UFC Analytics · Grappling
Gravity Always Wins
Strikers get the highlight reels. Wrestlers get the wins. Thirty-two years of fight data on the sport's oldest weapon — and why nobody has ever really figured out how to make it stop working.
The takedown is older than the sport. Before there were rounds, before there were gloves, before there were weight classes, there was one man deciding the fight would happen on the floor and another man unable to stop him. Everything the UFC has become — the striking clinics, the spinning elbows, the pay-per-view theater — is built on top of that first, brutal transaction.
Thirty-two years in, everyone knows it's coming. Every camp drills sprawls. Takedown defence is a line item on every scouting report. And yet: in the 2020s, fighters are shooting more takedowns per fight than at any point in recorded UFC history, and the reward for landing them hasn't budged an inch. Out-takedown your opponent and you win roughly two fights in three — a number so stable across eras it looks less like a trend and more like a law of physics.
This is the story of that law.
Act I — The volume era nobody saw coming
Track takedown attempts per fight from 1994 to today and you get a jagged, honest picture of the sport growing up — sparse early records, the wrestling boom of the early 2000s, gaps in the tape, and then a modern climb that hasn't stopped. Scroll through it.
The prehistory. Record-keeping barely exists: 0.10 attempts per fight shows up in the 1994 books. The fights had grappling; the stat sheets mostly didn't. Treat everything before the late 2000s as an incomplete archive.
The wrestlers arrive. Attempts spike to 5.73 per fight — but accuracy craters to 32.3%. Everyone is shooting; the sprawl is being invented in real time.
The gap in the tape. Recorded attempts collapse to 0.43 per fight in 2006. That's a hole in the data, not a hole in the sport — a caveat this chart wears honestly.
The modern record begins. Full round-by-round stats arrive: 4.68 attempts and 1.97 landed per fight. From here on, the picture is sharp.
More shots than ever. 2024, 2025 and 2026 all clear 6 attempts per fight — with around 2.2 landed. Three decades of everyone learning takedown defence, and the wrestlers just shoot more.
Where the record starts
Every archive has a first entry. In the UFC's takedown ledger, it belongs to the man the whole sport was built to showcase.
Act II — What a takedown actually buys you
Here is the exchange rate, computed across every fight in the record with a decisive winner. Land nothing, and you win less than half your fights. Every takedown after that buys you a bigger share of the outcome — and control time compounds with it, from 27 seconds on average to over eight minutes. Tap a number for the receipts.
Win rate when you out-takedown your opponent
2 in 3Split every decisive fight three ways — out-takedown your opponent, break even, or get out-taken-down — and the picture barely moves across three decades. Before 2010: 69.3% win rate for the fighter with more takedowns. Through the 2010s: 67.6%. In the 2020s, with the best takedown defence in history: 67.4%. The whole sport learned to wrestle, and the advantage shrank by less than two points.
Act III — Yes, defence got better. It doesn't matter.
Takedown accuracy has fallen — from 42.2% in the pre-2010 archive to 36.5% ever since. That's the professionalisation of the sprawl, right there in the record. But look at what wrestlers did in response: they didn't shoot less. They shot more — 1.34 attempts per fight before 2010, 4.42 in the 2010s, 5.76 in the 2020s. Accuracy per shot fell; takedowns landed per fight nearly quadrupled, from 0.56 to 2.10.
And each takedown still buys about the same two minutes of control it always did — 130 seconds per takedown in the old era, 120 now. Multiply steady value by rising volume and you get the real headline: control time per fight has more than tripled, from 74 seconds to 252. The ground game isn't dying. It's compounding.
1993–2009 · 1,265 fights
42.2%
takedown accuracy · 1.34 attempts and 0.56 landed per fight · 130.5s of control per takedown · 74s control per fight. (Sparse early records — read as an archive, not a census.)
2010–2019 · 4,196 fights
36.5%
takedown accuracy · 4.42 attempts and 1.61 landed per fight · 124.4s of control per takedown · 201s control per fight.
2020s · 3,335 fights
36.5%
takedown accuracy · 5.76 attempts and 2.10 landed per fight · 120.1s of control per takedown · 252s control per fight.
The great walls are real, for the record: José Aldo turned away 88 of 94 takedowns attempted against him — a 93.6% defence rate, the best of anyone who faced 75+ attempts. Petr Yan sits at 86.9% on a massive 160 attempts against; Max Holloway at 84.0%. Individual fighters can beat gravity. The division-wide average never has.
Accuracy fell six points.
Volume quadrupled.
Gravity kept the change.
When the shot lands
Takedown accuracy decays as the fight goes on — 39.6% in round one, sliding every round to 32.9% in round five. Fresh legs shoot better. But attempts don't fall with it: round three is the busiest of all at 1.38 attempts per fighter-round, because tired opponents are the ones worth shooting on, even at worse odds. Control time per round peaks there too.
Round 1
1.13 att/rd
Round 2
1.19 att/rd
Round 3
1.38 att/rd
Round 4
1.09 att/rd
Round 5
1.30 att/rd
Rounds four and five draw from championship and main-event fights only (768 and 668 fighter-rounds, versus 17,204 in round one).
The lighter you are, the more you fall
Takedowns are a small-fighter's economy. Flyweights land 2.34 per fight — two and a half times the heavyweight rate of 0.95. The gradient is almost perfectly monotonic down the scale: less mass means more shots, more scrambles, more chain wrestling per minute. Heavyweights don't shoot much, but note the exception in the data: heavyweight title fights convert at 43.4%, the best accuracy of any division listed — when a big man commits, it counts.
The emblem · Most takedowns in UFC history
The Machine
If this story has a face, it's Merab Dvalishvili's. 119 takedowns landed across 17 UFC fights — seven per fight, nearly double the 62 of his closest pursuer, Colby Covington. He is everything the data says a takedown artist should be in the defence era: his accuracy is a mediocre 35.2%, almost exactly the modern league average, and it does not matter at all, because he has attempted 338 of them. Nobody in the record comes close to that volume. He's banked 6,445 seconds of control — over 107 minutes of other men carrying his weight — and won 82.4% of his UFC fights doing it.
The signature exhibit is the night he met Petr Yan — the second-stingiest takedown defence in the dataset at 86.9%. Merab shot 49 times, the most attempts anyone has recorded in a single fight, landed 11 at a grim 22.4%, and won anyway. Accuracy is a stylist's stat. Attempts are a believer's.
Only one man has ever landed more in a night: Khabib Nurmagomedov's 21 takedowns against Abel Trujillo at UFC 160 in 2013 — on 27 attempts, at 77.8%. Merab's answer came twelve years later, with the belt on the line.
More takedowns landed than anyone in the UFC record — nearly double second place.
Merab put Cory Sandhagen down 20 times on 37 attempts in their bantamweight title fight — the second-most in a single UFC bout, ever — and kept his belt by unanimous decision.
The oldest weapon
Thirty-two years of adaptation, and here is what the ledger says: the sprawl got better, the accuracy fell, and the takedown won anyway. It won by volume where it lost on percentage. It won two of every three fights where it out-landed the other side — in 1997's chaos, in 2015's boom, in this decade's chess matches, at almost exactly the same rate.
The first recorded entry in the book is Royce Gracie dragging Remco Pardoel to the mat in 1994. The most recent chapters belong to a Georgian bantamweight who shoots fifty times a night and doesn't care what the accuracy column says. Between them, everything about the sport changed. The transaction at the bottom of it never did. You can defend a takedown. You cannot defend all of them.
Gravity always wins.