Author: Luke Thomas

Mexican national and UFC lightweight Erik Perez’s return to the Octagon is official: ‘Goyito’ will face Damian Stasiak at UFC Fight Night 78, also known as The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) Latin America 2 Finale, on November 21. The event takes place at Arena Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico. The news was reported first by La Aficion.

Perez, 25, last fought at UFC Fight Night 48 in June of 2014 where he lost to Bryan Caraway via second-round rear naked choke. He was expected to face Marcus Brimage at UFC 180, but was forced to withdraw with a shoulder injury.

Stasiak, 25, is trying to right the ship after dropping his UFC debut in his most-recent fight against Yaotzin Meza at UFC Fight Night 64 in April.

UFC Fight Night 78 is headlined by a welterweight clash between Matt Brown and Kelvin Gastelum.

The fight card for UFC 192 continues to fill out as two bouts have now been added to the card. The Houston Chronicle reports a flyweight bout between Joseph Benavidez and Ali Bagautinov as well as a women’s strawweight contest between Angela Hill and Rose Namajunas will now take place at that event.

Benavidez is riding a three-fight win streak, having most recently defeated John Moraga via unanimous decision at UFC 187 in May of this year. Ali Bagautinov returns from a performance-enhancing drug (PED)-related suspension following his last bout in June of 2014, a flyweight title fight he lost via unanimous decision to champion Demetrious Johnson.

Hill returns to action after suffering her first professional defeat at the hands of Tecia Torres in June at UFC 188. Namajunas is also looking to rebound after losing a contest for the UFC strawweight title against then-champion Carla Esparza at The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) 20 Finale in December of 2014. Both were TUF 20 season contestants.

UFC 192 is headlined by a light heavyweight title clash between champion Daniel Cormier and challenger Alexander Gustafsson. The event will take place on October 3 at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas.

Why didn’t Michael Johnson defeat Beniel Dariush at UFC Fight Night 73? The question isn’t meant to evaluate whether we personally agree with the judges awarding Dariush the split decision victory, but rather, why there was controversy in the first place? The judges themselves were not unanimous and neither was the audience watching. If there’s smoke, is there also verifiable fire?

It turns out, we might be able to tap into what drives the belief among some that Johnson deserved the nod if we look at more than just the aggregate striking totals. After all, those numbers are very close and while important, don’t settle the debate in and of themselves.

For most observers, there is general agreement Johnson’s striking was more effective in the first while Dariush the clear winner of the third, leaving the second round the epicenter of the dispute. Johnson outlanded Dariush numerically in that frame, but it was perhaps spatially that tells us the most about what happened in that round with the help of Fightmetric’s new ‘heatmaps’, a new data visualization tool that displays the movement of each fighter over the course of a round in the UFC:

This image doesn’t just show us where the fighters moved, but according to this representation of their movement in that pivotal second round, Johnson controlled the center of the Octagon for 57 percent of the round to just 4 for Dariush. Johnson advanced 29 percent vs. retreating only 13 percent, while Dariush advanced just 14 percent and retreated 27 percent. When one recalls that aggression and Octagon control are criteria judges must use to evaluate a winner, it appears the case of Johnson’s victory gets even stronger (note: the judges do not have heatmap visualization nor striking data to help them evaluate winners).

The key insight here from Rami Genauer, founder and director of Fightmetric, is that how much, where and why fighters move in the Octagon can be just as important to understanding a fight as the raw data about striking or takedown totals. “[This] is just another way of expressing the same kind of statistics,” he tells MMA Fighting. “We’re tracking the location and movement of the fighters and the heatmap is a nice way of plotting that on a graph or plane, so you can display frequency of time spent in a position in an easy way for people to consume.”

Collecting and making use of motion-tracking data has been a priority for Fightmetric for years, but heatmaps are the first use of them in mixed martial arts. Genauer says the first use of heatmaps came at UFC 180, but had been in the works for years. The value, he argues, is not the heatmaps themselves. While they can be a handy visualization tool, understanding just how much motion affects fighters, strategy, fans and especially judges can be a hugely important revelation for the sport is what’s really important.

“First and foremost, the important thing is to collect as much good data as we can,” he notes. “Ultimately, we’re trying to explain the sport and explain the fights. There’s going to be fights for which they strikes may not tell the story, the takedowns may not tell the story. One of the stories could be the use of space and the motion or direction of motion. We’ve seen that quite a bit. Regardless of who is landing the strikes, the fighter who is moving forward is considered winning. Judges certainly value it. I think fans and commentators do as well.

“So, if we can quantify those pieces of information, then we’ve added another layer onto the sport,” he continues. “We can understand it better. We can say there is tremendous value to being the fighter who is moving forward.”

That may not have not helped Michael Johnson in his close fight with Beneil Dariush, but from the motion-tracking data Fightmetric has collected to date, Johnson’s loss despite forward pressure and center control in the second round of their contest is aberrant, not indicative of what appears to be a larger trend.

Consider the following cases and Genauer’s explanation of what they mean as well as how heatmaps can differ fight to fight:

Conor McGregor vs. Dennis Siver, UFC Fight Night 59

“McGregor-Siver is a great example of center control success. What you see is the donut. There’s the center of the Octagon and Siver’s got a big blank spot. You take a look at McGregor’s and he’s filled in the donut hole, so all of his orange and yellow are right there smack in the center, where Siver is exactly not.

“If you watch that fight, it was one of those things where, ‘Why isn’t Siver doing anything about this? Why is he being complacent? Why is he allowing McGregor to let him pot shot?’

“It’s very, very difficult to win a fight from the outside if you’re opponent is constantly making you circle and circle because you can never set. You can never throw anything with power, as opposed to the guy who is stationary who can dart forward at a moment’s notice.

“For the most part, if you’re struck on the outside circling, you’re losing.”

Donald Cerrone vs. John Makdessi, UFC 187

“Neither fighter is on the perimeter. Both of them are standing in the center. They don’t move at all. They’re just in the pocket, taking shots at each other.”

Jon Jones vs. Daniel Cormier, UFC 182

“This is an example of a fight that’s all along the fence or in the clinch, at least. You’ve got vast segment of the Octagon in a five-minute round and yet there’s so much of it which is basically untouched because they did spend so much of it against the fence.

“This is not an interesting thing I’d put on screen to show people, but I would show it to you so can see there are different patterns of motion or action, which will play out differently in heatmaps.”

T.J. Dillashaw vs. Joe Soto, UFC 177

“They didn’t spend any time against the fence. This is all spent in free space. They didn’t cover the entire Octagon. You can see they still concentrated in the north-by-northwest portion, but at the same time, they’re constantly moving. You can see the total distance traveled between is 3,036 feet. That’s so far the highest we’ve seen combined in a round between two fighters.

“They’re covering a lot of ground and using a decent portion of the Octagon to get there.”

Travis Browne vs. Andrei Arlovski, UFC 187

“They use a lot of Octagon. It’s not like the Cerrone-Makdessi fight where they could be doing the same things – Arlovski and Browne are standing up and striking – but they’re doing it in a fundamentally different capacity because they are covering ground, they’re taking on different pieces of the Octagon, they’re moving.”

Cat Zingano vs. Amanda Nunes, UFC 178

“That was the shortest combined distance in a complete round between the two of them. They moved 186 feet. Zingano spent 30 of them getting across the cage. So, if you take out those 30, you’ve got 156 between the two in five minutes.”

Genauer says motion data is helping Fightmetric and the sport, generally, start asking and answering hugely consequential questions about the nature of mixed martial arts fights.

“With enough motion data, you can begin to answer certain questions. My most interesting one is, ‘Do judges only really look at the guys moving forward? Does moving forward matter more than strikes?’ Maybe it’s difficult to tell on a strike-by-strike basis who is landing each and every one of them, but it’s very easy to see who is moving forward or backwards.

“So, if you’re a fighter who is moving backwards, are you putting yourself at a severe disadvantage even if you’re able to outland because if it goes to a decision, the judges just aren’t going to give it to you?,” he asks. “They’re fundamentally predisposed to give it to the fighter who is moving forward. That’s the kind of the question that can alter strategy, can alter commentating or a lot of different things if it turned out to be true or false.”

He’s also able to ask a range of other questions related to fight performance or outcome, including whether ‘corner time’ – the amount of time a fighter spends within shouting proximity to their corner – affects their ability to win or perform better in particular physical or spatial contexts. Genauer also has suggested it could be possible with enough information to determine just how much a fighter’s odds of securing a takedown decrease the more there is distance between themselves and their opponent. That could reveal a takedown tipping point or a better explanation of how successful takedown artists manage distance or perhaps another revelation altogether.

There’s also the issue of what distance traveled could tell us about fights in different weight classes, genders, age and more.

Since the spatial data marries easily with the existing numerical data, Genauer argues, the motion-tracking data is a strong compliment to statistics observers already use.

As far using motion-tracking data that is useful or palatable to UFC television audiences, that’s where Genauer says the heatmaps come into play. “It helps illustrate some things the numbers are a little dry for,” he claims. “Center control for McGregor’s 64-percent to Siver’s 1-percent, everyone grasps that. Display it visually and you can really show the dominance.”

Still, for all the promise of motion-tracking data and its corresponding visualization, it’s not without its limitations, a fact Genauer is aware of and readily acknowledges.

For starters, he’s only tracking how much fighters travel, not ‘move’ aggregately. If they stay in place on the ground in a grappling exchange, the current state of motion-tracking doesn’t add much if they don’t compliment that by also traveling around the Octagon. “If something in staying in place and rotating, that wouldn’t count. They haven’t shifted center of mass,” he admits.

Second, visualization is a work in progress. As it stands, heatmaps can only show rounds, not entire fights (provided a fight is more than simply a round). While Genauer believes the way a fighter moves in the cage might show up visually in patterns over the course of a career, the picture can be a muddled mess after a three-round fight if there is an attempt to display the fight as a whole.

Lastly, Fightmetric can’t go back in time and measure the motion of older fights. A dedicated camera above the Octagon is used specifically and solely to collect the data. There’s no way to watch older PRIDE or UFC fights and get a raw data on motion (Genauer does note once we learn more about what motion-tracking data means and can show us, we can go back and watch old fights where we’ll be able to at least make some anecdotal notes or generalized points about a fighter’s movement). Yet, Genauer isn’t necessarily concerned about lacking that information in terms of creating adequately-sized data sets. He conteds the data size will grow fast with UFC’s aggressive schedule of shows. “Through 2006, UFC only ran 800 or so fights,” he recounts. “You can eclipse the first ten years of UFC existence in almost one year.”

But while the challenges with motion tracking are real, but the data is already as helpful as it is illuminating even in the infancy of its development. That’s why it’s not just part of what Fightmetric is doing, but in sports statistics, generally.

“The reason is why it was so important is it’s become such a fundamental part of the way other sports are analyzed,” Genauer argues. “MLB, this year, unveiled and rolled out this enormously expensive and tremendously sophisticated tracking system that’s based on cameras and radar, so that they’re looking at the motion of the players, the motion of the ball, bat speed, exit velocity of the ball off the bat, defensive efficiency.

“Motion tracking is the wave of the future,” he states further. “Basketball’s been doing it for several years. MLB did it in a more comprehensive way than they have in the past starting this season. The NFL introduced it in some games last year where they’ve got a chip in the shoulder pads of players. They can take a look at these things as well, like what it means if a corner is playing a guy off the line or giving him more space.”

The trend towards increased emphasis on motion-tracking data isn’t just widely adopted across sports as a blind mechanism to keep up with the Jones’s, he believes. As far as Genauer is concerned, it’s the next logical and evolutionary step from numerical metrics to something more robust that gives greater meaning and understanding to what’s happening on the field of play, be it a basketball court or Octagon canvas.

“This is really the next frontier. If looking at all the performance metrics was one phase, the next phase is turning those two dimensional statistics into three dimensions,” he says. “Now you can look at the outcomes or what happened, but also how did everybody get there? It should hopefully complete the story a little bit more, maybe explain those numbers better than they are in the abstract.”

I was excited. Sometimes you get offered a fight and you got those butterflies. You know this is a good fight, especially in our division. Everybody in our division is so tough and they’re so gamey. Every fight’s a hard fight, but this was really calm, it was really relaxed. It was like, ‘Alright, win. What’s the date? When do I get my contract?’ It was really subtle and it’s not because he’s not that type of an opponent that gives you that fear or anxiety because he can knock you out. He can wrestle you, he can do a lot of different things. He can take punches.

It’s a lot of different things. I’m just a man of faith and I believe when I put my mind to something – remember they told me I wasn’t going to get the Carlos Condit fight either and what happened? I ended up getting it and making the best of it. I expect to go out there and do the same thing, capitalize on this moment.

Tyron Woodley is a happy man. The UFC welterweight has been campaigning for what has felt like months to get a fight against former champion and top contender Johny Hendricks. As it turns out, his wishes have come true. The pair will meet at UFC 192 in October. Woodley says this is the best time for the two to meet given the surgery on his foot that was required after beating Kelvin Gastelum in January. In fact, it forces him to count his blessings twice since he was originally asking for Hendricks on the UFC 189 card, something that, he says, is thankful it never materialized.

“I’m 100 percent now,” Woodley told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s The MMA Hour. “I was bumping my gums pretty loud. I knew I wasn’t going to fight on the July card, but I was pushing for it and if they would’ve said, ‘Yeah, man, I’m ready to go, you get the card in July’, my eyes would’ve opened up like this. Physically, I thought I was going to be ready and I wasn’t, but now I’m 100 percent healed, I’m 100 percent mentally ready and I got that break and I had that family time, now I’m ready to fight.

“Sometimes it becomes a chore and it becomes a job, but I’m at the point now where I’m eager. Right before I called you, I just got off the phone with Duke Roufus and Din Thomas,” he explained. “We coordinated the training camp, how much time I’m going to spend in Florida, how much time I’m going to spend in Milwaukee, the weeks, what we’re going to work on and everybody’s excited. It’s like they’re fighting, too, because when I go in the Octagon, I’m a representative of guys like [Ricardo] Liborio, guys like Dan Lambert, Din Thomas, Duke Roufus. These guys, they go into the Octagon with me. I’m just excited.”

Woodley says the camp will start in Milwaukee and end up at American Top Team in Florida before he returns home to Missouri to make the very final adjustments before flying out. “I’ll get back home, get my weight down, get on that plane and go out there and beat Bigg Rigg down like he’s never been beat before,” he stated matter-of-factly.

Still, there’s a pervasive question. Welterweight is stacked. Woodley’s at the top end of it, but he chased Hendricks specifically. What was it about the Team Takedown welterweight that was so essential for Woodley?

“Because I’m a sportsman, man,” he says. “I want to fight the best. He’s a former champion at one point. He’s had three or four title shots, one of them he pulled out, the others were very close. With that said, he’s arguably one of the best if not some think he’s the best guy in the world. I can go and out fight a fighter that’s outside the top 10 or a fighter that’s a good style match-up and go out there and put on this crazy performance, beat him up and look all amazing and get a title shot off that.

“For me, I know that beating the best and continually, consistently doing that is going to make my road to the top deserved and earned,” he continues. “That’s why I can go look in the mirror, go to sleep at night and feel comfortable about that.”

As it turns out, there’s more than that. Woodley’s explanation of the current circumstances are true. Hendricks is highly ranked and a former UFC champion. That’s a scalp anyone would want. What compounds the interest, so to speak, is their history. The two wrestled in college in the same conference, but in a pivotal match, Hendricks controversially got the upper hand.

“I wrestled Johny in the Big 12 finals. It was a very close match,” Woodley recalls. “I was in on a single leg trying to take him down to go out by the lead. He put three fingers in my mouth and he started pulling my face away to get me off of his leg. He looked to the ref, he was like, ‘Look! Look! He bit me! He bit my hand! He bit my hand!’ Then the referee didn’t even ask me, didn’t check for bite marks. They just penalized me a penalty point and that was the difference maker of the match.

“With that and just that history, I lost that close Big 12 match. I never got over it,” he admits. “I had to really forgive him because I wanted to beat him up. The Big 12 finals, that’s almost more important than being an All-American because the Big 12 was so deep with talent, so many national championships and All-Americans. When he decided to put those three fingers and fish hook me, I got penalized for biting him. I’m like, ‘You put your fingers in my mouth.'”

Woodley isn’t blind, though. He might be frustrated with the outcome of that match and want to exact a bit of revenge, but it’s not from a place of anger. He says it’s precisely the opposite. It’s his respect for Hendricks that pushes him to go the extra mile and seek the toughest challenge.

“With that said, that’s the stuff I know about him as a competitor. That makes me want to train hard because I know what I’m up against. Even just watching his fight against Robbie [Lawler] the first time. That was a close fight. He had to steal that fight in the last 90 seconds of their first time meeting.

“It’s no vendetta, it’s no ‘I hate this ugly smirk he got on face’ or I think my beard’s better or his belly’s big, none of those things are a reason why I want to fight him.”

And as far as Woodley is concerned, Hendricks is the same way. They’re both family men today and in different places in their lives. Yes, the past isn’t completely the past, and the present is pleasant, but both know the future is still to be written.

“One thing that separates us from other fighters, we’re actually really not fighters. We’re competitors,” he says. “So, I can talk with him, smile with him, have a drink with him. When they lock that cage, I’m trying to knock him out. I’m trying to hurt him and I think he’s going to try to do the same thing to me.”

Bellator will continue its run of tent-pole events in 2015 as the promotion is set to stage their tier one version of events on November 6, sources tell MMA Fighting. The event, titled Bellator 145: Vengeance, will be part of the promotion’s return to the Scottrade Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Bellator previously held a tent-pole event at Bellator 138 in June of this year, headlined by Ken Shamrock vs. Kimbo Slice.

The event will be headlined by a featherweight title fight between reigning champion Patricio Freire and former champion Daniel Straus. Both previously and most recently competed at Bellator 138, although not against one another. Pitbull was able to get past Daniel Weichel via second-round KO while Straus submitted Henry Corrales in the second round.

Freire and Straus have fought twice previously, however, with the Brazilian the victor both times. Straus dropped a unanimous decision to Freire at Bellator 45 in 2011 and was submitted in the fourth-round at Bellator 132 in January of this year.

In the co-main event, Bellator lightweight champion Will Brooks will defend his title opposite leg lock expert Marcin Held. Brooks most recently competed at Bellator 136 in April where he bested Dave Jansen via unanimous decision. Held also competed at Bellator 136, submitting Alexander Sarnavskiy via kneebar in the third round.

Bellator staples Michael Chandler and Bobby Lashley are expected to compete on the card, but opponents for both fighters have not yet been made.

On Thursday, former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva was suspended and fined by the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC) for drug test failures related to testing from his January fight with Nick Diaz at UFC 183. The details of his punishment are available here, but what matters is how truly unusual, comical and downright embarrassing the entire ordeal was for Silva as well as others.

Here are five things we learned from today’s NAC hearing with Silva.

1. This was an absurd, hilarious moment in combat sports.

This was worth the cost an entire year of Fight Pass alone. For the sad souls who had the misfortune of not catching it live, it goes like this. The commission uses a speakerphone to interview witnesses or sports officials who need to testify in some capacity, and let the media call in to hear them speak. The speakerphone can be heard from the commissioner’s microphone in the room. It’s difficult to mute everyone when interviewing someone on the phone, so someone (or many) figured out how to call in and play music while the hearing was being conducted. The choices ranged from Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ or 2 Live Crew’s ‘Me So Horny’ to Salt N’ Pepa’s ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’. There were others, but you get the idea. All of it was timed perfectly and served as quite a bit more than comic relief, but commentary on the event.

The NAC fashions itself as the Adults In The Room, deeply-concerned chin strokers who parade their patriarchal sense of knowing what’s best for everyone in the most overly serious, moralizing of ways. Their job is important, but their sense of entitlement is outrageous. If their proceedings call out for anything, it’s pranksters who aren’t required to buy into their brand of enforcement, preferring to liven up the atmosphere instead. These heroic phone DJs seemed to have an uncanny sense for matching sexualized, recognizable songs that thematically matched the proceedings was the perfect antidote to furrowed brow finger waging from the commission.

2. It’s better to just admit guilt, maybe even if you’re not guilty.

Silva did admit guilt when it came to taking anti-anxiety medication, but essentially wanted either leniency or clemency when it came to being caught taking a sexual performance enhancement product his Brazilian friend procured in Thailand. I am not making this up. Either because he didn’t know what he was taking or didn’t realize it’d be problematic in some capacity or whatever the case, Silva and his team tried to argue there were extenuating circumstances. That they did it so clumsily (more on this in a minute) didn’t help their cause, but neither was the attempt at pushback at all.

If the NAC values anything, it’s genuflection before their might. Two boxers on the docket at Thursday’s hearing prior to Silva essentially accepted blame and walked off with sentences as light as seven months. Silva, by contrast, tried to argue there was basically more to the story or that the state of Nevada didn’t always follow proper procedure. None of that worked. It possibly made things even worse and in the process, apparent details of Silva’s sexual life were laid bare for the world to see. It is extremely difficult to imagine how confession of wrongdoing, even in the case where you haven’t committed it but can’t prove otherwise, isn’t the better option to take.

3. Anderson Silva’s attempt at defending himself was remarkably bad.

When the NAC is running circles around your defense, underscoring inconsistencies, highlighting your naïveté and more, you know you’ve made more than a few regrettable choices. Stated plainly, Silva’s defense was shockingly bad. Witnesses were unprepared, documents to substantiate claims were missing, translation from two sources was all over the place and in direct contrast to one another and worse. In the words of Peggy Noonan, it was a rolling calamity.

If you’re going to reject and challenge the NAC’s accusation, the least you can do is provide as much documentation as is humanly possible to substantiate claims. Or maybe provide a witness who has credentials the commission recognizes. Or have clear timelines memorized about usage of supplements or drugs in question. Or really, do anything that’s helpful, which is precisely the opposite of what Silva’s team did on Thursday. It’s instructive to think of Silva as a first-time offender because it looked like his team were entirely unfamiliar with the terrain of Nevada commission hearings, beaten down by the elements and by the time a decision was rendered, utterly willing to accept any judgment so long as they could put a stop to the beating.

4. In the end, the punishment was fairly light.

Silva is a bit lucky he’s working under the pre-Draconian NAC rules about drug usage, not the newly-adopted rules that fly in the face of basic sanity. In the end, he is suspended from competition for one, retroactive to January 31. He’s been fined his win bonus of $200,000 as well as 30 percent of his $600,000 base pay. In the end, $380,000. That’s no small sum, but won’t break the bank either.

This, though, just compounds the previous argument about accepting blame and moving on. Silva’s team asked for a number of continuances or delays. Had he just found a way to fall in line with the commission’s whip cracking, he could’ve been ready to compete in a matter of months and likely would’ve faced a similar or even smaller fine.

I have no idea why the commission expects tearful remorse since such a thing can so easily be faked, but damn if it isn’t an effective tool to lessen punishments.

5. Nick Diaz is in big trouble.

The UFC welterweight and middleweight had better expect very bad things to happen to him. For starters, this is his third-time running afoul of the same Nevada commission. Silva’s punishment isn’t terrible, but part of that reason is because he is a first-time offender in the state. Second, Diaz has previously tried to challenge commission authority. That may not necessarily play a role as he saunters up to the table to talk about his marijuana usage, especially if he’s compliant this time around. But if his previous run-ins and Thursday prove anything, if you don’t have the commission dead to rights – and even if you do, really – any attempt at undercutting their jurisdiction or authority is not taken favorably. Last, if Diaz thinks marijuana will soften the blow the NAC will offer him, he’s under a profound delusion. In part because of his prior offenses and in part because their view of marijuana runs in complete contravention to facts of medical science, they’ll treat his use of it just as badly if not worse than Silva’s magic aphrodisiac from Thailand.