My Favorite UFC 264 Bet, McGregor's Power, Weak Evidence & Carlos Condit's TDD
I’m back! Just in time for UFC 264. The summer’s been a busy one for me, but I’m thrilled to be back and fully in the swing of things on Twitter, Instagram, with my podcast and doing the newsletter.
We’ve also got a great array of fights to analyze this week — plenty of intriguing matchups with big sample sizes to draw from on both sides.
Let’s get right into this week’s newsletter.
Why I’m Betting Wonderboy
Stephen Thompson’s age worries me. The hype he got after looking great against an obviously-overmatched Geoff Neal worries me. But I’m feeling really good about betting Wonderboy this week.
Thompson is one of the best distance strikers in UFC history. His distance strike differential (landed minus absorbed) of +402 is the 5th best in UFC history (trailing just GSP, Bisping, Joanna and Holloway). His distance strike ratio (landed divided by absorbed) of 1.83-to-1 ranks #15 in UFC history (minimum 10 fights), and his competition has been tougher than most of the fighters ahead of him.
Gilbert Burns has shown improved striking at Welterweight, but his path to victory is not out-pointing Stephen Thompson from distance. He has some power, but that was also the book on Geoff Neal. Burns Pettis-ing Thompson is a serious long shot.
Burns needs to get this fight to the ground.
Well, since his second UFC fight when Matt Brown took him down 5 times, Thompson has only been taken down twice, on 19 attempts. That’s an 89.5% takedown defense rate, allowing his opponents to hold control positions for just 6.6% of his fight time.
Burns (36% takedown accuracy, 25.8% control rate) has a solid takedown game, but it will likely take more than “solid” to do any real damage to Thompson with your grappling.
Thompson keeps this one standing and wins handily.
UFC 264 Advanced Stats
If you’re interested in finding all of the advanced stats I have for UFC 264, you can purchase the analytics package here: https://numbersmma.gumroad.com/l/lUALT
And if you’re looking for a discount, you can also subscribe monthly (the price of 2 individual events) or even yearly (the price of 11 months, or just 22 individual events) here: https://numbersmma.gumroad.com/l/RdpKd
Weak Evidence
"When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate."
Nassim Taleb, "The Black Swan"
This quote, to me, is one of those that gets an immediate reaction of "well of course," but that becomes more interesting the more I think about it.
Confirmation bias (being more attuned to information that supports your preconceived belief) is nothing novel, but this idea goes deeper than confirmation bias.
When someone is making their UFC debut without having fought any UFC-level competition, it can be very hard to figure out how they're going to adapt to the huge step up in competition. Whatever conclusion you come to about their abilities from their pre-UFC fights is going to be based on relatively weak evidence.
Let's say you think they're a possible future champion, you're excited about them and bet on them. Then they win with an impressive 30-second knockout.
Fast knockouts like that are obviously impressive and hard to come by, but they're a lot less representative of a fighter's overall skill level than, say, a dominant 3-round decision. But you've continued building your opinion on weak evidence.
Now, even if they lose a dominant 3-round decision in their next fight, you're going to be more likely to look for reasons to dismiss this, even though from an outside standpoint you should be putting more weight in the first 3-round UFC fight than in all of your pre-UFC research.
Is there an actionable piece to take away from this beyond "be careful about holding too tightly to your prior beliefs"? I think so, though it's probably an unpopular one.
Because I use statistics as the backbone of my analysis, and because debuting fighters and even those with just 1 or 2 UFC fights to their name don't have reliable statistics, any evidence I have for my analysis there is week.
So what I do is just avoid analyzing most of those fighters too closely until we have a more significant sample size.
Do I miss out on some profitable bets from guys early in their UFC career? Certainly. But the difference it makes in my overall analysis can more than make up for that in the long run.
Conor McGregor’s Power
Can something be overrated and underrated at the same time? Because that’s how I feel about Conor McGregor’s power.
My gut reaction to anyone saying his power is overrated is to argue that it’s not. But at the same time, my gut reaction to the people who claim his power is incredible and that he’s one of the best ever because of it is also to argue.
I guess where I stand is that his power is underrated, but that the importance of his power is overrated.
Any way you want to look at knockdown rate stats, McGregor is one of the greatest in UFC history.
McGregor has averaged one knockdown for every 8 minutes and 16 seconds of UFC fight time. That is the best average for anyone in UFC history (minimum 10 fights). It puts him ahead of Pat Barry, Rumble Johnson and Francis Ngannou as the top four.
The usual push-back to a stat like is that the multi-knockdown Alvarez and Diaz performances inflate this stat.
So we can look at knockdown rate in a way that doesn’t reward multi-knockdown performances. I like to do this by taking the percentage of fights in which they have scored a knockdown (i.e. dropping one opponent five times but not dropping the next two would give a rate of 33.3%)
Spun that way, McGregor still ranks #2 in UFC history (minimum 10 fights again) at 69.2%, trailing only Cody Garbrandt.
Whether you want to call it power, precision, timing or whatever, McGregor’s ability to knock down opponents is almost unparalleled in the UFC.
But there’s only so far that can carry you. The list of fighters who join McGregor in averaging a knockdown per less than 10 minutes is a short one. But it’s also not exactly a list of world beaters.
Conor McGregor, Pat Barry, Anthony Johnson, Francis Ngannou, Khalil Rountree, James Irvin, Matt Mitrione.
So is McGregor’s power underrated? Probably not. Does that make him one of the best fighters of all time? Nope.
Carlos Condit’s Takedown Defense
I’ve written about it before, but statistically Carlos Condit has some of the worst takedown defense in the UFC. He’s allowed the most takedowns in UFC history despite facing just the 27th most attempts, and his defense rate of 35% is the second worst in UFC history for anyone who has faced 50+ attempts (only Louis Smolka has a lower TDD rate).
Max Griffin averages 3.3 takedown attempts per 15 minutes, with 52% accuracy. Griffin has five separate UFC fights with 2+ takedown attempts, and he landed at least half of his attempts in each of those five. His control rate in those fights is 28%.
But there’s one serious wrench in things coming into this one.
Condit just stuffed 5 of the 6 takedown attempts he faced against Matt Brown.
Condit is 37 years old, so I don’t think he’s suddenly added some new wrinkle to his game, so I’m going to operate as if that performance was more of an anomaly. I’m betting Max Griffin here. But I’d be feeling a whole lot better about the bet if it weren’t for that pesky performance against Brown lingering in the back of my mind.