SB Nation User Blog: PistonHyundai

Hard-nosed wrestlers

PistonHyundai — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:21:41 -0000

I was introduced to MMA as a casual boxing fan, so it's no surprise that I was among the many new fans that valued the striking portions of matches over mat work. And like so many of those fans, I figured out pretty quickly that the vast majority of the boxing in MMA was being done by scholastic wrestlers that needed that extra dimension to make some real noise. While that practice continues to turn off lots of boxing enthusiasts, it immediately appealed to me as a completely different skill (which it obviously is), and actually got me interested in wrestling, which I had never been curious about in my entire life.

To this day, wrestler/boxers take a pretty considerable lead over other archetypes when I think of my favorite fighters, past and present. Of course there are those who make people cringe with ineffective flailing or the dreaded lay'n'pray, but whose ass hasn't been out of its seat at some point while watching warriors like:

Hendo

Randy!

Rampage

Pulver

Tyson Griffin

Fitch

Rashad

Mike Brown

Koscheck

And even guys just beginning bright careers like Brian Bowles. And while I am NOT a fan of his theatrics, I'll watch BROCKLESNAR fight any day of the week.

Who else out there loves an all-american meatgrinder that doesn't mind trading leather? And which of those guys did I forget to mention?

The Real UFC 100

PistonHyundai — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:41:25 -0000

via www.mmabay.co.uk

Okay, now maybe this has already been pointed out, discussed, and even become common knowledge, but I couldn't find anything about it on the BE search engine, so here goes.

I was thinking the other day, as so many of us have, about UFC 100, and how 29 of our beloved pay-per-views actually occurred under the umbrella of a different partnership than the current one. Before too long, I grew curious about what Zuffa's real 100th MMA event would be, so I fired up Wikipedia and got to counting.

Since Zuffa purchased the UFC in 2001, the Fertittas and Co. have hosted:

70 PPVs (sloppily including non-US cards that were aired for free on Spike)

19 Ultimate Fight Nights (including Ortiz v Shamrock 3)

9 Ultimate Fighter Finales

and 1 anomalous fight card in UFC "37.5"

Meaning that the "real" UFC 100 is...

UFC 100!

Again, maybe this fact is so old that I completely missed any discussion about it, but if it isn't, I wonder if Dana or the rest of the UFC brass even know? If this was intentional, I feel like they would be making a bigger deal out of the dual significance.

A Possible Expansion on MMA Sabermetrics

PistonHyundai — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:15:01 -0000

OK, so here goes my first BE fanpost after a couple months of lurking.

I am by no means an authority on the subject of sabermetrics, MMA or otherwise- merely an enthusiastic amateur. But after reading Mr. Roling's awesome post on Strength of Schedule in MMA, I got to wondering about some alternative statistics one could generate:

First of all, it seems to me that SOS' lack of distinction between wins and losses of the fighter in question is something of a weakness. While I unfortunately have neither the resources nor the programming know-how to whip up a demonstrative database, I feel like there's a lot of insight to be found in separate Strength of Victories and Strength of Defeats statistics. Important: I have no idea if these already exist, but I googled "strength of defeat" and the top five or so results involved some crazy German techno album. I imagine calculating Strength of Victory in the same way as the standard SOS stat, obviously (I hope) only including the records of the opponents (or opponents' opponents- or both!) defeated by the primary fighter. Strength of Defeats could be divined almost identically, except for dividing the sum of losses, not wins, by the sum of total fights. In this way, if a fighter is losing to top flight opposition, the SOD stat weighs much less, whereas getting flattened by Luke Cummo (who I'm a fan of, but come on) is going to leave a mark.

After deriving these stats, one could divide SOV over SOD, producing a quotient greater than 1 (for any fighter worth starting a flame war over), higher for "better" fighters and lower for "worse" fighters.

I have some more ideas- like some kind of weight related to total number of fights (if Fighter A and B have identical Strength of Whatever stats but Fighter A has twice as many fights, he obviously deserves a bump... but how big of one?), but I figure I'll save those for if this post actually turns out to have any merit. Just thought I'd inaugurate my BE account with a more meaningful post than "GSP IS RULES!"