MMAPredictions

Well well well. The debut of mixed martial arts on network television. What did you think? Did that live up to the hype?

It’s hard to say. There are multiple angles we should examine the event from. Here are a few things that first come to my mind:

• Kimbo Slice actually was in a fight that lasted more than a handful of seconds. James Thompson did eventually provide a Kimbo win, much to EliteXC’s delight, but at least we saw Kimbo pushed a little harder than before.
• The dancers and Busta Rhymes were terrible. Is this what happens when CBS Entertainment puts on an event instead of CBS Sports?
• Announcing crew: Gus Johnson gets two big thumbs up. Great work with Frank Shamrock’s introduction to MMA at the beginning of the event. Mauro Ranallo was Mauro Ranallo and that’s okay.

Here is a snapshot of how our predictors performed here on MMAPredictions.com for the event overall, which you can see by going to the card’s detailed results page.

• 509 MMAPredictions users predicted on the card. That’s a pretty strong number, and in the range of those we see for most UFC events.
• The average of all our users’ prediction accuracies for the card’s 5 fights on MMAPredictions was 75.9% making these fights way more predictable than most MMA events. On average we can expect about half of a fight card to be correctly predicted by our users on this site, and rarely do they get more than 65% of a card’s fights correct. More on that below.

Most easily-predicted fight outcome: Ninety-four percent of MMAPredictions users knew that Brett Rogers would beat up Jon Murphy. Looking at Murphy before the fight began, he certainly didn’t seem to possess much confidence. I don’t know what soldiers’ faces looked like as they rushed the beach on Normandy knowing what lay before them, but I imagine many of them had the same look Murphy did: resigned.

Most surprising fight outcome: Well this is a first… we don’t have a most surprising fight of the night. In all four of the fights with a real outcome (the Lawler vs. Smith ending can’t really be included), the majority of our users correctly picked the winner of the fight. No upsets to see here folks, move along.

Here’s the trick: the event had five fights on the main card, which is not that many. Fewer fights means it’s easier to predict the card.

Then, the fight between Robbie Lawler and Scott Smith was ruled a no contest when a doctor ruled that Smith could not continue after receiving a thumb in the eye. So now we’re down to just four fights that were all correctly predicted by the majority of users. So we’re left with what seems to be a very predictable set of fights.

But is that what this card was about? Normally I hold promoters to a very high standard in that I believe fights should not be predictable. (Call me a purist but I feel MMA fights should include two evenly matched combatants.)

But tonight was about playing it safe, and having a successful debut. Or rather, a debut where nothing went wrong and the promoters could expect to return with another event. In that regard, EliteXC deserves a pat on the back for its first MMA event on network television.

Next up on MMAPredictions.com is the WEC Pulver vs. Faber in just a few hours. Get your picks in on this eleven-fight card!

- Caleb

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