All-time Mount Rushmore of pros — data edition
Composite Rushmore: Derek Hough, Valentin Chmerkovskiy, Mark Ballas, Cheryl Burke.
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
A composite of wins, win rate, scoring, lift, longevity, and finalist seasons puts Derek Hough alone on the summit (composite 14.62), with Valentin Chmerkovskiy, Mark Ballas, and Cheryl Burke filling out a data-native Rushmore. Weights are explicit and debatable on purpose — publish as debate bait.
Weights: 1.5z(wins)+z(win_rate)+z(mean_score)+0.75z(lift)+0.5*z(seasons)+z(finalist_seasons); min 5 seasons
| Rank | Pro | Wins | Win rate | Mean | Lift | Seasons | Finalist seasons | Composite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Derek Hough | 6 | 35.3% | 8.912 | 1.344 | 17 | 9 | 14.616 |
| 2 | Valentin Chmerkovskiy | 3 | 17.6% | 8.671 | 0.838 | 17 | 7 | 7.682 |
| 3 | Mark Ballas | 2 | 10.0% | 8.638 | 0.721 | 20 | 9 | 6.663 |
| 4 | Cheryl Burke | 2 | 8.0% | 8.123 | 0.268 | 25 | 8 | 4.982 |
| 5 | Julianne Hough | 2 | 40.0% | 8.373 | 0.614 | 5 | 2 | 4.644 |
| 6 | Jenna Johnson | 2 | 33.3% | 8.030 | 0.375 | 6 | 3 | 3.528 |
| 7 | Witney Carson | 2 | 15.4% | 8.300 | 0.162 | 13 | 4 | 3.239 |
| 8 | Kym Johnson | 2 | 14.3% | 7.954 | -0.008 | 14 | 4 | 2.328 |
| 9 | Maksim Chmerkovskiy | 1 | 5.9% | 8.255 | 0.500 | 17 | 5 | 2.302 |
| 10 | Lindsay Arnold | 1 | 10.0% | 8.116 | 0.240 | 10 | 4 | 1.036 |
Methods & caveats
Pros with fewer than 5 seasons partnered excluded. Finalist seasons count unique seasons with a Winners/Runners-up/Third place result tag. Z-scores are within the filtered pro set. Changing weights changes the monument — that’s the point.
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
