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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