Hello all! Welcome to the second in our series of fight breakdowns for UFC 260 this weekend. Next up, Tyron Woodley vs Vicente Luque. This feels like a retirement fight to me. Luque has knocked his opponents out in 6 of his last 8 fights and currently ranks as our #4 overall welterweight based on his total STeloR score. Woodley, on the other hand, is riding a 15 round losing streak and has looked like a shell of the competitor he once was. The eye test tells me Woodley should retire and save the punishment he is taking on his body and brain but I will remain objective and let the data speak for itself.

Woodley profiles as a mainly standup oriented fighter and is highly dependent on finishing his opponents to win fights. When you combine his two most used strategic classes, he wins less than one third of them based on our model’s results.

Woodley’s opponents take a relatively balanced approach to fighting him and each strategy is either highly or moderately successful. Woodley’s lack of point fighting ability is on full display here, which backs my assertion that he is finish dependent. I will dive deeper on this point later when I breakdown his STeloR scores.

Luque also profiles as a standup oriented fighter. His win percentages are not great either and push the notion that he too much of a finish heavy fighter.

Interestingly, Luque’s opponent strategic classes are on par with his in terms of round count. He is however better at countering strikers than he is at initiating as a striker from a points winning perspective.

Woodley’s tactical breakdown is very interesting to me. Our model has him never winning a striking round that we classify as balanced which is a pretty stark result. I would say this further backs the point that Woodley needs to target the head as a means of finishing his opponents.

From his opponent's point of view, Woodley is most successful when countering fighters who head hunt him on the feet and is consistently least successful when clinched and fought with pressure. As far as eye test, this has been my main takeaway from watching Woodley’s last three fights. He gets easily overwhelmed by pressure boxing and flow wrestling which naturally counteracts his strong counter boxing skill set. Woodley has tons of power that he unleashes mainly when opponents leave him an opening. When you watch Woodley today, it seems as though he is stuck in neutral and is constantly on the defensive, which the stats seem to validate.

Luque’s consistent tactics actually don’t portend well for him unless he spends more time focusing on his second class: tree chopping. Luque’s head hunting style plays into the hands of Woodley’s seemingly last remaining MMA skill set. He would do well to focus on attacking Woodley’s base to get him thinking low before eventually going upstairs to try and put him away.

This looks like it's going to be a head striking brawl. Both fighters attack heads mainly and conversely get their heads attacked as their primary opponent tactic.

Now for the new and fun part. I will be releasing an article on our updated STeloR ranking system this weekend before the event but I wanted to give a little sneak peak into the predictive and descriptive power it has. At a high level, STeloR ranks fighters on five metrics: points fighting, knockout ability, submission ability, knockout defense (i.e. chin strength) and submission defense. I shortened them to PTS, KO, SUB, KOd and SUBd for brevity. Utilizing an elo algorithm, I match fighters round-by-round in their fight careers and the algorithm assigns scores based on their probability gains in situations. STeloR is currently broken down into 16 unique situations that I will dive into further this weekend. For a quick math breakdown, if a fighter is given a .25, or 25%, chance of winning a round and they win it then they are given 1 - .25 = .75 points to their PTS score in STeloR. The same logic applies across the other four metrics.

I will start with Luque. Luque ranks as our #4 current welterweight and #5 all time based on his total STeloR score. Over 65% of his score comes from his prodigious power which has its positives and negatives. Luque’s power is an incredible weapon that puts him in the 92nd percentile of active knockout artists in the UFC. However, if he isn’t able to finish his opponents, he ranks in the 42nd percentile of point fighters which is a massive drop off and points to holes in his fight approach that more skilled welterweights like Kamaru Usman and Colby Covington could take advantage of. Luque is also currently near his peak as a fighter; his decay from his peak sits at ~12%. I calculate this by taking a fighter's all time peak STeloR score and dividing it by their current STeloR score.

Now let's take a look at Woodley using the same concept. Similar story but with a worse outlook. Knockout gains are 81% of Tyron’s total STeloR score and he has shown no ability in the last three fights to unleash that power. Tyron’s power ranks in the 75th percentile and his point fighting ranks in the meager 29th percentile. Woodley has decayed an incredible 90.9% from his peak where he ranked as the 14th greatest welterweight by STeloR score. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Woodley is in for a rough night Saturday and this fight is likely ending in a KO finish from one of these two men.

Neither of these two fighters rank particularly highly as point fighters but Luque’s power, decay rate and tactical skill set all point me towards a victory for him and most likely by KO. Unfortunately, Woodley is largely a shell of his former glory and even at his peak he did not win rounds consistently at a high rate. I would project Luque by KO/TKO.