Title Writing: Numbers For Nerds 7 "The First Minute"

Jim Miller fights Melvin Guillard this weekend, well, this Friday to be precise. In Guillard's last fight, he was dropped by Joe Lauzon and submitted within the first minute of the fight. During UFC 142 we saw Erick Silva finish Carlo Prater in the first minute (Silva was disqualified later) and at UFC 141, Johny Hendricks knocked out Jon Fitch in just 12 seconds.

All the quick finishes got me thinking about the effects of such a short fight on both the winner and the loser. At 142 we also got to see Terry Etim get knocked out by Edson Barboza; Etim was coming off a 17 second victory over Edward Faaloloto. Is winning so quickly a good thing for a fighter, or does it perhaps give them a false sense of confidence that things will always be so easy? I set about to compile some data on first minute stoppage victories, going back all the way to UFC 28, where the Unified Rules were used for the first time.

THE RAW DATA

First Minute Stoppages: 75
First Minute KO/TKO: 57
First Minute Submissions: 18

I forget where I saw the comment, but recently, Head Kick editor Cory Braiterman stated that nothing bugged him more than people making claims based on very small sample sets. I'm not sure if 75 first round stoppages is a very small sample set, but it definitely isn't a big one, so I will come right out and say that all this should be taken with a grain of salt. By the same token, MMA is still a young enough sport that it will probably be quite some time in the future before there have been enough fights to really get good data for things like this and what am I supposed to do in the mean time? Not attempt to analyze what we have? I think not.

After the jump, a look at how both the winners and losers of one-minute-or-less fights fare in their subsequent bouts.

WINNERS

Of the 75 winners, 9 were recent enough to not have yet fought since. If you are interested in which upcoming bouts involve a quick winner, Joe Lauzon faces Anthony Pettis, Che Mills meets Rory Macdonald, James Te Huna is up against Aaron Rosa and Jake Ellenberger faces Diego Sanchez. (Note that the fighter listed first is the guy who won his last fight within the first minute).

Of the other 66:

31 won their follow up bouts, while 35 lost.

Newsmaker Anthony "Rumble" Johnson, Mike Swick & Andrei Arlovski are tied for the most first minute victories, with three. Swick has a perfect 3-0 record in his follow ups, while Rumble has gone on to lose each one of his subsequent fights. Meanwhile, Arlovski has lost twice after scoring a quick victory.

Other fighters who have had multiple quick stoppage victories (two) are Drew McFederies, Johny Hendricks, BJ Penn, Frank Mir and Joe Lauzon. Hendricks & Lauzon were victorious in their lone follow ups thus far while McFederies and Penn lost both of their follow up fights. Mir split his fights.

All told, fighters with multiple first minute victories have 7 wins and 10 losses in their follow ups, with a win percentage of .411

LOSERS

Of the 75 losers, 14 either never fought in the UFC again or do not have a UFC fight booked, while 5 are awaiting their follow up fights, booked in the UFC. Who is coming up? Of course we have the aforementioned Melvin Guillard facing off with Jim Miller, Mark Hominick vs Eddie Yagin, Chris Cope vs Matt Brown, Jake Shields vs Yoshi Akiyama and George Sotiropoulous squares off against Takanori Gomi.

Of the other 56:

18 won their next bout in the UFC, 13 won their next bout after being cut from the UFC, 20 lost their follow up bout in the UFC and 5 lost their follow up bout after being cut from the UFC. To simplifiy:

31 wins, 25 losses.

C.B. Dollaway, Melvin Guillard, Ricardo Romero, Stefan Struve, Jonathan Goulet, Keith Jardine and Matt Hughes have all been stopped twice within the first minute. Hughes lost both his follow up fights, Guillard lost his first follow up and faces Miller in his second, Ricardo Romero lost consecutively within the first minute and hasn't been heard from since, Dollaway and Goulet are 1-1, while Struve and Jardine bounced back and won each time they were stopped quickly.

In total the group is exactly .500 with six wins and six losses.

RANDOM INTERESTING FACT

Don't take a fight with Josh Koscheck if you are coming off a fight that lasted less than a minute. Koscheck has faced four opponents in that scenario in his career and he has beaten each and every one of them, including three who were first minute winners!

Anything to take from this?

As I said earlier, the sample size is small, so it's difficult to think that this proves anything at all. That being said, if you wanted to take anything from the data, it would be that fighters who win quickly have a bit of a hard time in their next bouts, while fighters who lose quickly seem to get some motivation from it to ensure it doesn't happen again.

As for Melvin Guillard this Friday? He's already lost in this scenario once, against a less than stellar fighter in Rich Clementi. He lost by submission and seeing as he's facing a guy who has a good chin and even better submissions in Jim Miller, I'm going to have to say it doesn't look good for "The Young Assassin".

As always, thanks for reading! Comments and criticism welcome.