It was a championship fight, the most important fight of Matt Serra’s career and it was a fight he should have lost. But despite the naysayers, he won, and his life has not been the same since. Matt Serra beat Chris Lytle.
With all the hubbub surrounding his win over Georges St. Pierre, it’s easy to forget that Serra was one cranky judge away from quite a different career reality. The judges’ scores for the Serra-Lytle fight were peculiar, to say the least. Two of the judges gave the win to Serra 30-27. The other judge gave a 30-27 victory to Lytle. There have been more than 700 fights in Nevada since MMA was regulated in 2001, more than 300 of which have gone to a decision. This is still the only decision in which two judges thought one fighter won every round and the other judge thought that same fighter lost every round.
FightMetric’s effectiveness scores agree with Glenn Trowbridge, who gave the fight to Lytle. As you can see in the in-depth report on the fight, FightMetric calls the first two rounds for Lytle, while the third round is 10-10. That means a 30-28 victory for Lytle, who also has the edge in total points 103-72.
The career TPR Report for Serra is similarly uncharitable. TPR doesn’t like Serra’s style of positional control with occasional bursts of action. In addition, his accuracy scores aren’t helped by the fact that he attempts an average of 12 takedowns per fight, but lands only 20% of them. Scoring each of Serra’s 10 fights in the UFC, he manages a career average TPR of 53, which in baseball terms would be called “replacement level.”
Had one of the others judges given the split decision nod to Lytle, who knows what would have happened to Serra. Would he have dropped back down to 155 like fellow TUF 5 alums Din Thomas and Rich Clementi or would he have stayed at 170, where he would likely be at least two fights away from a title shot? It’s not to say that Serra wouldn’t have beaten St. Pierre when given the chance, it just might have been a while longer before he got his shot.