Okay, so I decided to tackle this whole “SummerSlam match ratings” thing. I’ve always been a huge wrestling fan, and I figured, why not combine my love for wrestling with my, uh, developing data skills? It sounded like a fun little project, anyway.
First, I needed to find the data. That was the initial hurdle. I scoured the internet, looking for sites that tracked match ratings. I didn’t want anything fancy, just something with the basic information, like match participants and, crucially, a rating. I finally found the data I needed, though I would need to do some clean up.
Data Wrangling (It’s More Fun Than It Sounds…Sort Of)
Next, I copied all the data into a spreadsheet. It looked like a total mess at first. Different formats, some missing information… you know, the usual. I spent a good chunk of time just cleaning everything up. That meant:
- Standardizing the names. Sometimes wrestlers were listed with their full ring name, other times just a shortened version.
- Dealing with missing ratings. For some matches, there just wasn’t a rating available. I had to decide whether to exclude those matches or try to find a rating elsewhere. I ended up finding data on most of the ones that were missing.
- Converting the ratings into a consistent format. Some sites used stars, others used a numerical scale. I picked a numerical scale (out of 10) and converted everything to that.
After all that scrubbing, I finally had a nice, clean dataset. It felt good, like I’d actually accomplished something.
Analyzing the Goods
I imported the data after saving the spreadsheet as CSV file. I use pandas and it was pretty straight forward to make calculations for what I wanted.
From there, I started doing simple stuff with the data.
I figured out which wrestlers had the most matches, who had the highest average rating, and things like that. I played around with different ways of visualizing the data, creating some basic charts and graphs. They weren’t super professional-looking, but they got the job done.
It was more than I thought I would get done!
All in all, it was a fun little experiment. It was cool to see the patterns and trends emerge from the data. And hey, I learned a few new things along the way. Maybe I’ll do this for other wrestling events in the future… or maybe I’ll just stick to watching the matches. We’ll see!
