How do Weight Class and Age Effect a Fighter?
Introduction
This week, the petition to strip Jon Jones of the UFC Heavyweight Title eclipsed the 100,000 signature mark. While nobody disputes that the fight between Jones and Aspinall should be made, it began to make me question the level of hate fans have towards Jones. After all, how many 37 year old successful champions have we seen in UFC History? Alexander Volkanovski just became the first athlete over the age of 35 to win a UFC championship under 155 pounds and in my mind, not many names came forward, at least recently. This led me to the data and seeing how I could leverage it to evaluate the Jon Jones situation: should he be fighting more for his age or has this hate gone a bit too far?
Data and Preprocessing
Before I dive into my analysis of the graphic, it’s important to provide some context to the dataset and preprocessing. Firstly, I got the data from an excellent Kaggle dataset, which provided me with athlete birth dates, weight classes, and a breakdown of all fights spanning back to 1993 in the UFC. From this, I was able to compute the age at the time of every fight for every athlete. Because women’s MMA didn’t start until 2013, I filtered out women’s fights. Additionally, to account for changes in technology and training of athletes, I filtered for fights from 2015 to present day. These were the two main filters I used.
For computing career stages, I classified early career as any fight where the athlete’s age is at or under 25, early prime where athlete is between 26 and 28, late prime where athlete is between 29 and 32, decline where athlete is between 33 and 35, and late decline where athlete is 36 or over.
For weight classes, I grouped flyweight, bantamweight, and featherweight together for lighter athletes, I grouped lightweight, welterweight, and middleweight together for middle athletes, and heavyweight and light heavyweight together for heavier athletes.
Age’s Influence on an Athlete’s Chances of Winning a Fight
The clear observation that is standout from this graphic is the effect of career stage on the athlete’s ability to win a fight. There is a clear trend that as an athlete gets older, they are much more likely to lose a fight. There is especially a sharp drop off from late prime to decline as well as from to decline to late decline, suggesting that when an athlete is beyond their prime, there can be a steep drop-off in quality.
The weight class of the athlete doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on their chances of winning a fight, although heavyweights tend to do better at winning fights later on in their careers compared to other weight classes and generally lighter weight classes tend to perform better earlier on in the careers vs later on past their prime.
Age’s Influence on an Athlete’s Activity
Age’s impact on the activity of an athlete is also very noticeable, as during the early career of an athlete, they will tend to fight more often, but later on, especially into their decline and late decline, the athlete will fight less.
There is a clear exception to this rule however and that is the heavier fighters. Heavyweights especially tend to fight more in their career later on and they are the X’s in the top right corner of nearly every cluster.
How Does This Conclusion Effect the Jon Jones and Tom Aspinall Mega Fight?
Historically, fighters in the heavyweight division in their late decline phase (which is what Jon Jones is in) tend to be some of the most active fighters in the UFC. Likewise, so are fighters in their late prime phrase (Tom Aspinall). So, the data says that this fight should happen; however, you can understand Jones’ reluctancy to take this fight as despite this activity from late declining heavyweights, they have a win % of just over 40%. This concern becomes even more highlighted considering Jones’ already established legacy in the sport as one of the greatest of all-time and Aspinall’s meteoric rise to one of the scariest fighters in the sport (Aspinall holds UFC records for shortest avg fight time and is second in knockdowns per 15 mins). Therefore, although this fight really should happen, you can understand Jones’ reasoning for holding out and wanting to ride into the sunset or becoming a sleep doctor, lol.
