FightMetric and math come to Mixed Martial Arts
The Boston Globe, winner of 21 Pullet Surprizes, just did a piece on the role of stats in MMA, excerpted…
The Boston Globe, winner of 21 Pullet Surprizes, just did a piece on the role of stats in MMA, excerpted below.
In a lot of sports, statistics can come in handy: We know Ray Allen is a pure shooter, while Rajon Rondo, with his paltry percentages behind the arc and at the line, must beat opponents with speed and craftiness. The problem for MMA fans was that nobody had really been keeping track of fights with this level of specificity. I think it was so crazy that we didn’t even give it any thought, said Kirik Jenness, an MMA judge and referee, and founder of the popular website MixedMartialArts.com. We were just thinking, ‘Oh my God, that guy’s stomping on that other guy’s head.’
By the time Rami Genauer began to follow the sport closely in 2005, fights were overseen by referees, matches were capped at 25 minutes, and rules had been imposed against hitting opponents in the groin. Genauer started writing analytical articles about the sport for a website called MMA Weekly, and realized that while fighters were performing increasingly complex feats in the cage, there was no useful way to seriously compare their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies.
Genauer’s frustration gave rise to a unique ambition: to systematize what might be the least systematic sport ever invented. The task would require going over more than a decade’s worth of fights, watching around 1,500 hours of video, and entering every punch, kick, and guillotine choke into a giant database. Genauer wanted to take a wild, free-wheeling sport and turn it into something that fans could analyze and obsess over with the same precision that their friends brought to baseball, basketball, and golf.
The result of his work was a pioneering thing: a full-fledged statistics system for mixed martial arts called FightMetric, produced by a company he founded in 2007.
But even as Genauer heralds the adoption of his system as a natural step in the evolution of the sport, some fans worry that too many numbers will spoil the very thing they love about it. Mixed martial arts, after all, has its roots in an impulse to see what happens when you throw out the rules.
The sport turned out to be ready for it: Within months of FightMetric’s launch, articles were referencing Genauer’s numbers, and broadcasters were invoking them in their commentary. Not everyone in the MMA world, however, saw the sense in systematizing a contest that consists of flying triangle chokes, underhooks, and headlocks. I was very skeptical at first, said Jenness. I’ve judged hundreds and hundreds of matches, and I thought you could not reduce judging a match to some kind of numerical formula. Judging, he said, is kind of biblical, whose will be done….You’re kind of watching for who’s forcing their will on the other person.
A competitor arose — Compustrike, which provides a similar service to fighting analysts and fans — and in 2010 the UFC essentially endorsed the idea, making Genauer’s company its official statistics provider. Today, despite some early resistance, reports from FightMetric as well as Compustrike have increasingly become the standard tools for analyzing the sport, and are frequently invoked by fans arguing about past matches or trying to ascertain the stakes of an upcoming one.