Forwarded this email? for more BLOODY FLBOW WITHOUT USADA, HOW WILL FIGHTS CHANGE? - I DID SOME DIGGING IT'S A BRAVE NEW WORLD, LET'S BRAINSTORM SOME IDEAS ON HOW TO LOOK AT IT. Chris Rini Feb 22 READ IN APP Max Holloway vs Calvin Kattar Max Holloway vs Calvin Kattar ruins all statistical averages Hey all, and welcome back to I Did Some Digging. The column that asks whether a middle aged man armed only with a search engine and Twitter DMs can suss out the truth behind some MMA Old Wives Tales. This week we’re going to do a some brainstorming about something we all know is happening, but can’t quite prove: juicing. Steroids. EPO. That good good. The stuff they aren’t testing for yet because no one knows they’re supposed to test for it. Bloody Elbow Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I was looking through r/mma and came across this post about EPO which inspired today’s column. It got me to reflect on the times that the UFC has put its finger on the scales of a fight to let things slide and how much the company hates when mishaps become public knowledge. To be clear, the UFC has let Vitor Belfort fight Jon Jones even though they knew his testosterone results were abnormal. I guess you could say the UFC let Jones have one back a couple years later when they moved and entire event from Las Vegas to California after Jones posted some unsatisfactory test results. These examples are dramatically different from what happens when state regulators are at the wheel. Those are the folks who derail UFC 200 when Jon Jones (ok that’s three Jon Jones anomalies in a row, what gives?) pops for Turinabol, or the NY State athletic commission that popped TJ Dillashaw for EPO, ending his title reign. So now we’ve established how outside actors have not only affected events but thrown monkey wrenches into the machinery of whole weight classes. Now it becomes a bit clearer why the UFC has slowly stripped away the ability to let us know what’s really going on. If a fighter fails a drug test, no one is obligated to alert the fans or media. As for the new UFC drug testing policy I’m less concerned with what the parameters are than who is enforcing them: the UFC. We’ve learned from the APEX era that this is a company more concerned with the bottom line than anything else, even the product its selling. All this brings us to the present day question: if the UFC isn’t going to tell us when fighters are juicing, what can we do on our own? I wondered what would be some clues that fighters are enhanced and came up with some variations from the norm we could look for. I’m talking about notable increases in strikes per fight, knockdowns per fight, and perhaps most interestingly, late in the fight finishes. UFC stats are not particularly helpful because they’re primarily focused on individual records. One key stat we can quantify on an individual level via UFC stats is look at how many strikes a given fighter has thrown per round. Another resource is fightmatrix.com and they’re a comparative gold mine. Fight matrix looks at all of MMA, but due to the sheer quantity of UFC fights per year, I think it’s still a helpful database. What I’m curious about is whether the number of finishes goes up in the post-USADA era. It’s probably an impossible task, like measuring the ocean with a teacup, to crunch numbers on an individual level to divine whether fighters are enhanced. But it’s important to remember that there is information all around us, and we are free to tinker with it as we see fit. Draw conclusions, heck even look into it, as a famous podcast guest once said. Take care of yourself and I’ll be back at BE on Monday. Chris. Bloody Elbow Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You're currently a free subscriber to Bloody Elbow Newsletter. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid Like Comment Restack © 2024 BE Presents Publishing Inc 254 Chapman Rd, Ste. 209, Newark, DE 19702 Get the appStart writing