UFC Fight Night: A Contrarian Take - Holloway vs. Kattar
Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to a Contrarian Take on UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Kattar. We have a new year with some exciting UFC cards coming up, as well as a new scoring system on DraftKings. H3budda has an excellent article quickly covering the changes, and I’ll add some quick thoughts here. I think the new scoring system will do a much better job of matching what our eyes tell us with the resulting DraftKings score (which is the main issue DK was looking to fix), but it will still require some adjustments. Previously we’d see fights (particularly in the last few months of 2020) where a fighter would dominate control time and strikes, but would end up with very low DK scores because of the lack of significant strikes and the losing fighter’s simple inability to get back to his feet. Now those fights will be properly rewarded, but I also believe we will see some increased variance due to the early “Quick Win Bonus” 25 bonus points. Finishing a fighter in 60 seconds will be 25 bonus points and almost certainly put the fighter on the optimal lineup no matter what the salary, but finishing a fight in 61 seconds won’t result in any bonus. I’m looking forward to the Twitter comments when a punch connects at 60 seconds and the fighter’s head hits the mat a second later. With the new scoring in mind, let’s take a look at the card and see if we can find some under-owned fighters who can help our lineups: