Kotonowaka: Ozeki - Narrative, Numbers, Nostradamus
To start this post off the right way: congratulations on your promotion to Ozeki, Kotonowaka!
So with that said, let’s take a look at Kotonowaka’s career thus far and see how that compares to some other wrestlers.
Kotonowaka started out fairly auspiciously, debuting in Maezumo and then winning Jonokuchi with a perfect 7-0 at just 18 years old. Sandanme was a quick stop for him too, but then, he stalled. It took him 2 years worth of tournaments in Makushita to reach Juryo, but he made up for lost time and after just 4 tournaments in the second division, he made his debut in the Makuuchi in March 2020. He was 22 and several months old.
So he debuted at the older end of the Yokozuna, but let’s look at how long it took him to reach Ozeki compared to those men. After injuries in the next tournament, July 2020 (recall: May 2020 was cancelled; wild times) he went back down to Juryo. That lasted a single tournament, and after 9-6 he was back in the Makuuchi again and hasn’t been back down since. Between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2022, he held his own but also bounced around, up and down. Finally, starting May 2022, he’s been a winner in the Joi (he went 7-4-4 one time, all other Kachi-koshi winning records). Finally, he hit the magic number of 33 wins, and also two Jun-Yusho, making him an easy Ozeki promotion candidate. So 23 tournaments in all.
Here he’s closer to the average. I’ll talk about it further later when I’m doing predictions, but I think it helps he’s really locked in over the past year or so. I think his consistent performances, lack of absences, and recent consistently higher win totals bode well for his future.
If you’re interested in some numbers and statistical oddities continue. If not just Ctrl-F ‘End’ and the numbers will all be much more digestible. Let me bring that table back up:
I used this table in the piece on Ozeki development so I decided to try and look at this a different way. The average Yokozuna debuts at 20.8 years old, and there’s a 1.4 standard deviation meaning up to 22.2. So he’s just outside that. Well just for fun I calculated the z-score for that which is basically a measure of how far outside the mean + standard deviation his age is. With his z-score of 1.07, if we assume that the age Yokozuna debut in the Makuuchi has a normal distribution (bold assumption), then approximately 86% of Yokozuna should have debuted at a younger age than he did. And in fact, check out this table.
So it does look relatively in line with the normal distribution depending how stringent you are. I know it’s massaged slightly by using decimals instead of months, but still, I found it interesting. So what I did next is run a Shapiro Wilk Test Statistic1, and got a p value and those results:
Shapiro-Wilk Test Statistic: 0.9698547124862671
P-value: 0.597976565361023
The data looks normally distributed (fail to reject H0)
That’s a lot of fancy words to say: funny enough, Yokozuna debut ages appear to be normally distributed.
For the statistics fun, we’re now at ‘End’
I’m comparing him to Yokozuna because the natural question when someone does this well is if they have even more in the tank.
In short, after this tournament I believe he does and he is a potential future Yokozuna. One big thing in Hatsu 2024 for me was him getting 13 wins. 23 wins is about as low as you can get over two tournaments and be promoted to Yokozuna. To reach Yokozuna is so hard because you have so few matches you can slip on. January ‘24 was the first time in his entire career he won 13 matches in a tournament. Seeing him able to do that raised my estimation of him.
Fun fact: Kotonowaka now has 9 straight tournaments competing in every match and with a winning record. Barring a major injury I think he’ll be able to stick around at Ozeki. He’s also shown great consistency starting with 11 wins in July 23 followed by 9 wins followed by 11 wins followed by 13. If he can stick at Ozeki, I think he has two good tournaments in a row in him for sure. An additional thing he has going for him is his sumo heritage. His grandfather is former yokozuna Kotozakura. For better and for worse, I believe those kinds of things tend to matter to the powers that be in sumo. If he’s older and has stuck around at Ozeki, I could see him being promoted with a relatively weak Yokozuna run.
This was a bit of a quicker piece. Let me know if there’s any interest in more “short-form” articles like this. I might do something similar with the other current Ozeki. I’ll also likely continue having more data and ways (hopefully better!) to look at them with so hopefully this was interesting.
As always, please subscribe to the email and follow the twitter. All sumo, no worries. Have a good one.
It’s a way (not the way, there are actually multiple tests for whether a distribution is normal or not, with different pros and cons) to test if a distribution is normal or not. Or at least that’s the highly simplified way to put it. The wikipedia page is linked here but I’m not trying to (nor could I) write a stats treatise here