Strength of Schedule… with a twist.

Leland Roling of MMA-Analyst posted some strength of schedule statistics on BloodyElbow. He went two layers deep, and included the winning percentage of fighters’ opponents, as well as the opponents’ opponents.

Although his efforts were more than noteworthy, after taking a closer look, I felt the combination of the two layers was a bit subjective in nature. Furthermore, the statistics included the entire careers of all fighters involved, which I felt was overkill.

Update: Posted a Top 50 list.

I decided to take a modified version of this on. For starters, I only included the winning percentage of the opponents of a fighter’s opponents; that 2nd opponent layer. I concluded that only including a fighters’ opponents was too shallow of a measure, and if you were going to include both, you may as well only include the 2nd opponent layer, rather than weight the two opponent layers in an attempt to combine them. Also, I decided to utilize a dynamic 3-year sliding window, that would adapt itself to the bouts found at each layer.

For example, if Fighter A fights Fighter B on 3/1/2009, my code will look at all Fighter B’s bouts within the previous 18 months (1/2 of the window), as well as his bouts within the next 18 months. The next step, is to look at all of the bouts of Fighter B’s opponents, and apply the same sliding window, based on the date in which Fighter B fought them. This 2nd opponent layer (3rd layer overall) is the one we are concerned about.

So who came out on top? Well, the 2nd opponent layer of some fighters were limited, so I had to implement a minimum qualifier of 100 bouts for this layer. Just for the record, Ganjo Tentsuku was the raw #1, with a 2nd layer SoS of 32-2-2. Its also worth noting that the initial fighters included (not the opponents) have to had a fight in the previous 18 months, as that is one-half of the sliding window. Remember, we have to start somewhere, and we can’t predict the future, so we can only use exactly half of the sliding window. I also decided to not include draws in the winning percentage, but will list them.

Here’s the Top 50.
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Fighter	W	L	D	WINPCT
Urijah Faber	93	28	1	76.9%
Katsuhisa Fujii	76	23	1	76.8%
Yoshiro Maeda	156	49	6	76.1%
Jens Pulver	110	35	1	75.9%
Brian Foster	80	26	1	75.5%
Toshiaki Kitada	89	30	14	74.8%
John Gunderson	102	35	2	74.5%
Kazuyuki Fujita	90	31	1	74.4%
Tatsuya Kawajiri	123	43	2	74.1%
Jeremy Stephens	80	28	1	74.1%
Poai Suganuma	77	27	1	74.0%
Telman Shariphov	119	42	3	73.9%
Eiji Mitsuoka	98	35	7	73.7%
Gray Maynard	117	42	2	73.6%
Tim Hague	127	47	1	73.0%
Mark Bocek	89	33	2	73.0%
Andrei Arlovski	102	38	1	72.9%
Josh Grispi	80	30	2	72.7%
Mizuto Hirota	130	49	10	72.6%
Akiyo Nishiura	114	43	9	72.6%
Tamdan McCrory	79	30	3	72.5%
Michihiro Omigawa	86	33	9	72.3%
Djamal Kurbanov	86	33	10	72.3%
Rousimar Palhares	132	51	3	72.1%
Hayato Sakurai	152	59	13	72.0%
Renato Sobral	85	33	1	72.0%
Yoshitomo Watanabe	72	28	12	72.0%
Marcus Aurelio	150	59	1	71.8%
Muhammed Lawal	118	47	6	71.5%
Vitalius Shemetov	138	55	5	71.5%
Carlo Prater	102	41	3	71.3%
Eddie Alvarez	160	65	6	71.1%
Jason Von Flue	125	51	1	71.0%
Rodrigo Damm	71	29	4	71.0%
Kyacey Uscola	107	44	1	70.9%
Mychal Clark	80	33	1	70.8%
Junya Kudou	72	30	10	70.6%
Vladimir Matyushenko	79	33	2	70.5%
Samuel Judes	114	48	4	70.4%
Francis Carmont	92	39	2	70.2%
Jung Bu-Kyung	139	59	4	70.2%
Chael Sonnen	153	65	1	70.2%
Jeff Curran	87	37	3	70.2%
Charlie Valencia	115	49	6	70.1%
Alberto Crane	110	47	1	70.1%
Asami Kodera	77	33	7	70.0%
Jim Miller	165	71	5	69.9%
Bryan Vetell	79	34	1	69.9%
Nick Diaz	95	41	7	69.9%
Niko Puhakka	203	88	13	69.8%