Survey Says (cont.)
On Tuesday, we revealed the responses to the first two questions in our survey. Today, we get to the third and most difficult question.
3. Not counting opponent quality, what are the factors that most contribute to the quality of a victory?
(Rate the following on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being the highest)
Time
Effective Offensive Volume
Accuracy
Effective Defense
Method
You'll have to forgive us a little when it comes to the data for this question. Our intention was to force people to rank these five factors in order from 1-5. Instead, the survey asked them to rate them. The resulting data is not as precise as we'd like (some people just don't like giving 1's or 5's), but the conclusions should be valid just the same.
(Rate the following on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being the highest)
Time
Effective Offensive Volume
Accuracy
Effective Defense
Method
You'll have to forgive us a little when it comes to the data for this question. Our intention was to force people to rank these five factors in order from 1-5. Instead, the survey asked them to rate them. The resulting data is not as precise as we'd like (some people just don't like giving 1's or 5's), but the conclusions should be valid just the same.
It's no surprise that the highest scoring factor is effective offensive volume. MMA matches are all about successfully attacking your opponent. It's true, some fighters (specifically BJJ fighters) will let their opponents take them down or punch them because it serves their ultimate purpose of setting up an attack of their own. In general, however, you can usually tell who is doing a better job by tracking who lands more HiPer techniques. Nearly 90% of respondents rated offensive volume as a 4 or a 5.
The second-highest rating went to accuracy, which was a bit of a surprise. Nearly half of respondents gave this a 4, with an almost equal number rating it either a 5 or a 3. The implication is that accuracy is a very important thing, but not the most important thing. We found this unusual because accuracy is a factor you almost never hear about when people talk about fights. This is likely a result of there being no means to comprehensively track accuracy until recently. The implication (which is good news for a service like FightMetric) is that fans aren't talking about this but they really wish they could.
Third on the list was method of victory. While an average of 3.72 looks high and is pretty close to the results for accuracy, that number should be taken with a grain of salt. While 62% of respondents said that method of victory rated either a 4 or 5, the results from question #2 indicate that 67% of fans feel that method doesn't matter that much at all. If they were willing to say that a decision can be worth more than a knockout, how important could method really be? This is where the ranking vs. rating problem is most apparent. Our feeling is that the answers to #2 are a more accurate reflection of fan sentiment. Method doesn't rate as highly as the numbers would indicate.
Next on the list comes effective defense. This was the answer that had the largest spread of responses. A nearly equal proportion of respondents rated defense a 4 or 5 as did those who rated it a 2 or 3. People didn't quite know what to do with defense because it's a difficult thing to assess in a sport like MMA. In sports of possession, like football or basketball, after you score you have to give the ball back to the other team. At that point, the goal is to prevent them from scoring, which is an easy thing to measure. But in MMA, the goal is not so much to prevent your opponent from scoring with his techniques; it's to prevent him from ever attempting techniques at all. MMA is a like pick-up basketball where the game is to seven and the rules are make-it-take-it. The best kind of game is the one where your team rattles off seven scores in a row and never plays defense at all. The best defense really is a good offense.
Last on the list is time. This was ranked much lower than the other factors, with 80% of respondents rating it a 3 or lower. It also received the highest number of 1's, indicating no impact at all. Fans seem unconcerned with how long it takes to win as long as the action along the way is of high quality.
Among the 205 responses were 17 write-in answers for "Other." Factors receiving multiple write-ins included damage inflicted (5 votes), controlling the location of the fight (3 votes), aggression, and heart (2 votes each).
Conclusions: The ratings point to a three-tier breakdown. Offensive volume and accuracy are a ways above method and defense, while time lags far behind.
The calculation will be heavily weighted toward rewarding successful offensive techniques. While the FightMetric system awards points for what one could call defensive grappling actions (like escaping from mount), this calculation will ignore those and focus only on techniques that press the action: Strikes, takedowns, guard passes, and submissions.
Accuracy will receive a higher weighting than initially proposed. Mentions of accuracy have started to pop-up. Witness people's admiration - including quotes from several UFC higher-ups - for Anderson Silva's amazing performance against Chris Leben, in which he connected on every strike attempt. As fight tracking becomes more prevalent, this is a category that will only grow in prominence.
Weighting for method gets depressed because of the contradiction between answers to question #2 and question #3. In general, you can trust someone's answer to a simple yes-or-no question better than a judgment call based on rating 1-5.
Defense and time fall to the bottom of the heap. Still important, they will be included in the calculations, but should receive low weights.
Keep watching FightMetric for the release of this still-unnamed fight quality statistic. The calculations are in the final stages of testing and fine-tuning and will be ready in the very near future.
posted by FightMetric @ 12:00 AM
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