The Statistics of EBI: P4 Further Analysis & Spreadsheets

After publishing the EBI stats yesterday I began to think of a few more things that would be interesting to look at. Also, in the interest of being transparent so that any mistakes/improvements can be discovered I also wanted to present the raw data from the spreadsheets I used. Further, I wanted to give everyone reading an indication of the sample size and sampling methods used to generate this data.

Style vs Finishing

Firstly, it was suggested to me by my coach that it would be interesting to see how the competitors style influenced the position they finished from and the submission they used. In this data I have only considered matches where competitors only utilise a single style. That being said some grapplers featured in multiple categories. For example, Russ Muira primarily plays a top heavy grappling style (Wrestling) with some leg lock attacks thrown in. However, in his match with Matthew Kaiser in EBI2 he chose to play guard. Similarly, Garry Tonon was forced to use deep half in the final of EBI1, even though I consider him to be a Dynamic stylist in most other matches.

A couple of things were expected. The leglockers finished from leglock positions. Transitional submissions were the most common ‘positional’ finish across the board, which is in line with what previous I had discovered perviously.

I noticed that there weren’t alot of pure leglockers. Even Eddie Cummings in EBI 4 had more of a hybrid seated guard/leglock style. Also, event though there were 5 ‘Wrestlers’, only Victor Henry (who comes from a Catch background) and Karen Darabedyan (Heyastan/Judo) come from non BJJ backgrounds. It makes me wonder how guys like Ben Askren or Rustam Chsiev would fair in this format.

The Orthodox stylists, like the Dynamic players, had submissions coming from many positions. Unlike Dynamic players, Orthodox grapplers had more difficulty finishing before overtime since half all their wins come via overtime. I believe this is because generally most grapplers are used to what are the most common attacks and are well versed in defending them. In contrast, of 31 total wins only 2 needed overtime for Dynamic grapplers. I’m sure this statistic is somewhat thrown off by Garry Tonon, Nathan Orchard, and Giovanni Martinez winning so many of their matches.

The guard players had the most representatives, but they had varying specializations. At this point I feel there is too little data to compare guards.

Looking again at Style and Winning Percentage

Given that I looked at only purists in the last section, I though it may be interesting to look at which styles win the most. However, this time I wanted to control for hybrid styles within the same match, whereas previously I just counted a competitor in both categories. For example, if they were Guard/Leglocks then  I counted 1 for leglocks and 1 for guard. Now it is a seperate category.

New:

And the old graphic for comparison:

Nothing too revealing except for the fact that most Leglockers play a guard based game. This is in line with my experiences grappling in that I generally find it easier to leglock from the bottom than the top. Still, it would be interesting to see a more top based Leglocking grappler (like Reilly Bodycomb or his one of his students like Denny Lenormand) get another shot at sub only.

Raw Spreadsheets

Here is the raw spreadsheet data. Also, if you haven’t seen EBI5 yet, full spoilers follow.

After all this it makes me wonder how you would design the perfect nogi grappler, and as an extension what to focus on in training. Based on the data above, I would design this super-grappler as highly skilled at dynamic submissions and leglocks but at the same time has potent guard game and is defensively sound. In terms of up and coming grapplers I don’t think anyone fits the bill better than Gordon Ryan.

Thank you all for reading.