The TUFfest Teams

While hardly the stuff of headlines, Rob Emerson's split decision victory over Keita Nakamura at UFC 81 continued the magnificent record of fighters from TUF5. In a recent post I examined the records of the cohorts of fighters from each season of TUF. Emerson's victory led me to wonder how the overall records of fighters from Team Penn and Team Pulver compared. So I've looked at the statistics for the first five seasons, comparing the records of fighters from each of the teams.

	Team	Overall record	Overall win %	Record minus TUFx fights	Minus TUFx win %
1	Liddell	27-14	65.85	20-8	71.43
	Couture	23-13	63.89	18-7	72.00
2	Hughes	16-15	51.61	11-11	50.00
	Franklin	23-14	60.53	20-10	64.52
3	Ortiz	12-11	52.17	6-7	46.15
	Shamrock	6-10	37.50	5-7	41.67
4	No Love	15-21	41.67	11-18	37.93
	Mojo	22-30	42.31	16-23	41.03
5	Penn	9-4	69.23	7-3	70.00
	Pulver	7-4	63.64	5-1	83.33

So to answer my initial thoughts about Penn vs Pulver is that Team Pulver has the better win percentage to date (excluding fights just between TUF5 fighters, ie from the season finale fight night), blemished only by Cole Miller's recent loss at Fight Night 12. However, Team Penn's record also includes 3 fights from before the show - Lauzon's shock win over Pulver and losses by Wiman and Ruediger. Remove them from the record and Team Penn has an near identical post-show record of 6-1. It's going to take a little time to see which of these teams' fighters have longevity in the UFC.

What's interesting to examine is not the actually records themselves but the comparison between the two head coaches on each season. My opinion would be that the coaches with the better records on the show demonstrated an overall ability to identify talent and hear. I'm not entirely sure how much fighters would improve their skills during the show, but I'd say that the coaches also played a factor in encouraging the improvement of existing talent.

Chuck and Randy's teams have near identical (and impressive) records from the first season. But there are significant differences in the records of teams in the second and third seasons. In TUF2, Team Franklin has a significantly superior record against Team Hughes - basically because Team Franklin included 3 standouts (Keith Jardine, Rashad Evans and Marcus Davis) against 1 in Team Hughes (Joe Stevenson). [It's notably that 3/4 of these standouts have dropped down a division from their TUF weight division and that both Jardine and Evans are part of Team Jackson].

Meanwhile in TUF3, the most disappointing season to date (in terms of records), Team Ortiz has performed better than Team Shamrock. The winners of both weight divisions were from Team Ortiz (Michael Bisping and Kendall Grove) and while Grove retains a positive 3-2 record, it's only Bisping (4-1) and Matt Hamill (3-1) that have decent UFC records.

Finally, season 4 needs further analysis - the records include fights both from before and after the show so in a future post I'll look at the effect of appearing on the show on the fighters' records.