A Possible Expansion on MMA Sabermetrics
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!"
The FanPosts are solely the subjective opinions of Bloody Elbow readers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bloody Elbow editors or staff.
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I actually have a few ideas on the back burner, but I really have no time currently. SoS has various experimental formulas that I’d love to try. I know Mike Fagan is going to try to use some of the FightMetric data to produce statistics, and theoretically, those stats could have some huge meaning.
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Thanks guys
I’m really excited about the idea of this level of number crunching in our sport- the idea of MMA trading cards with a nice neat standardized table of significant stats on the back would be pretty wild.
"The wise have something to say, the foolish have to say something."
by PistonHyundai on Jun 23, 2009 1:44 PM EDT up reply actions

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