Mathematical Connections to Wrestling: The WWE Draft's Unlikely Odds

I was in the middle of writing Part Two of my "Mathematical Connections to Wrestling" article when I felt inspired to write this. It covers the odds of certain events occurring in the WWE Draft, which I believe calls for a change in how it is billed.

The mathematics behind this article isn’t too hard in term of concepts, so I hope you can follow and enjoy.

The WWE Draft has always been billed as random, but as I sat watching the live draft—and then later the supplemental draft—I began to think that there were some huge mathematical improbabilities that I wanted to explore.

The concept of something being random is: any outcome has as much likelihood as another. However, due to the nature of probability, the odds that several of these events will occur in order or together can be significantly more.

The odds of flipping a coin and it landing on heads are 1:2. Not bad odds. But the odds of repeating this feat 100 times in a row is roughly one in a quadrillion quadrillion—pretty unlikely, I would say.

These kinds of compound probabilities produced some very improbable results during this year's draft, which I wish to evaluate fully.

Tag teams staying together

Anyone who was watching the supplemental draft yesterday would have been under the impression that several tag teams were bound for a split.

First Cryme Tyme, then the Colons, and finally the Bellas seemed bound for a split. But lo and behold, they weren’t. Their counterparts were drafted to the same show, and all three tag teams were saved.

So what are the odds of this happening?

Well, in total there are roughly 75 wrestlers working for the WWE, 36 of whom were drafted. That’s roughly a half of all superstars drafted.

So the odds of each member of a tag team being drafted are a half. As well as this, you have the choice of which brand to move to when drafted. As there are two possibilities, let's give the odds of moving to a specific brand a half as well.

The odds of Shad being drafted (as he was) are then a half. Which brand he moved to was irrelevant, as we are only concerned with the probability that JTG will join him.

Again, the probability of JTG being drafted is a half. Add to this the odds that he will move to the same brand as Shad, and you get one in four.

So the total probability that the tag team would be drafted together will be half times a quarter, which gives a one in eight chance. Not too unlikely, you say?

Considering the same thing happened to these three teams, the odds then increase to one-eighth cubed, which is 1/512. Starting to look less likely, isn’t it?

You may say that not all the tag teams were kept together, but when you consider the nature of their splits, they become irrelevant to these odds.

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