What We Learned from The UFC Fightpass Invitational 3

 This event exceeded my expectations and delivered a lot of action in a short time. One of the things I enjoyed was that the length wasn't overly long and they kept the show moving at a pretty good pace. Of course the main attraction was the action which delivered by having more submissions the OT rounds. Even the OT rounds were good and had me on the edge of my seat. Sometimes when you have star power on a event like this it, the actually matches don't live up to the hype, but in this case it did. You owe it to yourself to check this out if you haven't already.

Results

Patrick Gaudio def Haisam Rida via triangle choke

Mason Folwer def Pat Shahgholi via armbar

Luke Griffith def Andy Varela via OT

Oliver Taza def Richie Martinez via outside heelhook

Mason Fowler def Patrick Gaudio via triangle choke

Luke Griffith def Oliver Taza via RNC

Mason Fowler def Luke Griffith via OT

(Mason wins this tournament & $25K)

Dan Manasoiu def Ricardo Evangelista via smoother

Bia Mesquita def Miesha Tate via OT

Gordon Ryan def Nicky Ryan via OT

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Stats

That is the type of submission rate I like to see. 60% of the matches were finished by submission during this even and even the overtime rounds were generally entertaining. As always chokes were the most prevalent submissions followed by leg submissions and arms. Before the show started they said that any stalling would be punished with extra time added to OT rounds, but luckily there was no need to invoke it during this event. It should also be mentioned that all Dec/DQ/OT wins came via overtime. 

Strangely the triangle choke was the most common submission. Usually the RNC is number 1, but during this event there were 2 triangles and they had a 100% success rate. This was followed by the RNC. The outside heelhook and smoother both had 100% submission rates, but only 1 attempt as well. There was also an armbar in there too. Overall the submission rate was very very high. 50% of the attempts ended in a finish which is impressive.

There was a lot of guard pulling here and not many takedowns. There was 1 snapdown, which was more of a trip to a takedown. There was one kneetap as well, but otherwise there wasn't much takedown wise. 

There were a limited number of sweeps as well. The flower sweep Bia Mesquita hit, was a thing of beauty. Also we witnessed a rarely seen nogi berimbolo. However there were only 4 sweeps overall. 

There were 3 main passes used in this event, the north-south pass, half guard pass, and the knee slice pass. The bodylock was used quite a bit(mostly by Nicky Rod), but it didn't have the same success rate as the others. 

The mount is really coming on strong here. It had the most finishes and a 33% completion rate. The back had a better completion rate, but for some reason it wasn't used much in this event. There weren't many submission attempts from side control and it seemed most people wanted to move to a better position before trying a sub. The 50/50 also didn't seem to be a popular position although apparently Nicky Rod broke Gordon's foot from there. 

Trends

In these matches it didn't seem like people wanted to do any standing wrestling. People were getting to guard ASAP, but was that a good strategy? There were 4 sweeps, but 9 guard passes, which tells me that it may not have been such a good idea to pull guard here. Lets also look at the positions submission were finished from. 2 were finished from bottom, 3 from top and 1 from the back. Although pulling guard might have been popular in this event, for most people it didn't deliver results. 

As we have been seeing over the last 2 years or so, the mount has been becoming more and more popular. In this event we saw 2 finishes from there and a lot of people were trying to get there instead of bypassing it and going straight to the back. Now people are actively trying to get to mount and finish from there. 

In a few ways this event was a bit of a trend breaker. There was little to no wrestling which has gone against what we have seen people do for the last 2 years or so in professional nogi events. Also there were 2 triangles from guard which has become more and more rare. On top of that this is the first time Gordon Ryan has looked beatable in a long time. 

Overall

This event lived up to the hype with an exciting tournament and great superfights. This was a big improvement over the last UFC invitational and I hope that going forward they have more events like this. It was run well and there was very little downtime between matches. The match making itself was good and the athletes came to play. You really can't ask for too much more, so if you haven't checked this event you owe it to yourself to do so. 

Year to Date Stats 

Here are all the subs from this year minus the ADCC and Nogi worlds stats. I'll add those in for a year end wrap up.