Boxing, Grappling, Jiu Jitsu, MMA, Wrestling
Posted by
Steve Spencer
I’ve often wondered what the real dominant factors are of a UFC champ. What’s the “secret sauce”?
In an effort to better understand that, I took all UFC champs starting in 2005. Anyone who has held the title. I chose 2005 because I feel that the sport has really matured and stabilized a lot in the last several years. Going back too far into its past would yield valid results based on what is needed to win now. As a note, I did not include the Bantam and Feather weights, as they are so new to the UFC.
This left me with 22 total fighters. I next undertook to rank those fighters’ skill levels in Takedowns, Submissions, and Striking. For each skill I ranked the fighter either:
Champion level skills, Exceptional (setting them apart from even most champions), or chose that this area could actually be deemed as something of a weakness in their game.
In looking at a few charts of these numbers we see some interesting results.
Let’s start first with the items that probably dont’ surprise most of us:
- A fighter very rarely wins the title if they are weak at striking (only one fighter).
- Striking is the most common attribute for a champion to be skilled at.
What might surprise you however is to know that only a very few champions truly excel at submissions. In fact, being fairly weak in the submission skills is nto at all uncommon for a champion.
I don’t know about anyone else, but although I expected the slant toward striking, I was shocked at the weakness of submissions given how much MMA still harkens back to the glory days of Royce Gracie.
To run the numbers for you briefly: Roughly 36% of Champions have been Exceptional strikers, with nearly as many (32%) being exceptional at takedowns (which also surprised me a bit). But only 14% when it came to submissions.
Looking on to the next chart, we see that no UFC champion has been without at least one element of their game that would not be considered exceptional. Equally however, no champ has been an astounding example of all three of these elements either.
What was surprising though was to see that a very large number of champions had at least one part of their game that would be considered as a weakness (73%). Almost as many as had one or more exceptional elements of their game (77%).
So what does all of this mean?
Well, several key things jump out of this data:
- Almost no one makes it to the top without good striking.
- If you want to make it to the top you have got to excel at something. You have to pick your weapon of choice and hone it to a razor’s edge.
- It is not uncommon at all for a champion to have a weakness. What does this mean? Does this mean “it’s okay to suck”? I don’t think it does. But what it
