This Saturday, Josh Emmett (13-1 MMA, 4-1 UFC) takes on Jeremy Stephens (27-14 MMA, 14-13 UFC) in Orlando, Florida.

Whilst Emmett is still relatively inexperienced in his UFC career, Stephens will be competing in the UFC for the 28th time, pulling level with Jim Miller and behind only Michael Bisping (29) in the all-time appearances list.

Let’s take a look at the recent results of the two men in Saturday night’s main event:

Emmett rebounded from a split-decision defeat to Desmond Green last April with back-to-back victories over Felipe Arantes and Ricardo Lamas via unanimous decision and KO, respectively.

Emmet’s win over former title contender Lamas came on a little over 2 weeks’ notice, with Emmett missing weight before scoring an emphatic first-round KO victory.

Like Emmett, Stephens rebounded from a split-decision loss last April (to Renato Moicano) with two victories, defeating former Strikeforce champion Gilbert Melendez via a lopsided unanimous decision and Doo Ho Choi via TKO last month.

Stephens has seen 8 of his last 10 fights go to the judges’ scorecards and holds the record for the most decision losses in UFC history (10). He’s won his event’s Fight of the Night award in 3 of his last 5 contests, including the last two.

Emmett and Stephens share no common opponents throughout their professional MMA careers.

The Dwyer Score

Each event, I calculate a ‘Dwyer Score’ for the card. It essentially gives a numeric value to the momentum of fighters competing at any one event. I do this by assigning a figure to each fighter’s current streak; a fighter on a five-fight winning streak contributes +5 to an event’s score, whilst a fighter on a two-fight losing streak contributes -2 to the score. A fighter coming off a No Contest, a draw, or a bout with another promotion has a streak of 0, and only UFC results are considered. When you tally up the scores for every fighter on a card, you get a total for the event- the ‘Dwyer Score.’ This score does not claim to predict or measure the quality or excitement of any one card, but it does give you an idea of the general momentum of fighters heading into a specific event. The graphic to the above-right displays some of the highest-scoring events of all time, to help give some context to this score.

UFC on FOX 28: Josh Emmett vs. Jeremy Stephens checks in with a solid score of +10.

This score ranks 18th out of 41 events in the last year and 3rd out of 5 UFC on FOX events in that same period.

Here’s a look at how this score compares to other events’ scores over the past year:

Aside from the comparisons displayed in the graph, this score falls short of the +14 average for UFC on FOX events in the last year but far exceeds the +4.9 average for all non-PPV events in the same time frame.

Let’s take a look at exactly how this score breaks down:

The highest individual contributors to the score are Tecia Torres, Ovince Saint Preux and Olivier Aubin-Mercier (all +3), just ahead of Josh Emmett and Jeremy Stephens (both +2).

The lowest scorers this week are Alan Jouban and Albert Morales (both -2), whilst two fighters are making their promotional debuts on Saturday.

Enjoy the fights!