Explaining TPR - Volume II: The Win Component
How important is a win? Seems like a silly question, because fights are almost exclusively measured in binary: You've either won or lost, or to borrow an idiom, winning is everything.
The introduction of TPR changes that. A performance rating means that not all wins and losses are created equal; there are degrees to which some wins are better than others. Similarly, not all performances in a losing effort are equal. This begs the question: Is it possible for some losses to be better than some wins?
We posed this question in a survey and received over 200 responses from various segments of the MMA community. In all, the clear majority opinion (76% of respondents) was that losses can sometimes be better than wins.
The perceived logic behind this is two-fold. Firstly, some wins are questionable, whether because of bad decisions or early stoppages. Those victories are already devalued in the eyes of fans. More important is what we'll call the "Clay Guida Problem." Try ranking the following three performances in order of quality:
Justin McCully's against Antoni Hardonk
Clay Guida's against Roger Huerta
Gabriel Gonzaga's against Kevin Jordan
There would likely be variation in who was ranked second and third, but those 76% who responded above would almost definitely put Guida's performance as the best. Compared to a boring decision victory in McCully's case, or even to a definitive knockout in a three round snoozefest in Gonzaga's case, one would have to concede that Guida performed better, even though he was submitted.
The result is that the Win component contributes just five dedicated points to the TPR formula out of 100. Winning does have a larger effect, as we will see in discussions of the Time and Method components, but in the end, we've taken that original binary outlook and reduced it to a mere fraction of total performance quality.
This broaches an even bigger question: Is it possible for a loser to put in a better performance than the fighter who beat him? Here the binary problem is more pronounced. Thinking exclusively in terms of wins and losses means that a winner did not just perform better than the fighter he beat, but performed 100% better.
While this is true in principle, most fans would not agree to this if challenged. To use a recent example, even of those who believe that Michael Bisping deserved the win against Matt Hamill by way of the ten-point must system, most would agree that Hamill put in the better performance overall.
By not building a correction into the system that requires winning fighters to outpoint their defeated opponents, we've opened the door to non-traditional conclusions. Indeed, the TPR calculation gives Hamill a 69 rating, while Bisping, despite gaining the points included in the calculation for officially winning the fight, gets only a 47.
One of the reasons why fans are so incensed by bad decisions is that it leaves the loser with nothing to show for it. In Hamill's case, TPR leaves him with more than Bisping. This frees a fighter's performance from the bonds of the single comparison point: how did they do compared to their opponent? With TPR, we have the means to look at the larger picture and see how the fighter did in the context of every fight performance. In doing so, we can answer the question, "How important is a win?" Not nearly as important as a superior performance.
posted by FightMetric @ 12:00 AM
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