Another year in grappling has just finished and it is time to look at what happened in nogi grappling in 2023. I've decided to split things into 2 parts and go over some of the events with action stats here in this part and the total stats in the next. Don't worry though I have a lot of new stats in this one that should be interesting and inciteful. Overall I think 2023 was a great year for grappling, but looks look at why.
You can now check out part 2 here.
Matches
This year actually ended with more submission wins than points or decisions. That's actually amazing and the best result I've seen in 3 years of covering Nogi grappling. I have to say, I think over the last few years pro grappling has gotten much better in terms of action, submissions, takedowns, passes and leglocks. I hope this year wasn't a fluke and that we see another increase in action in 2024. Only 42.9% of matches ended by points or decision this year. There seems to have been a shift in the culture and people want to go above and beyond to get the submission. I think that is great and it seems like the young generation is leading the way with newer, better and more exciting grappling.
As you can see above leglocks actually surpassed neck submissions this year. 25.2% of matches were won by leglocks, compared to 24% by neck sub and 8% arm subs. It seemed like many of these came from the ADCC opens. I don't know if it is because these are semi-pro events and the people competing have lower leglock defense or the big shows are using people who aren't know for leglocks. For the last 5 years or so people have been saying that leglocks were going to decrease in effectiveness as people got better at the defense. That does not appear to be the case. Leglocks are alive and well, but I think in general we are seeing a greater variety of submissions than before, but we'll talk about that in the next article.
Here we can see what percentage of matches ended in submission at various events. If we look at the very end, we see the yearly average. On average 46.4% of matches ended in subs in 2023. This is a really solid number that shows that the athletes do understand the objective. We don't want to see long protracted sweep battles, where one person edges out a victory. Years ago this would happen every other match, but these types of matches are almost non-existent now(although we have other problems).
The AIGA finals had the most finishes, followed by the Fight Pass Invitational 5. WNO 16 was the worst with only 25% of their matches ending in submission.
I had an idea a few months ago, that will hopefully be able to give a solid reason to say one event was better than another, or answer some questions such as, which matches are better, submission only matches or point matches. These are new stats, that I've been working on for a few weeks that hopefully will give some insight into what is going on in these matches and the nogi grappling world as a whole. These are all based upon what happens in 5 min of time intervals. The most important stats are going to be the total action and total technique stats which are at the very bottom. The total action you can think of a the entertainment rating of an event. The technique can be though of as how often you will see a move succeed.
These stats were calculated in the following way. I took the match time and multiplied it by the number of matches that went to decision. Then for every match that ended in submission I take half of the match time and multiply it by the number of submissions. Finally I add both of those numbers together for the base time.
Ex. An event with 10min matches where 5 matches go to decisions or points and 5 wins are by submission.
(5 matches x 10 min) + (5 matches x 5 min) = 75 min base time.
From there I take the base time and divide it by 5 to get the action/technique per 5 min. In the case above it would be 15. Then I just divide the number of sweeps, passes, takedowns, etc by those the 5 min intervals(15 in the example below).
As you can see on the right the average for the year was 0.49 takedowns per 5 min and 1.7 attempts. Serval events exceed that, but I think Polaris 25, WNO night of champions and Fightpass invitational 5 were standouts. Polaris 25 had some really good takedown battles with Fabrico Andre, Izaak Mitchell and Kaynan Duarte. WNO night of champions had Mica vs Jay Rod, which was a barn burner, PJ Barch vs Andrew Tackett and Baby Shark vs Keith Krikorian. All of them had amazing takedown exchanges. FPI 5 was all around good, which lots of action everywhere. I don't think there was a bad match on the card and most matches had some nice takedown exchanges.
The yearly average for sweeps is 0.43 sweeps per 5min and 1.14 sweep attempts. Polaris 26 and the AIGA finals came out on top here. Polaris 23 ad 24 also look pretty good when it comes to sweeps as well. I don't know why, but it seems Polaris is the place to be when it comes to sweeps.
The yearly average for passes was 0.46 passes per 5min and 1.79 attempts. Quintet 4 was the most impressive here, which is really surprising because I wouldn't have guessed that about Quintet. This was followed by WNO 16 and FPI 5.
The yearly average for submissions is 0.26 per 5min and 1.86 submission attempts. The AIGA finals had the most submission action and the most actual submissions. Quintet followed in attempts, but was one of the worst events when it came to actual subs. Polaris 23 "The Women's GP" was a pretty good mix of attempts and subs. The ladies really put on a show.
This is the most important stat in my opinion. Here we can see the total amount of moves attempted every 5min and the total amount of techniques completed. I think of the action number as how much fun it is to watch the event. The technique number could reflect how good the event is for study purposes(assuming most who watch are grapplers). I the other stats can sometimes be misleading because a match with lots of sweeps will likely have less takedowns, because the match is mostly on the ground. Here however, I think things are fairly clear. However there is one caveat. The method I used to calculate the times can skew things if many matches are ended early and/or the match times are long. I believe most of these events are unaffected by this, but the technique score for the AIGA final seems to be a bit low due to this.
Now that we have some data, let's talk about some conclusions I've drawn from it. I hope these new stats will encourage people to think about the rules or even change the way they compete.
I think the athletes are finally improving their marketing. We see B-team coming about with good and most importantly consistent content. I've seen vlogs from Lucas Pinerio, Ffion Davies and Junny Ocasio this year. There are also great podcasts from the Simple men(Nicky Rod, Jay Rod, Ethan Crelenstein and Damien Anderson) and Eoghan O'Flanagan. I think these will help grow the sport by making people feel more connected to the athletes. Although not everyone has started doing it, I think people are starting to see how helpful it is. For us the viewer it also gives us an interesting look into these people's lives and makes the matches more interesting.
This was a very good year for grappling. As you can see there was a lot of exciting action and new events popping up. The ADCC open's have been fun and have managed to attract some high level talent. The Fight Pass Invitationals look beautiful and it looks like they are very close to finding a great ruleset. The future of nogi grappling is looking bright. I can't wait for 2024, which is a ADCC year and this one might be even better than the last.
Action Stats
These stats were calculated in the following way. I took the match time and multiplied it by the number of matches that went to decision. Then for every match that ended in submission I take half of the match time and multiply it by the number of submissions. Finally I add both of those numbers together for the base time.
Ex. An event with 10min matches where 5 matches go to decisions or points and 5 wins are by submission.
(5 matches x 10 min) + (5 matches x 5 min) = 75 min base time.
From there I take the base time and divide it by 5 to get the action/technique per 5 min. In the case above it would be 15. Then I just divide the number of sweeps, passes, takedowns, etc by those the 5 min intervals(15 in the example below).
This method is somewhat crude, but I think it should generally work out. One problem how ever is that OT is counted in the time, so promotions that use OT will look worse than they actually are. Also a match may end earlier than half the time of the match, which will make the stats slightly less accurate. I'm making the assumption that submission ending times follow a normal distribution and that will make everything even out in the end for the yearly average. For the individual events it is possible that this method might be off if many matches end extremely early or late. However I've found that these stats line up with my subjective evaluations for action in the events for 2023.Anyway, enough talking about the methodology. Let's look at the stats.
This is the most important stat in my opinion. Here we can see the total amount of moves attempted every 5min and the total amount of techniques completed. I think of the action number as how much fun it is to watch the event. The technique number could reflect how good the event is for study purposes(assuming most who watch are grapplers). I the other stats can sometimes be misleading because a match with lots of sweeps will likely have less takedowns, because the match is mostly on the ground. Here however, I think things are fairly clear. However there is one caveat. The method I used to calculate the times can skew things if many matches are ended early and/or the match times are long. I believe most of these events are unaffected by this, but the technique score for the AIGA final seems to be a bit low due to this.
Getting into it, The yearly action average was 6.5 per 5min and 1.68 techniques. I don't think these numbers are bad at all. People are making legit attempts to do something more than once a minute and on average something happens at least every 5 min. Of course I hope things improve, but I think this is an improvement from years past(although I don't have data on it). Quintet 4 had the most action and FPI 5 had the most technique. Nogi Worlds was unfortunately the worst in both categories.
Analysis
Something that has been the topic of debate this year is stalling penalties. Quintet 4, the AIGA Finals and FPI 5 had what I'd call strict stalling. The others either had more lax stalling calls or none at all. If we look at all 3 of these events, they have much higher than average action per 5 min scores. In fact they are all in the top 4. They also have higher technique per 5 min scores as well, except the AIGA finals. It should be noted however that the WNO Night of Champions and the Polaris Women's GP had high scores despite having no stalling calls. That said I believe that being more strict on stalling produces more action and you'll see more techniques in matches.
Let's take a look at passing vs sweeping. In years past I believe someone did an analysis and it said that sweeping was more common than passes, but in the 2023 nogi grappling scene, is that true? There were 0.43 sweeps and 0.46 passes per 5 min on average this year. Based on this I would say passing was more successful, but only slightly so. Keep in mind however that there are more passes attempted per 5 min than sweeps. Based on this it seems that trying to win by sweeping someone for points might not be the best strategy.
Now let's look at something related. Takedowns vs sweeps. Is it better to standup and try to wrestle someone down or pull guard and sweep them. As noted above there were 0.43 sweeps per 5 min for the yearly average. For takedowns the number was 0.49 takedowns per 5 min. The number of takedowns attempted was also higher than sweeps. It seems here that taking someone down is yielding slightly better returns than attempting to sweep them.
Do IBJJF rules make matches boring? This might actually be true. The IBJJF nogi worlds came in below average in Action, Technique, Submissions(& attempts), Passes(& attempts), Sweeps, and Takedowns(& attempts). The only thing it didn't come in below average in is sweep attempts. It came in at half the yearly average for technique per 5 min and significantly lower in action. To be fair, I don't have stats for other IBJJF events this year and I only covered the finals matches. Due to this it might not be representative of the whole event. However I only covered the finals of the ADCC Asian trials, and the AIGA finals and they didn't come out with numbers like this. I think we need more data, but it isn't looking good. If IBJJF wants to do a pro nogi event in the future, I'd recommend that they adjust the rules.
Which is more exciting and brings better action points matches or non-point matches? This seems to be a toss up. If we look at the action and technique per 5 min totals it seems to be about even. Quinet and the WNO night of champions scored very high on action and technique, but so did the FPI and the AIGA finals. The event with the lowest action was Nogi worlds, which is a point event. However the 2nd lowest amount of action came from FPI 4 which was EBI rules(no points). It seems points don't seem to have much of an influence over the amount of action and technique. Perhaps in the future when we have more data we can make a definitive conclusion, but as of now, I'm not seeing much of a difference.
Off The Mats
On the other hand the promotion of events has been pretty bad this year. Not only did they happen inconsistently, but they were also under promoted. I'd like to see more regular events and more of a build up before they happen. About 2 years ago there was about 1 big event every month to look forward to. In 2023 it seemed like there were months of drought followed by 2-3 big events in 1 week. I hope 2024 shows improvements in this area.
Finally, I think media should step their game up. Many of the events don't have the hype that they should and people don't even realize they're happening in some cases. How can we grow the sport if people don't know when or where the events are going on? By improving coverage I think it will help engagement. People often don't want to watch matches between people they don't know, but I think the media can help expose people to some of these lesser known athletes. I include myself in those that need to step it up here.
Overall
I know you're saying. where are the rest of the stats, like takedowns, submissions, etc. Don't worry, they are coming in part 2.
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