Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports
At UFC 194, two champions lost their title, making 2015 the most active title changing year in the sport"s history.
At UFC 194, history was made in many different areas. Conor McGregor became the first ever UFC Featherweight Champion not named Jose Aldo. The fight was the quickest in UFC championship history, lasting only 13 seconds.
One of the most spectacular records that the event highlighted was the amount of title changes in 2015. For years the UFC had some of the most dominant champions with historically long championship reigns (Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre, Jon Jones, Jose Aldo).
Entering 2015, the UFC had four champions with four or more title defenses: Jose Aldo (7), Jon Jones (7), Demetrious Johnson (5) and Ronda Rousey (4). As of today, Johnson is the only remaining champion out of those four.
It wasn"t only long reigning champions that saw the championship title slip from their hands. In total, 7 out of 10 weight classes saw a new champion crowned in 2015. If you go back a month to December of 2014, that total would increase to 8 with Robbie Lawler winning his championship on December 6th, 2014.
One of the most amazing things about this chart are the dates of when the championships were won. On one side, you see a whole range of different years, with some going as far back as 2010 and 2011. Now in 2015, 9 out of 10 champions won their title in 2014 or 2015.
There has also been a major shake-up in the pound for pound best conversation. Here is a screen-shot of the P4P rankings from January 1st, 2015 and how some of the fighters fared in 2015.
After going years with four definitive P4P best fighters in the world (Anderson Silva, Georges St. Pierre, Jon Jones and Jose Aldo), the UFC will now have a cluster of newly minted champions and former long reigning champions vying for the #2 position, with Demetirous Johnson topping the list . The argument can even be made that Jon Jones never gave up his #1 ranking.
These discussions are made tougher because of the crazy year that has been 2015. Tracking from 2009, we can see that the amount of new champions and title changes in 2015 has blown any other year out of the water. (New Champ = amount of weight classes with a new champion in that year, Total Changes = amount of times the title changed hands in that year)
The closest year to 2015 since the WEC merger would be 2010 when almost half of the weight classes saw a new champion crowned. This was the year that Cain Velasquez defeated Brock Lesnar for the Heavyweight Championship, Mauricio Rua defeated Lyoto Machida for the Light Heavyweight Championship and Frankie Edgar defeated BJ Penn for the Lightweight Championship.
Last year only two weight classes saw new champions crowned, the Welterweight division and the Bantamweight division. Both divisions had two title changes within 2014, as Johny Hendricks and Robbie Lawler both won the title in 2014, as did Renan Barao and T.J. Dillashaw.
Those years do not compete with 2015, though. Fabricio Werdum, Daniel Cormier, Luke Rockhold, Rafael dos Anjos, Conor McGregor, Holly Holm and Joanna Jedrzejczyk are newly crowned UFC champions in 2015.
What a crazy year.
Source: http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2015/12/13/10022654/jose-aldo-chris-weidman-join-losing-ufc-champions-2015
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