The UFC might as well stop announcing fights ahead of time, as bouts are cancelled so frequently these days that nobody trusts fight announcements anymore anyway.
With Daniel Cormier the latest to pull out of a UFC main event, fingers have started to point at different MMA gyms that have higher injury frequencies than others.
Greg Jackson may have gotten the ball rolling in that department, after boasting on Twitter how infrequently his fighters have to pull-out of fights due to injuries. Tristar gym in Montreal, which has a friendly relationship with Jackson-Wink, also boasts a much lower than average injury frequency. Perhaps there is something to Greg Jackson’s claims.
Using statistics provided by Tapology, we have ranked the six worst fight camps in terms of fighters cancelling bouts due to injury. The time period measured is between 2009-2016, and includes all fighters scheduled for at least 5 bouts during this period.
Here are the 6 MMA gyms with the highest frequency of injuries.
6. Team Nogueira/Blackhouse MMA
As these two MMA gyms tend to overlap frequently, their statistics have been combined for this purpose.
Between 2009-2016 Blackhouse MMA fighters pulled out of 10.88% of their fights. Out of 147 scheduled fights, Blackhouse martial artists pulled out 16 times. These are actually fairly decent numbers considering the average age of fighters from this camp. With aging guys like Anderson Silva, Lyoto Machida and Little Nog, their average age is over 34.
While Blackhouse has pulled out of 16 fights this year, their opponents have pulled out of 12 as well. In theory that makes them a below average camp in terms of cancelling fights.
