The 2023 men’s Royal Rumble match lasted 71 minutes and 40 seconds (71m 40s).
The survival time for a superstar is the time that lapses between the point when he steps foot into the ring and the time that his feet hit the floor to signal elimination. This does not include the time it takes for a superstar to make his way from the entrance ramp down to the actual ring.
The average superstar survival time for the 2023 men’s Royal Rumble match was 13m 19s and the median survival time was 7m 29s. The median value is less influenced by outliers at either extreme.
Here is the full list of survival times for all 30 superstars:
- 71m 40s: GUNTHER
- 52m 32s: Sheamus
- 39m 09s: Drew McIntyre
- 37m 17s: Seth Rollins
- 29m 57s: Johnny Gargano
- 25m 45s: Dominik Mysterio
- 15m 39s: Austin Theory
- 15m 07s: Cody Rhodes
- 14m 51s: Kofi Kingston
- 11m 13s: Braun Strowman
- 10m 57s: Logan Paul
- 10m 28s: Xavier Woods
- 9m 14s: Ricochet
- 8m 42s: Chad Gable
- 7m 45s: Finn Balor
- 7m 13s: Bobby Lashley
- 4m 56s: Santos Escobar
- 4m 23s: The Miz
- 4m 12s: Karrion Kross
- 4m 03s: Damian Priest
- 3m 17s: Angelo Dawkins
- 3m 07s: Otis
- 2m 28s: Brock Lesnar
- 2m 27s: Omos
- 1m 04s: Edge
- 0m 44s: Montez Ford
- 0m 41s: Booker T
- 0m 39s: Elias
- 0m 07s: Baron Corbin
- 0m 00s: Rey Mysterio
Every listed time above should be viewed with a margin of error of about two seconds or so.
These survival times all fall within one second of the numbers listed on WWE’s web site, with one exception. WWE lists Angelo Dawkins as surviving for 2m 28s, whereas I have him at 3m 17s. I double checked his appearance in the match, and I am very confident that my time is accurate. It looks to me like a simple typo on WWE’s end; they list Dawkins and Brock Lesnar in adjacent entries and accidentally assigned Lesnar’s survival time of 2m 28s to both wrestlers.
I decided to count Rey Mysterio as a participant in the match with a survival time of 0m 00s, even though he never made it out to the ring. This is similar to what happened with Macho Man Randy Savage’s spot in the 1991 Royal Rumble and with Skull in the 1998 Rumble. If Rey is excluded, the remaining 29 wrestlers had an average survival time of 13m 47s and a median time of 7m 45s.
The overall match time of 71m 40s is second longest Royal Rumble match ever, only trailing the 50-man Greatest Royal Rumble. That’s right, this 30-man Rumble with 90 second intervals lasted longer than the 40-man version in 2011 and all of the Rumbles with official waiting intervals of two minutes.
GUNTHER was the Iron Man of this match with a survival time of 71m 40s. It’s the second longest survival time ever, only trailing Daniel Bryan’s performance from the Greatest Royal Rumble.
The top six wrestlers on the list all surpassed a survival time of 25 minutes. They are also the only wrestlers in the match who lasted more than 16 minutes. Of these six men, I’d say Johnny Gargano was the quietest, in terms of not really doing a whole lot given how long he was in there.
Even though Cody Rhodes was the 30th man to enter the match, his survival time of 15m 07s ranked eighth longest. That’s because his final one-on-one showdown with GUNTHER lasted 7m 15s.
This is the second consecutive year where Brock Lesnar’s survival time was less than three minutes. That was good enough to win it all last year, but not so much this time around.
Logan Paul’s survival time of 10m 57s includes the 3m 55s break he took outside the ring, before he ran back in to eliminate Seth Rollins.
Edge, Montez Ford, Booker T, and Elias all failed to survive long enough to make it to the next buzzer after theirs.
Even though Baron Corbin only survived for seven seconds, he actually did make it into the next waiting period. That’s because Brock Lesnar immediately laid him out with an F5 before he could enter the ring. He remained unconscious outside the ring until the next entrant (Rollins) came out and tossed him into the ring to start the clock on his survival time.
So there you have it, Cagesiders. Which of the above numbers surprise you the most?
Previous Royal Rumble analyses:
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