This week’s Super Bowl card in Las Vegas is naturally filled with big names, both of the veteran variety (Anderson Silva, Vitor Belfort, Rich Franklin, Forrest Griffin) and of rising young stars (Jon Jones, Ryan Bader).
So it’s not surprising that their names appear all over the list of “UFC official records” recently released by FightMetric. There you can find leaderboards for a number of different statistical categories, such as striking (volume and accuracy) and takedowns (offence and defence).
Let’s take a look at three of the main card fights and see what the stats suggest we can expect when the fighters match up Saturday night at the Mandalay Bay Events Center.
Silva gave the quote of the day at Wednesday’s pre-fight press conference when asked about the all-Brazilian duel between him and Belfort, suggesting the matchup of the decade would instead be “me fighting my clone.” While not exactly a humble statement, Silva could make a case for that statistically.
Silva is by far and away the most on-target attacker the UFC has ever seen. He leads the category of significant striking accuracy (SSA) by a huge margin (68.4 per cent — second best is Cheick Kongo at 61.3). It’s also worth noting that even in the fights where he has been criticized for not being on his game he still gets the job done, as he has never had a fight in which his accuracy was less than 50 per cent.
In addition, he is second all-time in terms of total career knockdowns with 12, and there’s a decent chance he’ll move atop the list before he’s done in the Octagon. Chuck Liddell leads the pack with 14, but the former UFC knockout artist has now retired. Who knows, a motivated Silva could usurp The Iceman before Saturday night is done.
Just to show how well-rounded his game is, Silva also has a career takedown accuracy (TDA) of 76 per cent, including his non-UFC fights. Compare that to the efficiency of the UFC leader in that category — Georges St-Pierre, who gets people to the mat at 77.7 rate.
Belfort is no slouch statistically. His career SSA is 49 per cent and his TDA is a very respectable 67 per cent, which would rank him right in the middle of the top-10. However, he hasn’t fought enough fights in the UFC (only five since it adopted the Unified Rules of MMA and just one — a win over Franklin last September — since 2005).
| UFC 126 schedule | |||
| What? | When? | Where? | |
| Pre-fight press conference | Wednesday (re-watch) | Live stream | |
| UFC Fight Club Q&A | Friday, 5 p.m. ET / 2 p.m. PT | Live stream | |
| UFC 126 weigh-ins | Friday, 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT | Live stream | |
| UFC 126 live results | Saturday, 7:20 p.m. ET / 4:20 p.m. PT | Fight card | |
| Kid Yamamoto’s UFC debut | Saturday, 8:25 p.m. ET / 5:25 p.m. PT | ||
| UFC 126 preliminary fights | Saturday, 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT | Sportsnet | |
| UFC 126 main card (PPV) | Saturday, 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT | Pay-per-view | |
| Post-fight press conference | Saturday, 1:15 a.m. ET / 10:15 p.m. PT (approx.) | Live stream | |
The most interesting matchup numbers-wise is the co-main event between Franklin and Griffin. These two are natural-born scrappers. They like to get in there and throw down. And this is evidenced by the fact <a target="_blank" href="http://blog.fightmetric.com/2011/01/ufc-leaders-significant-strikes
landed.html”>they rank No. 4 and No. 6, respectively, in significant strikes landed (SSL).
While that measures sheer volume over the fighters’ careers, even more telling is the strikes landed per minute (SLpM), where Griffin also ranks 8th. The combination of the two stats indicates that Griffin tends to keep throwing throughout the duration of his fights. On the other hand, that aggressiveness has only led to one knockout win in his 12 UFC fights, while five of his eight victories have gone the distance.
Franklin is more of a power puncher, and he ranks just behind Silva in knockdowns landed (KD) with 10, meaning he doesn’t need to throw quite as many to do the damage. So while their fight is likely to be primarily a standup one, it will be very interesting to see which fighter keeps busier and who does the most damage.
Moving on to the duel of twenty-somethings between Jones and Bader, which is also a battle of “unbeatens” (technically, Jones has one loss by disqualification for an unintentional foul during a fight he was dominating).
The furious striker Jones will have his work cut out for him against the elusive Bader, who is the current leader in significant strike defence (SSD). Bader’s 78.4 rate of making his opponent miss is a few points higher than a group of three (that includes GSP) hovering around 74 per cent. It’s no wonder he is 5-0 in the UFC and has always outstruck his opponent by a large margin.
Jones, meanwhile, finds his name on the leaderboard for takedown accuracy, sitting tied for 8th at 65 per cent. And this is accomplished with than an occasional attempt as he gets on average 4.14 takedowns per 15 minutes.
This could mean that Jones, who has the longest reach in the UFC at 84.5 inches, might opt to go for takedowns rather than try his luck in the standup.
He had better be careful however, because Bader is almost as good at getting a fighter to the ground, succeeding 16 times in his five UFC fights (for an average of 4.04 times per 15 minutes). He just takes a lot more attempts to accomplish it.
One final note. While Silva is the king in a couple of categories, UFC president Dana White may want to reconsider who truly is the best fighter pound-for-pound, since St-Pierre finds his name in a whopping nine of the 12 top-10 lists.