Do WWE Money in the Bank winners really lose all their matches?

Back in early 2015, I was relatively new to the Internet Wrestling Community. So, when some guy on the internet told me that WWE used 50/50 booking, I believed it, and then I saw it! When another guy told me that tag teams were built to explode, I believed it, and then I saw it, especially in 2017.

And sometime during the lead-up to WrestleMania 31, someone online said that Money in the Bank winners always lose a bunch after they win the briefcase. They pointed to then-current Mr. Money in the Bank Seth Rollins as proof, as even though the Authority had just come back, Rollins was still losing every TV match he had.

I believed Random Internet Guy wholeheartedly, and for years, I kept the idea in my heart that Mr. or Ms. Money in the Bank will lose more matches than they win. Now I’m a super-cool, totally smart mark who never, ever gets worked, and I don’t just take random internet guys’ words. I AM the Random Internet Guy, and now that it’s AIPT’s Skepticism Month, I think I should use this time to be a little skeptical of my long-held wrestling beliefs.

Do Money in the Bank briefcase winners really lose most of their matches? Instead of just taking someone’s word for it, I decided to use some statistics.

The method

There have been 33 Mr. and Ms. Money in the Bank runs, though that number is arguable for multiple reasons. For our purposes, “run” is defined to include every match in which a competitor starts *AS* Mr. or Ms. Money in the Bank, meaning their initial Money in the Bank win does not count, though their final cash-in attempt — or however they lose the briefcase — does count.

So we can’t include Asuka’s, Damien Priest’s, or Carmella’s first runs, as none of them cashed in. Asuka became Ms. Money in the Bank in 2020, but her briefcase included the WWE Raw Women’s Championship, so she never needed to cash-in. Priest is our current Mr. Money in the Bank, as of this writing. Carmella’s record-setting run is included in the data, but her first MITB win was included in that initial number of “33 runs” from the start of this section. In reality, Carmella never had a match during her first run as Ms. “Mella in the Bank,” as she was stripped of the briefcase and had to win it back.

For cases like Mr. Kennedy and Edge in 2007, Kennedy’s run would be every match from the Raw after his WrestleMania win to his briefcase-losing defeat to Edge. Edge’s run, meanwhile, would not include his win over Kennedy, instead starting with his cash-in on SmackDown.

Edge’s one-win run does highlight an issue: if we include immediate cash-ins, this list gets weighted very heavily toward the positive. I mean, how can Kane, Dean Ambrose, and every woman between 2018 and 2022 be seen as having anything other than a 100% win rate? And, yet, if we start cutting out the Kanes and Liv Morgans of the world, what do we do about Edge and Brock Lesnar, as neither of them cashed in the day they won the title, but both cash-ins were their next matches?

In order to acknowledge this weighting, each graph toward the end of this article will include both a version that accepts all the data as valid, and a version that ignores the one-win runs, treating them as extremes.

After researching each of the 30-ish eligible runs and the televised matches within them on cagematch.net, I came away with the following notes:

The data

• Edge, 2005
  • 14 wins (50%)
  • 10 losses (35.714%)
  • 4 draws (14.286%)
• Rob Van Dam
  • 7 wins (70%)
  • 3 losses (30%)
• Mr. Kennedy
  • 1 win (11.111%)
  • 7 losses (77.778%)
  • 1 draw (11.111%)
• Edge, 2007
  • 1 win (100%)
• CM Punk, 2008
  • 14 wins (50%)
  • 13 losses (46.429%)
  • 1 draw (3.571%)
• CM Punk, 2009
  • 10 wins (66.667%)
  • 5 losses (33.333%)
• Jack Swagger
  • 1 win (50%)
  • 1 loss (50%)
• Kane
  • 1 win (100%)
• The Miz, 2010
  • 10 wins (47.619%)
  • 9 losses (42.857%)
  • 2 draws (9.524%)
• Daniel Bryan
  • 13 wins (44.828%)
  • 16 losses (55.172%)
• Alberto Del Rio
  • 4 wins (66.667%)
  • 2 losses (33.333%)
• Dolph Ziggler
  • 27 wins (38.028%)
  • 44 losses (61.872%)
• John Cena
  • 1 win (50%)
  • 1 draw (50%)
• Randy Orton
  • 7 wins (87.5%)
  • 1 loss (12.5%)
• Damien Sandow
  • 11 wins (39.286%)
  • 17 losses (60.714%)
• Seth Rollins
  • 31 wins (43.056%)
  • 39 losses (54.167%)
  • 2 draws (2.778%)
• Dean Ambrose
  • 1 win (100%)
• Carmella, Round 2
  • 5 wins (27.778%)
  • 13 losses (72.222%)
• Baron Corbin
  • 2 wins (40%)
  • 3 losses (60%)
• Alexa Bliss
  • 1 win (100%)
• Braun Strowman
  • 6 wins (54.545%)
  • 4 losses (36.364%)
  • 1 draw (9.091%)
• Bayley
  • 1 win (100%)
• Brock Lesnar
  • 1 win (100%)
• Otis
  • 9 wins (81.818%)
  • 2 losses (18.182%)
• The Miz, 2020
  • 5 wins (25%)
  • 15 losses (75%)
• Nikki A.S.H.
  • 1 win (100%)
• Big E
  • 4 wins (100%)
• Liv Morgan
  • 1 win (100%)
• Austin Theory
  • 3 wins (15.789%)
  • 16 losses (84.211%)
• Iyo Sky
  • 1 win (33.333%)
  • 2 losses (66.667%)

Discussion

As a break between the raw numbers above and the graphs below, I think it’s important to note that two things that these story-less stats miss are the qualities of the wins and the order of the wins. This is especially true for the wrestlers whose records are closer to being 50/50, as some of them got the majority of their wins on Main Event and NXT, while losing on Raw and SmackDown, and others spent the first few months of their run winning or losing consistently before flipping the script in the weeks before their cash-in attempts.

The good

Wrestlers who cashed in the night they won the briefcase — Kane, Ambrose, Alexa Bliss, Bayley, Nikki A.S.H., and Morgan — really are batting 1,000. The second ever Mr. Money in the Bank, Rob Van Dam, won 7 out of his 10 matches, and none of the losses were clean, either losing a handicapped match or taking a disqualification loss. Seven years later, Randy Orton’s only loss as Mr. Money in the Bank would be in a match featuring RVD, and though both Orton and Van Dam lost that match, Orton walking away with 7 wins and 1 loss does at least get him the better run over the Whole F’N Show.

The most surprising Mr. Money in the Bank run has to be that of Otis, who is generally considered to be a horrible briefcase-holder, as he’s one of only two men to lose it to another competitor without cashing in. However, at 9 wins and 2 losses, Otis is statistically the third best Mr. Money in the Bank to wrestle more than one match with the briefcase. The one man with a better run than Orton and Otis is Big E, who had four matches as Mr. Money in the Bank and won them all.

The bad

Damien Sandow, right?

Sandow only won 39% of his matches, which might not be as bad as you’d remembered, but he put in some work to get his win rate that high. Prior to his eventual failed cash-in, Sandow won 7 of his last 10 matches and won the last five straight before hitting the Cena wall. That being said, Sandow also lost 9 of his first 10 matches as Mr. Money in the Bank, so he wasn’t exactly Otis.

Speaking of Otis, the third-best genuine Mr. Money in the Bank run led to the third-worst Mr. Money in the Bank run, as the Miz only won 5 of his 15 matches, three of which were handicapped matches where he had the advantage, one of which was the final cash-in with heavy interference, and the last of which being a genuine battle royale win.

The race for dirt worst is more up to interpretation — though it’s definitely between Kennedy and Austin Theory. Kennedy has the worst stats, only winning 11% of his matches and losing the briefcase to Edge. Theory’s stats are marginally better at 18% wins, but he actually did cash in his briefcase — on the United States Title — and lost.

Also, shout out to Iyo Sky, who broke the Women’s Money in the Bank streak of cashing in the night she won the briefcase, and in doing so, taught the women’s locker room a lesson — just keep cashing in immediately. Sky’s only victory was her eventual cash-in, as she lost both of the matches she had between the ladder match and her title win. Even then, her 33% win-rate is still better than Carmella’s 27%, so maybe everyone between them was right to just get the cash-in out of the way.

The middling

It’s crazy how many of the earliest Mr. Money in the Banks had near or exactly 50% wins on TV. Edge and 2008 CM Punk both won exactly as many matches as they didn’t. 2011 Miz and 2018 Braun Strowman were also both about 50/50, with Miz just under at 47% wins, and Strowman just over at 54%.

Miz, like Sandow, is a curious case of a man whose run was damaged by its other half, though Miz had a rotten back end as opposed to Sandow’s putrid start. Miz lost his first match as Mr. Money in the Bank, then won six, drew once, lost once, and got his win back the next night. After that, he only won 2 of his next 10 matches, taking his great run and finishing it so poorly that he ended up batting under 50%. Miz did beat Cena three times during this run, though, so you have to give him that.

Rollins had a close-to-middling but overall net-negative record, though he didn’t start out that way. Rollins was actually incredibly dominant in 2014, losing a couple of matches right after the won the briefcase, then collecting a lengthy string of wins in late summer and early fall, broken up only by the occasional loss to Cena. Then, right as the Authority temporarily lost power, Rollins seemingly forgot how to win, as the man who went 9-3-1 between Night of Champions 2014 and Survivor Series 2014 (during which all of his losses were by DQ) was now going 6-16 in his 2015 matches as Mr. Money in the Bank.

The results

Conclusion

Money in the Bank briefcase-holders have had more total losses than wins, whether you look at the extreme cases or not. However, this is more indicative of the fact that the longest-reigning Mr. and Ms. Money in the Banks — Rollins, Ziggler, and Carmella — all ended their reigns with more wins than losses, while those with better win percentages were also, by nature, the shortest. For my purposes, the more important answer lies in the average win-loss records of all the briefcase holders.

The results show that, whether you include the extremes or not, Money in the Bank winners, on average, actually win more than they lose. With extremes, this is undisputed, as the eight wrestlers who cashed in immediately all won, and their 100% win averages bump the score up. Even without those eight, though, the wins still end up rounding to 50% of the total.

Looking back at the time period when I read that “factoid” about Money in the Bank winners being perennial losers, Rollins may have been having a rough start to 2015, and if you were to only remember one Mr. Money in the Bank from the year previous to Rollins’ win, Sandow would also support that belief. But even then, Orton was one of the winningest Mr. Money in the Banks ever in 2013, and aside from poor Kennedy, everyone before Orton was also closer to 50/50.

I don’t even know why Random Internet Guy told me that the Money in the Bank briefcase holder always loses, nor do I know why no one else in the comments challenged it at the time. Whatever bias he had, though, I took it to heart, and whenever Baron Corbin was being touted as a loser in 2017, or Theory got the same treatment in 2022, I excused it because, to me, Mr. Money in the Bank ALWAYS struggled to get wins.

But, as we can see with Priest, who has 19 wins and 9 losses as of writing, there is no hard-set rule that the briefcase-holder has to lose. He might become a little dumb, as Priest probably could have gotten away with cashing in his briefcase half a dozen times by now, but he’s still no loser.

Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.