UFC Lightweight Tournament

I was thinking about the year-spanning tournaments that K-1 have and Pride used to have and was wondering if we might ever see anything like it in the UFC. Chances are slim that they'd create events specifically for a tournament but how about incorporating the tournaments into fight cards, perhaps in such a way to establish a number one contender to the title. Thinking about the weight classes as they are at present, the light heavyweight and the lightweights appear to show the most promise for this scenario given that they appear to have the flattest contender structures in the UFC.

But having a light heavyweight tournament doesn't make a lot of sense when some of the fighters there are the biggest ppv draws and you want to use their brands to establish cards when necessary. In contrast, the lightweights are currently much lower profile and are still establishing their brands, despite their record of exciting bouts. So who would you include in a tournament of 16 fighters if you were going to establish a #1 contender to BJ Penn? Well first the top-level exclusions - Joe Stevenson because they just met at UFC80, Sean Sherk because he's fighting Penn at UFC84 and Roger Huerta because he's taking time off to concentrate on studies. But excluding them still leaves a huge list of potential entrants: Aurelio, Bocek, Clementi, Danzig, Diaz, Edgar, Fisher, Florian, Gamburyan, Griffin, Guida, Lauzon, Maynard, Miller, Pellegrino, Stephens, Stout, Tavares, Tibau, Thomas is already 20!

But look at those names closely and you see that a number of fighters are booked for UFN13 and UFC83. At UFN 13 we have the headline of Florian-Lauzon, plus Edgar-Maynard, Aurelio-Fisher, Guida-Schiavo and Thomas-Neer. Then at UFC83, Clementi-Stout and Bocek-Danzig. Is there something going on that we don't know about; has Joe Silva actually set up a tournament for #1 contender that we don't know about? If I was designing the tournament I'd include 6 of those bouts, choosing to exclude the Thomas-Neer fight on the basis of Neer's track record.

So if those 6 fights are part of a tourney, who might be in the other 2 (which I'd expect to see at UFC84)? Well of the remaining 20, that leaves Diaz, Gamburyan, Griffin, Miller, Pellegrino, Stephens, Tavares and Tibau. Let's stretch our tournament theory even further and say that there have already been entry fights into the tournament - the recent fights including these fighters at UFC81, Griffin-Tibau, and UFN12 Miller-Stephens, to eliminate Tibau and Miller. Griffin is at the top of the pile of these fighters and must be included. Also, given their status from TUF5, Diaz and Gamburyan must be included. That leaves a tough call between Pellegrino, Stephens and Tavares. Of those I've got to pick Tavares as the best call (maybe Stephens-Miller wasn't an eliminator after all?).

Leaving the four of Diaz, Gamburyan, Griffin and Tavares, there's a potentially intriguing rematch between the TUF5 finalists, with Gamburyan given the chance to make up for his freak loss on that occasion. The problem with this rematch, aside from it being too early to make anything of, is that it'd also leave Griffin and Tavares rematching their UFC76 fight. Instead I'll pick Diaz-Tavares in a bjj battle and Gamburyan-Griffin to grapple and bang.

So that gives us the 8 fights: Florian-Lauzon, Edgar-Maynard, Aurelio-Fisher, Guida-Schiavo, Clementi-Stout, Bocek-Danzig, Diaz-Tavares and Gamburyan-Griffin. To continue the speculation, I'll pick Florian, Edgar, Fisher, Guida, Clementi, Danzig, Tavares and Griffin to emerge victorious. Then in the quarters we'll get match-ups along the lines of Griffin-Fisher, Edgar-Guida, Florian-Tavares and Danzig-Clementi. Griffin, Edgar, Tavares and Danzig win through, Griffin then beats Danzig and Tavares submits Edgar to set up a Griffin-Tavares rematch for #1 contender.

Tavares to win, then meet BJ Penn in a championship bout, which Tavares wins sometime in the second quarter of '09.

Pure fantasy, eh?

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.