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It’s not easy to rank fighters; threads like this prove it. Even people who know a whole lot about fighting (and I am NOT one of them) disagree about who should be ranked where, and there’s a lot of subjectivity involved.
As an experiment, I tried ranking fighters on a different basis. I don’t know enough to judge how “good “ a fighter is, so I did not try. Instead, I worked out a mathematical method that ranks fighters based on nothing but fight results. I applied the method to the UFC welterweight division, and the results don’t look too bad.
Here is (roughly) how the method works. The inputs are the results of all official UFC welterweight fights in the past three years. The outputs are “ratings” for all fighters who have won at least one fight. Each rating depends on the sum of the “fight scores” for the fights which that fighter won. The fight score of each fight depends on whether it ended by stoppage or decision; when it happened; and the rating of the loser. Stoppages score higher than decisions; more recent fights score higher than “older” fights; and winning over a higher rated fighter scores higher than winning over a lower rated fighter.
Finally, a fighter with only one or two fights gets a reduced rating, simply because there isn’t enough of a record to draw a solid conclusion.
Because the input depends partly on the output, the method is partly circular. If you’re mathematically inclined, you have noticed that the algorithm has to iterate until it converges.
Which it did, producing the results shown below for the UFC welterweight division. There are 51 fighters who won at least one fight, and so were rated by the method. The algorithm forces the average rating to equal 100. Here are the top 15 as calculated using this method:
1. Georges St. Pierre 151
2. Jon Fitch 140
3. Thiago Alves 128
4. Matt Serra 128
5. Josh Koscheck 126
6. Dustin Hazelett 113
7. Mike Swick 112
8. Diego Sanchez 108
9. Marcus Davis 107
10. Roan Carneiro 105
11. Kevin Burns 105
12. Drew Fickett 104
13. Josh Burkman 103
14. Tony DeSouza 103
15. Karo Parisyan 103
I am not claiming that this ranking is better than any other, and I am certainly not claiming that I have any insight into the fighters’ skill levels. There’s no point in flaming me on those grounds. I think it is interesting, however, to see that the mathematical approach does give me results that are similar (at least partly) to some people’s rankings.
It’s also interesting to see why the method put certain fighters in certain places:
Matt Serra: His KO of GSP is the one single fight that pushes his rating up.
Dustin Hazelett: Defeated Josh Burkman by stoppage, which helps his rating a lot.
Mike Swick: Wins over Josh Burkman and Marcus Davis by decision.
Roan Carneiro: Defeated Tony DeSouza by stoppage.
Kevin Burns: Defeated Roan Carneiro by stoppage, but has only one fight.
Drew Fickett: Defeated Josh Koscheck by stoppage, but that was a long time ago.
Karo Parisyan: Defeated Josh Burkman and Drew Fickett, but by decision and not recently.
BJ Penn: Not rated – he only fought two welterweight fights in the last three years, and lost both times.
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Grumpy
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