Effective Strikes per Minute Predicts UFC 132 Victories

Unpredictability in MMA is part of what makes this such a great sport.  MMA has been host to some of the best and most thrilling sports upsets in the last decade.  But is there a method to the madness?

Lets find out!

The first thing that we will need is some DATA.  I have taken approximately 200 different stats ranging from fighter age, stance, and record, to less trivial things like effective takedowns per minute for 20 of the fights from UFC 132.

Below is a set of examples:

After some data conditioning and the magic of statistics, the biggest most robust predictor of WINNING from UFC 132 was the difference of "Effective strikes / Minute".  The fighter with the more effective strikes per minute in their previous bouts would likely get the win.

This statistic successfully predicted 8/10 fights on UFC 132 (I didn't have the statistics for Hougland v Walker). So the better you are at successfully hitting the other guy, the more likely you will be to win.  This makes a lot of sense intuitively, but imagine what would happen if this predictor held true for more than just UFC 132... wouldn't that be something!!!

Stay tuned after future UFC fights to see if statistics can successfully predict future winners!

THE MMA MESSAGE TEAM

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