Carlos Condit, Killer Instinct and the Art of the Third-Round Comeback

Filed under: UFCMixed martial arts is a sport so new that good statistics aren’t readily available for many scenarios worth examining. But watching for years gives you the ability to make general observations, and one of them is the conclusion that fig…

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Mixed martial arts is a sport so new that good statistics aren’t readily available for many scenarios worth examining. But watching for years gives you the ability to make general observations, and one of them is the conclusion that fighters that lose both of the first two rounds of a bout rarely come back to finish an opponent in the third.

There are multiple reasons for this, but the most simple one is that if Fighter A was good enough to control the action for 10 minutes, the possibility of Fighter B turning it around and finishing him sometime in the last five is probably not good.

And that is part of what makes Carlos Condit‘s comeback win over Rory MacDonald at UFC 115 so outstanding.