Fight Facts: Legacy Fighting Alliance 40

In a promotion that routinely sees champs leave to the UFC without a single title defense, Kevin Aguilar has three of em. Give that dude a shot. #LFA40 pic.twitter.com/IjpGo9tie9

— caposa (@Grabaka_Hitman) May 26, 2018

Fight Facts is a breakdown of all the interesting information and Octagon oddities on every card, with some puns, references and portmanteaus to keep things fun. These deep stat dives delve into the numbers, providing historical context and telling the stories behind those numbers.

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For its 40th numbered card and 41st overall, Legacy Fighting Alliance on Friday put on a terrific show. With six of the seven televised fights ending before the final bell, LFA 40 featured the company’s first title unification bout, more rear-naked chokes than you can shake a stick at and a fighter who set a whole bunch of organizational records all at once.

HAPPY 400TH: AXS TV held its 400th MMA event with LFA 40. It has been showing events on the network -- it was formerly known as HDNet -- since it aired World Extreme Cagefighting 9 in 2004. WEC 9 featured several well-known competitors in Chris Leben, Mike Swick, “Razor” Rob McCullough, Joe Riggs and Olaf Alfonso.

NOT A RACE: In just over 16 months, the LFA has put on an incredible 41 events, with 40 numbered fight cards and one “Fight Night” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. By comparison, it took the following organizations about this long to hold that many events: Ultimate Fighting Championship (eight years, six months), Pride Fighting Championships (six years, eight months), World Extreme Cagefighting (seven years, 11 months), Strikeforce (four years, nine months) and Bellator MMA (two years).

YEESH: LFA 40 was only the eighth card in company history to have no fighters miss weight and feature no scheduled catchweight bouts.

NAKED AS A JAYBIRD: With a whopping four rear-naked choke finishes on the seven-fight main card, LFA 40 featured the most rear-naked choke wins on a televised LFA card. LFA 13 featured four rear-naked choke wins, as well, but the fourth occurred on the untelevised postliminary card.

GREAT UNIFIER: LFA 40 featured the first title unification bout in the company’s history, as champion Kevin Aguilar returned from injury to face off against interim titleholder Thanh Le. With his second successful title defense, Aguilar became the second LFA fighter to ever defend his belt more than once, joining Robert Watley.

YOU SPOONY BARD: Damon Jackson handed Jeremy Spoon his first career submission loss. Both fighters now have exactly 12 wins by submission, with one loss each by submission.

MR. LFA: Jackson competed in his record sixth LFA bout, the most of any fighter in in the organization’s history. With his submission win over Spoon, Jackson now has the most wins (five), the most submissions (five) and most wins at featherweight (three) of any fighter to ever compete in LFA.

SIGNATURE MOVE: In submitting Spoon by rear-naked choke, Jackson picked up his fourth LFA win by that submission, the most in company history. The only other fighter in organizational history to have more than one rear-naked choke win is Devin Miller, who has two.

ENOUGH FOR THE REST OF US: With 20 career losses prior to his bout with Levi Mowles, Rey Trujillo featured more losses on his record than the combined number of losses (15) of every other fighter on the entire 11-fight card. Trujillo had the second-most losses of any fighter to ever compete inside the LFA cage, trailing only Chris Mickle with 21 losses.

IN DESCENDING ORDER: Dropping his bout against Mowles by submission, Trujillo now has eight submission losses, seven knockout losses and six decision losses on his record.

A BUDDING DIVISION: The bout between debuting flyweights Victoria Leonardo and Hailey Cowan was the 10th women’s flyweight fight to be contested under the LFA banner. With Leonardo’s submission win, six of those 10 bouts have ended via finish.

READY, SET, DRAW: The untelevised bout between Hunter Joffre and Charles Spoolstra ended in a majority draw, marking only the third bout in LFA history to come up even on the scorecards.

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN: Coming into this event, Eric Ellington and Ramiz Brahimaj had never been defeated, Le had never been knocked out and no LFA bout contested above 125 pounds had ever ended in a draw.

Jay Pettry is an attorney and a statistician. Writing about MMA since he started studying the “Eminem Curse” in 2012, and while writing for Vice Sports and Combat Docket along the way, he put together many UFC fight result and entrance music databases to better study the sport. You can find him on twitter at @jaypettry.