Dave Meltzer Reacts To Seth Rollins Calling Star Ratings “Silly”

Dave Meltzer has defended his rating system and has defended Seth Rollins’ right to say whatever he wants about it.

Dave Meltzer has been covering professional wrestling for four decades. Although his weekly Wrestling Observer Newsletter has covered the business side of wrestling and has covered big stories from an outsider’s perspective, arguably the most controversial part of his work has been his star ratings.

Meltzer’s match ratings have been a point of debate and contention among wrestling fans since he first started. Some fans have taken his ratings as gospel or as a neutral or possibly objective rating of a match’s overall quality.

Others, however, have pointed to which wrestlers’ matches have been getting the highest and most frequent praise, which has led to accusations of bias from Meltzer.

One wrestler feels this way is Seth Rollins, who laughed at Dame Meltzer’s ratings as “silly” due to their subjectivity. In response, Meltzer echoed Rollins’ sentiments on an episode of the McGuire on Wrestling podcast.

“It doesn’t bother me. It’s as silly as movie ratings, food critic ratings, video game ratings, it’s all the same — it’s all opinion. If Seth can say that a match is good, then it’s a three-star match. If he can say it’s great, it’s a four-star match. They’re synonymous with each other, you see what I’m saying?”

Although Dave Meltzer’s match ratings have been a point of discussion among wrestling fans for years, some of this debate has become hotter and fiercer in the wake of an interview Meltzer did with Chris Van Vliet.

In it, Van Vliet questioned Dave Meltzer’s match rating methodology and pointed to specific promotions (TNA/IMPACT), wrestlers (Kurt Angle and Triple H) and matches (Undertaker/Michaels at WrestleMania 25, Hogan vs. The Rock) that were either given lower ratings or weren’t given the praise many fans believed they deserved.

In this same interview with McGuire, Meltzer noted that people shouldn’t give that much credence to his ratings and noted that he technically didn’t break the rating system because he was simply building off of what Jim Cornette and Norm Dooley created.

“Cornette’s the guy who came up with it, and it was based on … [using] numbers instead of saying, ‘Good, very good, [or] excellent. And then they had to raise it because the four, which was originally the top number — matches just got too good, so we had to have the five.

Then they added the six — they added the six before I ever got there. … So people saying, ‘You know, you broke your system,’ … it wasn’t my system and I didn’t break it.”

h/t WrestlingInc for the transcription