Our model picked the winner of all 12 fights at UFC Vegas 120 on Saturday. On method, the call of how each fight ends, it went 5 of 12.
Start with the size of that first number. One card. Twelve fights. That is the entire sample, and it is far too small to say anything about how good the model is. A clean card does not move our season figures in any material way, and it carries no information about the next card. Anyone reading 12 of 12 as an accuracy claim is being misled, and we are not making one.
A perfect card is also the exact shape a grading bug takes, so we checked the result before publishing this.
Three things came back clean. The 12 picks split five one way and seven the other rather than all landing on one corner, which is the pattern a grader scoring picks against themselves would produce. The winners were parsed from UFCStats independently of our picks. And the results carried a real mix: five decisions, four KO/TKO finishes and three submissions, with finishes in the first, second and third rounds. A bug that manufactured a sweep would have had to fake all of that too.
That verification is part of the story, and readers should see it rather than take the number on trust.
The method column is the more useful read of the night. Going 5 of 12 means that on a card where the model named every winner, it got the finish wrong more often than right.
That is the third card running where method was the weak column. The model went 5 of 12 on method on July 25, 3 of 14 on Aug. 1 and 5 of 12 Saturday.
All three submissions were method misses: Jose Montanha over Louie Sutherland in the first round, Juliana Miller over Ravena Oliveira in the second and Salkilld over Gamrot in the first.
The main event shows the split cleanly. The model had Quillan Salkilld at 65.9% and had the fight going to a decision. Salkilld submitted Mateusz Gamrot by rear-naked choke in the first round. The winner was right and the method was wrong.
Where method held, it held on the more readable fights. Steven Asplund and Diego Ferreira both won unanimous decisions the model had called as decisions, and Diyar Nurgozhay's first-round KO/TKO of Bruno Lopes came as called.
Both flagged picks landed with the method correct. Alexia Thainara, at 75.5% to win by decision, beat Amanda Lemos over three rounds. Ty Miller, at 73.2% to win by KO/TKO, stopped Billy Ray Goff in the third. There was no LOCK on the card.
The model also picked against Darren Elkins in the last fight of his UFC career, giving Yadier Del Valle 64.1%. That pick was unflagged and it was correct. Del Valle won in 35 seconds.
We are reporting this card on its own numbers only. Our flagged-picks season figure is under an internal hold because it cannot currently be reproduced, so nothing here is offered as a season-to-date record, and the card-to-card method comparisons above are per-card figures.
Twelve of 12 is a good night. It is also 12 fights.