With five heavyweight bouts on the main pay-per-view card of UFC 146 on May 26 from Las Vegas, Nevada, fans are right to expect thunderous action. Heavyweight champion Junior dos Santos makes his first title defense against former Strikeforce and K-1 champ Alistair Overeem.

Also on the card Frank Mir and Cain Velasquez will meet to sort out who's a contender and who's got a long climb back ahead of them. Roy Nelson welcomes Antonio Silva to the UFC. Veteran Gabriel Gonzaga does the same for up-and-comer Shane del Rosario and Stefan Struve puts Mark Hunt to the test.

Luke Thomas and the guys at Fight Metric have taken a hard look at the fights in the heavyweight division and some very interesting things pop out. Most notably the fact that the big boys have the shortest fights of any of the divisions. Here are the stats:

Below are the average lengths of time for a fight for each weight class since UFC 28, which is when the Unified Rules were put in place:

Weight Average Time

HW 7:59
LHW 9:02
MW 9:06
WW 9:54
LW 10:34
FW 11:12
BW 11:19

The most obvious takeaway is, quite clearly, heavyweight fights on average do end more quickly than fights in other divisions. In fact, the data tells us heavyweight fights are approximately 30% shorter than bantamweight fights on average. We can also see the difference between heavyweight and light heavyweight marks the biggest increase in average time between any two weight classes.

Luke also breaks out the shortest UFC main cards in pay-per-view history:

19:10 - UFC 29 (no heavyweight bouts)
19:23 - UFC 91 (two heavyweight bouts)
20:05 - UFC 32 (one heavyweight bout)
21:19 - UFC 55 (two heavyweight bouts)
23:22 - UFC 142 (zero heavyweight bouts)

What do you think? Will the unprecedented number of heavyweights make UFC 146 the quickest card ever?

SBN coverage of UFC 146