2006: Dragon by The Numbers
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- Top Ten WrestleMania Weekend Matches – 2024 Edition - April 24, 2024
So when I first sat down and came up with the concept of doing this summer long project covering the twenty-five year career of legitimately one of the greatest of all time, I was so excited to write about Danielson’s match with Necro Butcher in Pro Wrestling Guerilla where the long standing legend has been that Danielson thought that Necro was going to shoot on him so in turn he is just super uncooperative and is laying his shots in. Well fun fact, that match was in 2007 and I thought it was 2006, and despite me literally coming up with the project, I had been locked out of 2007 by the time I realized my blunder, who knew you could check things out before committing, could not have been me!
Anyway, after my shock of making a mistake, I had a few ideas for how I wanted to break down Danielson’s 2006. Sure, I could have picked a particular match of his to cover, or the multiple stints in Pro Wrestling NOAH that he had over the course of the year, but why stop there? I want to do something that has not been done yet, and something I do not *believe* anyone else is doing. I want to break down the year that he had in the universal language of the Internet wrestling fan: numbers! 2006 is commonly a year where many people then and now equate to Danielson “jumping the shark” and going overly long in matches that maybe didn’t warrant it, so let’s break that down and talk about The Man Who Forgot He Need Not Always Go Broadway.
First, I want to just talk about my love for numbers, because I think doing a whole piece on numbers and stats does not make much sense if I do not get this out there. I love the statistical presentation of everything; wrestling, gaming, movies, television shows, podcasts, everything! I don’t think I am the only one with this problem, I think everyone reading this, you are more than likely just as (or more so) obsessed with numbers as me! Do you have a Google doc filled with matches that you have liked, are you using your Excel knowledge to make macros and formulas to formulate your top one hundred wrestlers of the year with no added work needed, are you a self proclaimed “spreadsheet sicko”? Congratulations, you are as big a nerd as me (but probably even bigger because I am obviously a cool guy, I have a podcast). Bottom line, the name of the game in this fandom are numbers, and we much satiate the thirst of our ruthless God.
So where to start? First off, I want to shout out the inmates at Cagematch for having so much of this info hoarded into one place, say what you will but it is an invaluable resource to our hobby. So now, numbers, let’s breakdown 2006.
So in 2006, Bryan Danielson wrestled 90 matches in the span of 12 months, primarily in ROH (46 matches) and FIP (22 matches). The other 22 matches were had in 11 promotions across the US, Europe and Japan. That’s a lot of moving around in a time where accessibility to footage was nowhere near where it is now, I mean YouTube was not even a year old in 2006, DVDs were still taking months to ship and uploading that footage took even longer, the Internet was not a fast place in 2006! ROH was running multiple times a month as well, and Danielson had won the title in September 2005 and would not lose it until the last week of 2006, so he had obligations on top of that!
People are hot and cold on the Bryan Danielson 2006 title reign, and a major problem with that is just the gosh darn length of some of these matches. 31 minutes, 37 minutes, 44 minutes, 56 minutes, so many 60 minute draws, it was a lot. In fact, 26.67% (24/90) of Danielson’s matches in 2006 went over 25 minutes, and 14 of those matches were ROH title matches. The scary thing, we only have *official* match times for 77 of Danielson’s 90, and I would bet good money at least a few of the 13 untimed matches went 25+, are you telling me IPW:UK flew Danielson out to go a damn second less than 25 minutes with Doug Williams in 2006, come on now get so real.
I think this is a lot of where the Danielson fatigue came from and why even today have a hard time making it through Danielson’s 2006, the sheer volume of stuff, even if it’s good to great, is frankly overwhelming. Danielson had 28 matches ROH World Championship matches with official match times (there is also a match with Christopher Daniels that has no time listed and I can’t find it online, we will never know what happened on that hot June night inside the Bellaire Baptist Church Gym), and in these 28 matches he wrestled a total of 13 hours, 52 minutes and 20 seconds. To break it down further, that’s an average of *roughly* 29 minutes and 43 seconds per match. This does not count Cage of Death 2006, any of his FIP title matches that for the most part is good, or *any* match he had in Pro Wrestling NOAH, where he was for most of the Fall. Fair reader, I think if someone came to you and told you that you needed to watch *any* 28 matches with an average runtime of nearly a half hour would be enough to cause your brain to explode, and I am not being hyperbolic, seriously go for it.
It’s so funny to look through the lens as a 2024 person at what was going on in 2006, people would have gone apeshit, people *do* go apeshit about overly long matches, even if they are good! Danielson may have the best batting average of any wrestler ever, and if I were to sit down and spend that much time watching all of those matches, I would hate it, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, especially in wrestling! Sometimes you need to see that garbage, be it funny bad or just bad bad, you have to watch the bad shit to appreciate the good shit, if it was all good all of it would be bad, are you following me? You don’t appreciate Joe/Necro as much if you have never seen Undertaker/Giant Gonzalez, and you don’t appreciate a Danielson without a Miz, it’s all relative!
So what’s the point of this piece? Like I said, I like numbers, but I think it’s important to look at maybe the not so fun stuff sometimes. It’s pretty universally agreed upon around these parts that Danielson is the best American wrestler of all time, and a shoe in on any reputable Greatest Ever Wrestlers’ Top Ten list, but in a fandom that is all about spreadsheets and time saving methods, we gotta look at Danielson spending multiple working days doing his thing in Ring of Honor and ask ourselves “Man, has this dude ever been bad?”, and that question I can’t answer, but I can say without a doubt that despite his best efforts (so many damn matches over 25 minutes) he’s still held in such high regard, and at the end of the day, isn’t that enough?
