Mixed Martial Analytics

Data was scraped by an unknown 3rd party from the Sherdog Website. It can be found here.

There were a total of 3,569 fights and 1,561 fighters in the two main data sets. The fights ranged from November 12, 1993 all the way up until February 21st, 2016.

All R code for this and other projects can be found on my GitHub site.

Striking versus Grappling: How do fighters win in MMA? Most fights are won with striking, followed by chokes and joint locks. The graph below also indicates that the majority of fights were won in the first round. There were a total of 3,569 fights in this data set. No Contest results are not included. A more detailed analysis of the different types of strikes, chokes, joint locks that won fights can be found in the supplementary section. Subcategories of winning methods were cleaned up manually. An analysis of Wins by Decision are also located in the supplementary section. Category Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4 Round 5 Total Strike 694 299 133 9 6 1141 Choke 299 177 91 7 1 575 JointLock 130 44 16 1 4 195 Stoppage 18 26 8 2 1 55 MISC 28 8 3 1 0 40 Injury 16 12 7 1 0 36 DQ 2 0 1 0 0 3

In what round are most fights won?

Ring Rust: Is it real? The analysis below examined the average days between wins and losses for the fighter’s last fight. Results showed that fighters who won their most recent fight in the data had a longer time since their last fight than losers. This difference was statistically significant (p < .05). Result Difference in Days loss 172.3 days win 211.3 days

Fight like a girl: Are their gender differences in how MMA fights are won? For both men and women, more fights ended in decision than any other way. This was followed by striking, then choking then joint locks for both genders. About 52% of female fights end in decision, while only 42% of male fights end in the same way. Men win more fights with striking (M:32%, F:25%) and choking (M:16%, F:14%) than women. However, women win fights with joint locks more so than men (F: 8%, M: 5%). Overall, women are more likely to last the entirety of the fight than men (F: 52%, M: 48%), but they are also less likely to knock out or choke out their opponents (M: 49%, F: 39%). There were a total of 3,467 male fights and 102 female fights. The large disparity in the number of male and female fights required an analysis of percentages rather than raw counts. Percentage of total fights were calculated using a simple formula: Winning Method (count)/Fights (count). Gender was not included in the data set, and was added manually by the author. One piece of feedback regarding this data that I found interesting was that it is possble that physical weight is playing a role in the gender differences as well. The female fighters are lighter than the men, and limiting the male fighter comparison data to the lower male weight classes might offer a better comparison than including all male weight classes. Gender differences in Decision Wins? Overall, male fights end in unanimous decisions slightly more often than female fights. Female fights also have slightly more split decisions and majority decisions.

Where do MMA fighters come from? Below is a map of all the UFC fighters contained in the data set. It is interactive.