look at it as hey, I invented these stats...now follow along with me as we see if they *work* . With the SPOT Rating, I've actually been quite surprised at how well it measures what it is supposed to measure (a wrestler's average position on the cards expressed as a number) across different territories and different time periods. I first debuted the FEUD Score in November of 2019. It's an attempt to measure how "big" a feud was based on how many times it occurred on house shows, and how clustered those matches are over time (if they're wrestling against one another once a week for five weeks, that's different than if they wrestled each other five times in one week). The idea being that if a particular feud between two wrestlers or teams is received well by the fans (i.e., it draws money), the booker/promoter will continue to run it around the horn, wit...

 Updated on 8/9/21 with rankings for 1964!

In the final week of November 2019, we introduced a second statistical metric into our analysis of wrestling in the territorial era. It's an attempt to measure feuds, ie when two wrestlers (or teams) wrestle against one another frequently over a short period of time. We have named this statistic Frequent Encounters Using Data, or FEUD for short (see what we did there?) The FEUD score is a positive integer; the higher the number, the more "intense" the feud is at the time. Due to many factors (listed at the bottom of this post), it's hard to say what a "good" number is; as a loose rule of thumb, a FEUD score of 25 and above is a good indicator that the match in question was indeed a "feud". Many of the matches listed in the FEUD charts aren't actually "feuds"; they are merely matches that happened frequently at the time. The higher the FEUD score for a given match relative to other matches over the same time period, the bigger the fe...

One of the most important features of my research into pro wrestling in the territorial era is the development of the SPOT rating. SPOT is an acronym for Statistical Position Over Time, and it measures a wrestler's average spot on the cards over a fixed period of time as a number between 0 and 1. The highest possible rating is a 1.00; this would mean that a wrestler was booked in the main event of every card they were booked on during that fixed time period. Here is a sample SPOT rating chart. In this column, I will go into a little more detail about how it's calculated and how it should be read. Much like other statistics, the period of time used to calculate a SPOT rating can be different. In baseball, you generally see a player's batting average listed for the current season to date. But sometimes they give you their batting average for the last week, or month, or for a three year period or even their entire career. The most frequent usage of the SPOT rating o...

This blog is going to continue to focus on the McGuirk/Watts territory, but I'm going to do it a little differently. Every week I will take a look at four different years, starting with 1961, 1968, 1975 and 1982. For the first week in July, I will look at the first week in July for 1961, the first week in July for 1968, etc. SPOT ratings will be calculated every week for each of the years. This way, I can focus more on week-to-week changes for wrestlers and look at how wrestlers move up and down the cards over time. I will also list the matches that occurred most often, as well as the wrestlers that teamed up most often. I think this is way of presenting the data will be of more interest to wrestling fans: 1) It will lead to more frequent updates of the blog, as I will be making four updates each and every week. 2) By covering multiple time periods, fans who may be more interested in the Mid-South years will have something to look at every week. Fans who are more interested i...

If you've been following this blog, you know the key feature is the SPOT ratings, which measures a wrestler by their average spot on the card over a period of time. It most certainly has its limitations, many of which I will discuss in this post. But the overarching theme and what you should take away from this post is this ... SPOT  is best used to evaluate wrestlers in a specific territory in a specific time frame. What's Wrong With SPOT: All Towns/Venues are Not Created Equal - The way the SPOT formula currently works, the wrestlers in the advertised main event of a specific card get equal billing. So the main event for a card at Madison Square Garden would get as much "credit" as the main event at the Jaffa Mosque in Altoona, PA. It's obvious that main eventing the Garden means more, but what SPOT does is merely aggregate a wrestlers' position over a variety of cards, some big and some small. I certainly could add some sort of factor that takes into c...

This blog is going to take a look back at pro wrestling territories in a way that hasn't been done before. There are numerous web sites, blogs, message forums and social media accounts dedicated to covering the history of professional wrestling. There are even a couple of databases with scores of information. But I want to present the information in such a way that you can look at ONE piece of data and instantly understand that wrestlers' place in the grand scheme of things; or as Arn Anderson once famously spoke of, their spot.