Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow

This article is meant to answer one simple question: Do rankings mean anything?

It’s pretty common to hear “rankings don’t really mean anything” from almost everyone. On the other hand it’s also common to get congratulated on being ranked highly. And then I have to start to dig into the deep philosophical question of ‘what really matters in life?’ I want to avoid the deep philosophical question in this case. Therefore I will focus simply on one answer to the question ‘what matters in life?’ and that is the bottom-line, winning. (Deep down I’m very shallow)

To get ranked highly, a wrestler has to have some big breakthrough. He beats someone in the top few spots. Or he has to perform consistently against a good portion of the crowd and place highly in a major tournament. But once he’s ranked it’s all eyes on him. If he loses to someone below him, or has another big breakthrough then it’s going to affect his ranking.

Everyone, whether they like it or not, puts a certain amount of credence in rankings. Let’s say I’m going to wrestle someone I’ve never wrestled before. I need some way of knowing whether or not I am expected to beat him. Clearly the easiest way to find out is by looking at the rankings. But even more so, I don’t need to look at them. They announce rankings before every match. Someone is basically telling me whether I’m expected to win or not. It is almost impossible to ignore rankings because they give us a sense of relief and identity. Unless you are confident enough to say “I am the best there is, I should beat everyone” or the exact opposite, then you are going to find yourself somewhere in the middle asking, “how good am I?” and looking to rankings to determine it.

Then I have to come back the essence of the question; how do these expectations affect our bottom line? I think the best way to understand how expectations significantly affect results is to look at a study of Black students on standardized tests. Students scored lower on exams after having to report their race. In a similar fashion it always ruins my night when I tell my friends I’m going to hit the dance floor and they remind me I’m white. From this study and my anecdotal evidence (since clearly I have mad dance skills that are under appreciated) we see that expectations from our social environments affect us without even noticing. It doesn’t matter whether it is true that you aren’t as good as your opponent when you are ranked lower, in most cases you are willing to accept the general belief and perform slightly up or down because of it.

But I want to go even deeper into the effects of rankings. Assume you are using the transitive property of wrestling: you have found a simple logical way to determine that you are better than the opponent you are wrestling. For example, I’ve beaten Bill Scherr who has beaten Kurt Angle who has beaten John Cena. Therefore in my head I know my value is higher than John Cena’s in terms of common opponents. Should rankings any longer affect the bottom line? To understand a deeper effect of rankings on results let’s look at the concept of gain and loss versus risk. This is the real issue at hand. Rankings very much exist, and if you’re like me you place your pride on them and you like to maintain your ranking in order to keep a little mental edge over your opponents.

First I would like to clarify what risk is. Risk means that the outcome of any given situation is directly dependent on your actions. In other words, the outcome is not fixed; it is the result of taking chances that may be for better or for worse. I would also like to make another point, which may be argued against (but hopefully won’t be): in a contest where two wrestlers are nearly equally matched, the one that takes more action is the wrestler with a significantly better chance of winning. The more aggressive wrestler will be favored simply because he has more opportunities to win. As long as his chance of securing a takedown on any given action he has created is higher than his opponent’s, this is true. Even more so I would say the better wrestler puts himself at a significant disadvantage by refusing to take more risks.

To understand why a better wrestler is at a disadvantage by not taking risks look at a casino. A casino makes it’s money by taking a huge quantity of risks that they favored on. If a casino can win 51% by playing blackjack then after customers have risked $1,000,000,000.00 then (if my calculations are correct) the casino will have made $39,215,686.28. Not a bad amount of money to make for taking a risk of only 51%. In a similar way the wrestler with a 70% chance of scoring on any action is favored in a match with 20 total points 14-6. If he lets the match stay at 2 total points then it becomes more of a crapshoot. You can see why it very much favors the better wrestler to create more action and take more risks.

Now the other thing to understand, and this is something that has been tested, is people are generally willing to take more risks if they stand to lose something than if they stand to win something. This makes sense for all practical reasons. An army is more likely to fight a battle that it has very little chance to win in defense then in an opportunity to expand. To find an example of this look at any war, the declaration of independence was written in 1776, after declaring independence they were willing to fight until 1783 to keep it. Other battles for land were riskier when the land was already acquired in a battle and is threatened for being lost. If you look to the problems in the Middle East you will realize this is true to a huge extent. Israel is a land that two groups of people, the Israelites and the Muslims both believe they have rights to. The Muslims are not willing to lose it (although this happened some time ago), and the Israelites have acquired it. It’s like taking a very sentimental object from one son and giving it to another who the object is equally sentimental to. It has very deep implications and there is no answer since at that point both sons feel it is their right to own this sentimental object. Both will die not to lose it when at one time both were satisfied with which son had it. The Israelites and the Muslims don’t have a problem; they both want the same thing. They want to keep what’s rightfully theirs. (Thank god the English don’t want their colonies back anymore, but I assure you after the war for a while they were pretty pissed.)

Now I have to relate these three things backwards. 1) The person who has more to lose will take more risks. 2) Wrestling, in almost all cases, rewards the wrestler who pursues more risks that are well planned. 3) Being ranked higher gives you a lot more to lose than you had before – expectations from everyone else and the sum of your previous accomplishments. Therefore it makes sense that the wrestler who gets ranked higher has a significant advantage. The wrestler with more to lose is better off than the wrestler who has nothing to lose. Think about close matches you’ve watched in which one wrestler was winning with just a few seconds left to go. And then, uh-oh, takedown for the opponent, two points. Why? Because as I have explained, the wrestler who is winning has nothing more to gain by taking risks; he literally shuts down and waits to win. The other wrestler has a definite loss if he doesn’t take risks, so he has something to lose. The same works in a more subtle way with rankings. Have you ever seen someone ranked lower seem to just sit there and accept his defeat; he might even take bad shots or try to look productive, stopping halfway, almost saying “If you finish this next takedown, I don’t have a chance, my pride isn’t on the line that much since I’m not expected to win. At least I tried, right?” It’s being ranked that may give a wrestler that little push saying, “I have too much to lose, I have to leave it all out there.”

Of course there are other ways to find that mentality. If you invest everything you have in wrestling and convince yourself you are the best, then you are on your way to reaching it without being ranked. Hopefully you have coaches and fans that convince you that you are the best, if everyone you know has expectations of you then the ranking from ‘somewhere out there’ is less significant. But in most ways, a higher ranking should make a wrestler wrestle better than he otherwise would have.

Just in case you don’t like reading or don’t understand: YES, rankings matter.