You can see the whole thing here. No major surprises. Sanity prevailed, and Nagoya yusho winner Mitakeumi will continue his Ozeki run from the East Sekiwake slot, jumping over Ichinojo despite the latter’s lack-luster kachi-koshi record. As predicted, Takakeisho takes over the West Komusubi slot from Shohozan, and Ikioi and Kaisei occupy the top maegashira slots, followed by Yutakayama and Chiyotairyu.
From there, while my predictions got the big picture right, they had more than their usual share of misses. My original forecast was actually quite a bit more accurate than the revised one. Lesson: don’t overthink it. The biggest surprises to me were that Abi only dropped from M3 to M4 despite his 6-9 record in Nagoya, how little respect Onosho got for his 10-5 record at M11, only getting promoted to M6, and just how low they ranked the three promotions from Juryo (Takanoiwa, Takanosho and Kotoyuki).
On to the basho!
I might guess they took the option of keeping Onosho out of the joi-jin, at least if the upper ranks can stay away from kyujo. As a future star, they may want to let him heal more.
Ranking Kagayaki ahead of Onosho is pretty egregious though. Hokutofuji has reason for complaint in being ranked behind Giku, and the committee did that thing again where you could justify Aoiyama either ahead or behind the duo of Daishomaru and Daieisho, but they opted for the compromise solution that doesn’t make logical sense of placing him between them.
This is why I have so much respect for your dedication to forecasting this stuff. 1) You are better at it than anyone I have seen, 2) I gave up with all of these swaps like Kagayaki vs Onosho, and my monkey-brain started trying to concoct all sorts of triggers and dependancies that brought it about. That kind of thinking left me unable to even attempt to do a reasonable job of forecasting.
So hats off to doing what you do so well!
Thanks Bruce. I think my second set of predictions got worse than my first through precisely the process you describe. Gotta accept that some of the decisions are just inexplicable, and don’t set any sort of precedent for the future.
I don’t keep statistics on how the commitee judged in the past, so obviously that ruling might not be consistent with the past, but if I just look at whom Onosho has been fighting and whom Kagayaki has been matched against, I have absolutely no problem with that order. Onosho had only a 10-5 at M11. Among his 10 wins were only two quality wins (Yutakayama&Myogiryu) against guys who had a good tournament (more than 8 wins) and 3 more against opponents with at least a Kachikoshi (and Okinoumi got his only by fusen on day 15).
Kagayaki on the other hand had 2 Ozeki, 2 Sekiwake and 2 Komusubi. Its only a 4 win difference and they have been 7 ranks apart.
Purely looking on the numbers or past banzukes, you could easily switch them or even move up Onosho another rank, but also weighting in their actual performance, I think its just fine. Onosho simply wasn’t very convincing.
I’m happy they moved Mitakeumi past Ichinojo.
Sure, you can make that argument in isolation, but then what’s Asanoyama doing up at M5, when he only got one more win than Onosho (11-4) at two ranks lower (M13), and whose only quality wins were Myogiryu and Endo? It’s not any specific decision that bothers me; it’s the inconsistency. Totally agree about the Sekiwake swap, even though I predicted they wouldn’t do it.
Yago at J2! yippee!!!!
Hard to believe it, but basically all my gut-based decisions ended up working out this time. GTB yusho #7 in the bag.
Kagayaki vs Onosho strikes me as one of those things one just has to accept as stuff that happens; merging the joi MK and the non-joi KK is probably the toughest part of the whole gig, right ahead of merging maegashira KK with juryo KK.
Personally I’m more interested in how Kagayaki vs Shohozan turned out, which is a comparison with a lot more history behind it, and IMHO they went with the less-common-slash-unexpected decision there, too. Nearly the same situation happened just two months ago, actually, and they favoured the komusubi back then (even though the maegashira was another half-rank better than Kagayaki this time).
Your intuition, sir, is uncanny. Congratulations and deep respect.
I also went through the same thought process with Kagayaki vs Shohozan, and I don’t know how one could have predicted that they’d do the opposite of what they did last time. Perhaps one could argue Endo got a popularity bump that Shohozan did not, but Chiyotairyu also received a very lenient demotion from Komusubi four months ago.
Would also be curious to hear your thoughts on Aoiyama’s placement—they seem to be “spliiting the difference” between two logical placements a lot lately.
Aoiyama is coming off 3 consecutive KKs in makuuchi- the only other wrestlers in that position are Ichinojo, Tamawashi and Ikioi. It’s not as if Aoiyama is some delicate little flower that needs to be protected from higher-ranked opponents and I would have thought they would have placed him a little higher. I don’t think the big man will be too fussed as he is still in a spot where he could run up a huge score.