Hopefully if you're reading this by now you know that Season 9 of American Ninja Warrior is complete and for the 8th time in the show's history no one achieved Total Victory. Now a lot of the stats I reference this week will be comparing American Ninja Warrior to Sasuke. I have seen every Sasuke tournament but I am far from an expert on the show. However, with such small sample sizes of competitors on the later stages of American Ninja Warrior I'll be drawing from Sasuke's much larger competitor pool to make more impactful comparisons.

Last week, I pointed out that this season's Stage 1 had the second highest completion rate of any course in American Ninja Warrior history, including City Qualifying and City Finals courses. At the same time, this season's city courses featured the fewest clears in American Ninja Warrior history.

In Sasuke there are no city courses, just 100 competitors taking on the 4 stages of Mt. Midoriyama (I know there are the Sasuke trials but they are no where near as complete as the American Ninja Warrior city courses, and only account for a few of the competitor slots). The City courses of American Ninja Warrior do mean that the level of competitor taking on Stage 1 is higher in American Ninja Warrior than Sasuke. An example being Mr. Octopus, was a regular competitor in Sasuke despite the fact that he rarely made it past the first obstacle. To date, there have been 33 Sasuke seasons (season 34 has been filmed but hasn't aired so I have no data. It will feature Jessie Graff and Drew Drechsel, it is scheduled to air sometime this fall).

The 41 Stage 1 clears we saw this season, are more Stage 1 clears than there ever have been in a single Sasuke competition. The most Stage 1 clears in any of the previous 33 seasons of Sasuke was 37, in Sasuke 4, which aired all the way back in 1999. Since American Ninja Warrior began sending (roughly) 100 competitors to the National Finals (before it was just 10) in Season 4, an average of 26.5 competitors clear Stage 1. On average only 12.58 competitors clear Sasuke's Stage 1.

[The number of Stage 1 clears for every Sasuke and American Ninja Warrior competition.]

We're seeing more than twice as many competitors clear the American Ninja Warrior Stage 1 than the Sasuke Stage 1. This does make a lot of sense, only 5 American Ninja Warrior Seasons have featured (roughly) 100 Stage 1 competitors and in two of those seasons, Season 7 (38) and this season (41) we saw more Stage 1 clears than in any of the Sasuke competitions.

Stage 2 is a completely different story. In Sasuke, an average of 5.91 ninjas clear Stage 2 every season. In the past 5 seasons of American Ninja Warrior, the average number of Stage 2 clears is just 3.83.

[The number of Stage 2 clears for every Sasuke and American Ninja Warrior competition.]

This means that the average completion rate of Stage 2 is vastly different in Sasuke than it is for American Ninja Warrior. On average 46.99% (195/415) of all Sasuke Stage 2 competitors clear the course. For American Ninja Warrior the average completion percentage of Stage 2 is a ridiculous 14.46% (23/159). Obviously there's a huge sample size difference there, but the Stage 2 completion percentage for the first 9 Sasuke competitions was 49.79%, so it doesn't seem like sample size was the issue.

Now obviously the American Ninja Warrior data is lacking after Stage 2 with just 23 clears in the past 5 seasons (I could include the 9 Stage 2 clears from Seasons 1-3 but those technically occurred on a Sasuke course, so I will not being doing that in order to keep the data sets separate). The Stage 3 completion percentage is 18.46% (36/195). Which again is more than double that of the American Ninja Warrior Stage 3 completion percentage, 8.70% (2/23).

In Total there have been 5 Total Victories in Sasuke: Kazuhiko Akiyama - Sasuke 4, Makoto Nagano - Sasuke 17, Yuuji Urushihara - Sasuke 24, Yuuji Urushihara - Sasuke 27, and Yusuke Morimoto - Sasuke 31.That's 5 Total Victories in 33 seasons or 1 every 6.6 seasons.

On the American Ninja Warrior side of things there were just the 2 Total Victories, by Geoff Britten and Isaac Caldiero in Season 7. That's 2 Total Victories in 9 seasons, however, as I've pointed out above, had someone achieved Total Victory in Seasons 1-3 of American Ninja Warrior that technically would have counted for Sasuke. So removing those first 3 weird seasons, American Ninja Warrior has had someone achieve Total Victory every 3 seasons on average. Said differently, 0.15% (5/3300) of Sasuke competitors have achieved Total Victory compared to 0.33% of American Ninja Warrior National Finalists (2/600).

In summary:

American Ninja Warrior's Stage 1 is more than 2 times "easier" than Sasuke's - on average American Ninja Warrior Stage 1 has more than 2 times as many clears as Sasuke Stage 1.

American Ninja Warrior's Stage 2 is more than 3 times "harder" than Sasuke's - the average completion percentage of American Ninja Warrior Stage 2 is less than a third of Sasuke's Stage 2 completion percentage.

American Ninja Warrior's Stage 3 is more than 2 times "harder" than Sasuke's - the average completion percentage of American Ninja Warrior Stage 3 is less than a third of Sasuke's Stage 2 completion percentage.

Achieving "Total Victory" is more than 2 times "easier" on American Ninja Warrior than Sasuke - the percentage of of the American Ninja Warrior National Finalists who achieved total victory is more than 2 times greater than the percentage of Sasuke competitors to do so.