Pre-Weigh-In January 2025 Banzuke Height-Weight Graph
Merry Sumo Christmas!
Hakke-howdy, y’all!
I hope to do a few more posts over the holidays while we wait for the January 2025 Grand Sumo Tournament. It’s been a busy December at work, but I have a week off now.
With the banzuke out, that means it’s time to update my height-weight graph for Makuuchi.
Because the January tournaments are in Tokyo, they will have weight updates, but that hasn’t happened yet. I’ll repost when those new weights are in.
Initial Full Makuuchi January 2025 Scatterplot
As usual, we start with the full 42 Makuuchi wrestlers.
The size of the bubbles is an attempt to distinguish (approximately) the ranks: the bigger the bubble, the higher the rank (the color goes along with that as well, but the colors are similar, being from the Hokusai3 colorway of MetBrewer).
I have three subsets of the above scatterplot, as 42 dots, many of which overlap, is a lot to look at:
Sanyaku (Yokozuna, Ozeki, Sekiwake, Komusubi)
Top Maegashira (M01 - M08)
Bottom Maegashira (M09 - M17)
It’s easier to look at those different groups. All of the graphs use the same axes, so you can see where the wrestlers are placed with respect to height and weight.
Sanyaku January 2025
It feels warm and fuzzy to have the Waka-bros in the sanyaku together.
It does mess up the schedule a little, given they can never fight against each other, except for a championship playoff.
But if that ever happens… wow.
Upper Maegashira January 2025
I am not analyzing the ups and downs of the ranking movement, but some people moved a lot in rank between the November 2024 and January 2025 tournaments.
November was nuts, man.
Before the banzuke was released, I listened to Grand Sumo Breakdown’s own banzuke prediction, which was more useful in hearing the banzuke “collision” that was going to occur — a lot of people were going to get “stuck” where they were, with winning and/or losing records due to the reality of the situation:
Sometimes the JSA plays favorites in setting out the banzuke, with guys with horrible losing records not slipping down the banzuke that much. However, being ranked too high for your ability level also means you’re going to have a more difficult schedule, and that’s really not doing you favors.
I will use “my guy” Ura as an example. His record in November was 5-10, which is pretty bad. According to the GSB guys, he should have slipped 5 notches, but he went from West Maegashira 2 in November to West Maegashira 4 for January.
The problem for Ura is that he has trouble beating any of the top-most guys, given his size, for all the technique he has.
Anyway, enough about the Pink Power Prince.
Lower Maegashira January 2025
There are five guys up from Juryo (thus, five people dropped out of Makuuchi), and of those 5 guys, one is a total newbie: Tamashoho.
Following a 10-win performance in the November 2024 tournament at the rank of jūryō 4, Tamashōhō earned a promotion to the top division (makuuchi) for the first time in his 13-year professional career. Tamashōhō is the first new makuuchi wrestler for Kataonami stable since the promotion of fellow Mongolian and brother-in-law Tamawashi in 2008, as well as the first top-division wrestler for his stablemaster, former sekiwake Tamakasuga. He is also the slowest foreign-born competitor to be promoted to the top division, having done so in 79 tournaments, and well as the eighth oldest wrestler of any nationality to do so in the post-war era.[22][23] Tamashōhō said he was happy and was glad to achieve his goal of top-division promotion. His stablemaster said that he did not expect Tamashōhō to be promoted, noting that he was lucky since two of his ten wins at the prior tournament came by default and foul.[23]
Welcome to the big leagues, dude!
Spreadsheet with Initial Stats for January 2025
Merry Sumo Christmas!
Background to this pic: Sumo: Former ozeki Konishiki recovering well after kidney transplant
Something less serious:
