One thing I thought about including was subs/kos. Fighter A has more subs, Fighter B has more KOs. However, although “finishing” a fight has some actual value, the split seems more likely to lends itself to personal bias.

I thought about including % different in strength of schedule (it’s pretty close), and possibly even 1/3 year mod (Fighter B is higher in both of those categories). Again though, I think those become more inferred things and step away from the pure performance of the fighters in question.

I’m not really expecting an absolute “Fighter A is higher than Fighter B”, but rather a more general expectation of where these fighters stand in the MMA landscape. Is Fighter A a “can”? Is Fighter B “top 10″? Are they “similar”? Do you see something that clearly yells “Fighter A > Fighter B”?

Since this response is now longer than the rant, I’ll just mention briefly(ish) how this all came about. Recently I was talking with some new (very new) MMA fans and they got to talking about “top 10 fighters”. After a little bit I started giving them blind fighter histories and answering honest questions, “Yes title, no different weight class, yes 5 wins in a row, yes never won 4 in a row”, etc.

In many cases I found a fighter they found impressive was one they’d never heard of. In some cases a fighter they were just recently proclaiming as “top 10″ was suddenly not so “unbeatable”. (funny how when you realize a guy has lost 40% of their fights it suddenly becomes harder to proclaim them unbeatable).

Having gone through that, I figured it was worth a try here as well. The problem I have is finding the right criteria that gives enough information to make a solid judgment, but not so much that it skews the results or opens them up to bias.

If there are some universal questions or additional numbers you’d like to see included let me know. I’d like to try this again next week (have a few ideas already), so I can add the information in then.