Narratives, Jessica Penne, and Francis Ngannou Streaking

UFC 260 is upon us, but it moves forward without the co-main event that was scheduled between Alex Volkanovski and Brian Ortega.

That’s probably for the best, because I’m still not mentally recovered from the absolute bath I took betting Korean Zombie over Ortega. Woops.

Anyway, here’s this week’s newsletter.

Creating Narratives

Did Kevin Holland have a “mental breakdown”? Or did a fighter with a 53% takedown defense rate who has struggled against any opponent who has attempted 5+ takedowns also struggle against an opponent with Division II All-American wrestling chops who attempted 12 takedowns?

No matter what you think of Holland’s personality and fighting style, there’s absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in the result of his fight against Derrick Brunson.

His style and the way he talks through his entire fight may not be ordinary, but that’s also who he is in his wins as well as his losses — so by his standards that aspect of the fight was also nothing out of the ordinary.

So why would we attribute his bad performance to the same factors that pop up in his victories, instead of just attributing the loss to the clear area of weakness that he had shown previously and that his opponent made an obvious point of targeting?

Jessica Penne …

… is one of the least efficient strikers in UFC history. There are 816 fighters in UFC history with at least 300 significant strike attempts and at least 300 significant strikes faced. Penne ranks 794/816 in Strike Efficiency vs Expectation (SEvE).

Streaks, Variance and Francis Ngannou’s Power

It’s obviously not a hot take to theorize that Francis Ngannou is more powerful than the average Heavyweight. But time and time again we’ve seen fighters put together a string of early knockouts only to never really live up to that hype again.

So let’s look at how we can use streaks to identify legitimate outliers more easily than we could otherwise.

In the UFC unified rules era (dating back to UFC 28), there have been 440 knockouts inside the first two minutes of a fight [let’s use KOu2 as a shorthand because that’s a mouthful]. That means the base rate in the UFC in that time has been 7.6% (440 out of 5,780) of fights end that way.

Even if we just look at Heavyweights, that rate is 13.2% (69 out of 523).

So an average Heavyweight, just by pure chance, has a 1.7% chance to score back-to-back KOu2s. And this isn’t just 1.7% to ever do it, but to do it in two specific fights. So if they fight 10 times, that gives them nine different two-fight stretches to achieve that feat. With that in mind, there is a 14.3% that an average UFC Heavyweight has back-to-back KOu2s at least once in those 10 fights.

So how do streaks help us identify outliers?

Well, we know the base Heavyweight rate for KOu2 is 13.2%. Let’s say a Heavyweight is 50% better than average at scoring a KOu2. Their rate climbs to 19.8% then. Over a 100-fight sample, that’s a difference of only 6.6 KOu2s. Across 10 fights, their expected number differs from the average by less than one. So for a high-variance event, there’s not a big difference.

But let’s look at streaks.

That fighter with a 19.8% rate is 3.9% to score back-to-back KOu2s in any two given fights. And across a 10-fight sample they are 30.1% to do it at least once.

Now what about a 3-fight streak of KOu2s?

An average Heavyweight is 0.23% to do that in any given set of three fights. Across 10 fights they only have a 1.83% chance to achieve the feat at least once.

For our 50% better than average Heavyweight, those numbers are 0.78% and 6.02% to do it at least once.

So, they may only be 1.5 times more likely to score a KOu2 in any given fight, but they are 3.29 times more likely to score three straight KOu2s in a 10-fight stretch.

We don’t want to take this thinking too far and try to infer someone’s “true” KOu2 rate from their streaks, but this still gives us a very useful tool.

The wise analyst is going to be leery of extreme results over small samples, and that makes sense and will give you a solid edge in general. But to take it one step further, using extreme streaks can help us identify legitimate outliers much more quickly than we may be able to otherwise.

Francis Ngannou Has Accounted For …

… 7 of those 69 knockouts inside two minutes (10.1%) in UFC Heavyweight history.

Tyron Woodley Inside the Distance…

… is available at +600, if long-shot prop bets are your kind of thing.

Thanks so much for reading! As always, feel free to reply to this email with any questions, comments, or topic ideas you’d like to read about in the future!

Preparing to look silly for the Tyron Woodley ITD call,

Jason