Statistically Speaking, The Greatest of All Time: The Ultimate Warrior HQ

Not a lot of people really like Warrior. He was an okay wrestler for a while, he had a few really good matches with Hogan and Savage, went (more insane) in WCW, and then just kind of went away. He's about to become a Hall of Famer and he probably deserves it, approximately, based on the normal wrestling considerations. But this is a different sort of beast, this tournament. Here, we're asking a simple question - who wins a match between two given wrestlers? Typically speaking, we answer these questions with a lot of flim-flamy arguments that usually are just based on confirmation bias. Rarely is there a good a priori analysis of who's actually going to win a match. Well, I'm a man of science. I prefer more rigorous methods. So I found some data. Thanks to the wonderful Internet Wrestling Database, I discovered something very interesting - the all time highest winner percentage among wrestlers (counting mostly televised matches with a handful of high profile live events) belongs to none other than the Ultimate Warrior (88.51%). If you'd like proof, here you go: From this, we deduce that against any given opponent, the Warrior has better odds of defeating him than any other wrestler would.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that Warrior would defeat just anyone. After all, perhaps there's some trend to those wins and losses. We might look at what type of wrestlers Warrior lost to. Unsurprisingly, it's fellow titans against whom Warrior has more of a spotty record. In two one on one contests with Hulk Hogan, Warrior is 1-1 - though the fact that his win was on the biggest stage of his life, in his ultimate (no pun intended) prime, in the main event of WrestleMania and his loss was years later in a much less significant match in WCW is telling. His record against Savage is rather shockingly 2-6. First of all, Warrior is fortunately far away from Savage in this tournament, as they're in different regions. But it's also instructive to look at where those wins and losses came - the wins are both at SummerSlam and WrestleMania in huge matches, while the losses all came from house shows and dark matches. Once again, when the stakes are high, the Warrior wins. And what stakes are higher than the WrestleZone Tournament, after all?

Other significant Warrior losses - vs. Sgt Slaughter, via interference from an unrelated party, and Warrior went on two defeat Slaughter twice (once by DQ). The Honky Tonk Man has defeated Warrior by countout once, and I shouldn't need to explain to you at all how Warrior fared against Honky Tonk Man in a fair fight, as his IC title win is one of the all time greatest WWE moments. And...oh...wait, that's it. Yes, folks - in recorded history, only four men have defeated the Ultimate Warrior one on one, all of whom he's defeated on bigger stages. Sure, Warrior was a crusher of jobbers, but he also has defeated a litany of top wrestling names - Harley Race, Rick Rude, Andre the Giant, the Undertaker, Triple H, and Owen Hart, among others.

Warrior is the all-time winningest wrestler ever, and when you get in there and break down his wins and losses, well, it bears out that Warrior can handily defeat just about anyone in the world.

Look at his likely early opponents - Goldust? He's defeated him before (admittedly by countout) - but Goldust only stands at an all time 45.45% winning percentage. Daniel Bryan? God knows I love him, but I haven't seen a huge WrestleMania win for him yet and a lifetime 55.87% winning percentage really isn't getting him over Warrior for me. He'll have to beat the Rock to get out of his group, sure, but let's be honest with ourselves here - The Rock has lost plenty of times when the lights were bright (twice vs. Austin, vs. Cena) and an all time 57.13 winning percentage.

Ultimately, if you put the Warrior in the ring with any of these guys, the numbers and the traditional arguments both bare out Warrior as the guy coming out on top. An unconventional choice? Maybe. The right one? Definitely.