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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
Saturday's UFC 165 event featured one of the greatest title fights in UFC history in the night's main event, a really close battle between Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson. The fight was filled with drama, and had the type of close action in the early rounds which left the first three frames open to interpretation.
Because of that, there were arguments for scorecards anywhere from 48-47 Gustafsson to 50-45 Jones. That led to some vehement disagreements on Saturday night, and even though some may balk at the latter score, the numbers back up how close each of those rounds were.
This also brings us to a common fallacy regarding these types of fights. For some reason, there's a backlash against a score like 49-46 Jones because it suggests that it was more of a one-sided fight than it actually was, but that's not the case at all. A fight can be scored 49-46 or even 50-45 for one fighter even if each of the rounds is a toss up.
In the case of Jones-Gustafsson, we had three straight rounds that were very close to start the fight off, with really only the fourth and fifth clearly in favor of one fighter. Those came for Jones due to badly hurting Gustafsson in the final minute of the fourth and then delivering a lot of his most damaging offense in the fifth. But the first through third, despite Jones' inability to score takedowns and taking more of the shots to the face, left arguments for each of them, and that's backed up by the fight report from the UFC's official stat-provider, FightMetric.com.
For a simple stat breakdown of the fight, Jones out-struck Gustafsson 137-114 overall, with Gustafsson having a slight edge in strikes to the head (66-55) and body strikes (33-29), while Jones had a massive edge in leg strikes (53-15). Jones was 1-11 on his takedown attempts, while Gustafsson became the first person to take Jones down, successful on one of his eight takedown attempts.
However, the overall numbers don't tell the story of the fight, and you have to look at how those were spread out to see how close those first three rounds were.
Let's start with the first. This is the round where Gustafsson scored his takedown, and swayed many in his favor given how close the rest of the round was. In that frame, Gustafsson landed eight strikes to the head, while getting in four more to the body and seven to the legs. Jones was much more active with his kicks, and they were spread out to the legs and body, where Jones landed 15 and eight, respectively, with another five head strikes.
Based on FightMetric's "effectiveness" score, they'd have given the round to Gustafsson, but by a very small margin, and with how effective Jones seemed to be with the kicks, him taking that round isn't crazy.
The striking disparity was greater in the second round, and though Gustafsson continued to stuff Jones' takedowns and landed some key counters in the round, he only got in 15 strikes in the frame total. By contrast, Jones connected on 26, 21 of which went to the legs and body. Based on FightMetric's scores, this round would have been a tie at 10-10, with Gustafsson's effective striking evening out Jones' striking edge, but again, in a coin flip round it could have gone either way.
It's a similar story with round three, with the effectiveness scores virtually identical, but Jones again with a slight edge in strikes. He also started opening up to the head and body more, adding to the leg attacks. Once more, Jones had an argument, as did Gustafsson.
In the fourth and fifth is where Jones took over, and even though Gustafsson managed to bust up his face, the damage done by the elbows in the fourth and the head kicks in the fifth were enough to take the highest margins in FightMetric's "effectiveness score" for the fight.
Bringing it back around, this isn't an exercise to say FightMetric is the be all end all, nor is it saying that a Gustafsson win would have been wrong. Indeed, a Gustafsson win would have been justified given how close those first three rounds were. But it's also justified that Jones won this decision.
Though Jones' face was quite messed up, and both needed to hit the hospital after the event, it was the Champion who had the challenger more in trouble than he ever was (save for the cut the doctor supposedly wanted to stop the fight for). So before the emotions of the close fight take control of reactions, we should all take a step back, absorb the idea that a close fight can breed scores all leaning one way, and appreciate the fight we got to see between the two best light heavyweights in the world right now.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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