# Fight Stats

> Data-driven insights into UFC and MMA statistics, trends, and analysis. Every figure ships with its sample size, method and confidence interval — see /data.

## Insights

- [The Disappearing Clinch](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-disappearing-clinch.md): For ten years fighters have been quietly deleting the tie-up on the fence, where the knees and the takedowns come from. Clinch strikes are down 27% per fighter since 2015; the takedowns have not moved at all, and the clinch still wins the fights it is used in. One man never got the memo.
- [Everybody Lands the Same](https://fightstats.online/insights/everybody-lands-the-same.md): The lighter divisions throw 10.7% more significant strikes than the heavyweights and land not one more. The fast-forward impression is real — it is an impression of strikes in the air, not of damage arriving.
- [First to Finish](https://fightstats.online/insights/first-to-finish.md): Umar Nurmagomedov had never been finished in nine UFC fights. Song Yadong knocked him out in one minute forty-eight — and became the tenth man in UFC history to reach eighteen fights before turning twenty-nine.
- [The Year They Started Falling](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-year-they-started-falling.md): Through 22 August, 2026 has dropped men more often than any year since 2003 — 43.9% of fights carried a knockdown, against a 35.5% baseline. It is not the scorers being generous, and it is not a heavier card sheet.
- [The One Man It Worked For](https://fightstats.online/insights/valter-walker.md): Grappling spent a decade rebuilding itself around the heel hook and the UFC has seen twelve of them since 2015. Four belong to Valter Walker, who has won five fights here and won every one of them at the leg.
- [The knockout goes missing](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-knockout-goes-missing.md): Angela Hill has lost sixteen fights in the UFC and has never been knocked out. There are four ways a fight can end, and women are level with the men in three of them. The fourth does not arrive.
- [The Real Zombie](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-real-zombie.md): Marlon Vera has never been stopped in twenty-six UFC fights. The Korean Zombie earned the nickname; the record says the name is on the wrong man.
- [The Twister](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-twister.md): Five twisters in the history of the UFC, and two of them landed eight weeks apart. Charles Johnson was on the receiving end of a different rare finish forty-nine days before he threw this one.
- [Hometown Advantage](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-away-corner.md): The most quotable number on home advantage is worth nothing. Underneath it, two opposite effects — and a real edge that is not the crowd and not the scorecards.
- [The Changing of the Guard](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-guard-is-gone.md): The oldest promise in this sport is that you can win a fight flat on your back. Submissions have not declined in a decade — but the armbar finishes about a quarter as often as it once did, and the choke from the back has not moved at all. Unless the fighters are women.
- [The Year Out](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-year-out.md): Josh Barnett spent 4,179 days out of the UFC, came back, and won inside a round. Ring rust says that should not happen. So we set hundreds of fighters against nobody but themselves — the same man fresh, the same man a year later. Both things turn out to be true.
- [The Aim of the Sport](https://fightstats.online/insights/where-the-sport-aims.md): Fighters aim three quarters of everything at the head — the target they hit least often. Ask the obvious question about working the body, and the numbers hand you a clean, confident, wrong answer. We nearly ran it. The version that survives points at a target almost nobody spends on.
- [Blood, Sweat and Submissions](https://fightstats.online/insights/they-stop-trying.md): Submissions dry up as a fight wears on — round one produces four times as many as round five — and everyone blames the sweat. The attempt rate falls by more than half; the finish rate per attempt falls by six points. The choke did not stop working. Fighters stopped reaching for it.
- [Five Round Fight Pace](https://fightstats.online/insights/nobody-paces-for-five.md): Every main-event broadcast says the same thing: they are pacing themselves, it is a five-rounder. Measured against the same men in their own three-round fights, the effect does not exist — and a five-round fight gets busier every round, peaking in the fifth. In the women's divisions the myth turns out to be true.
- [Coming Up Short](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-shorter-man-shoots-more.md): Every gym says a low centre of gravity wins the takedown battle, and the record agrees that it does — give away ten centimetres and you win the count in 65% of fights. It disagrees completely about why: the success rate per attempt is identical. The edge is volume, not leverage.
- [Wrestler vs. Striker, who wins?](https://fightstats.online/insights/neither-man-gets-his-fight.md): When a wrestler meets a striker, everyone knows what happens. Across 165 of them, the wrestler wrestles less than he usually does, the striker strikes less than he usually does, and the winner is a coin flip. Both game plans die at once.
- [Never the same again](https://fightstats.online/insights/never-the-same-again.md): It is the most repeated claim in the sport: once a fighter has been knocked out, something is gone for good. Set against fighters whose first defeat was a decision — same age, same decline, no trauma — the effect disappears completely.
- [The armbar belongs to the women](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-armbar-belongs-to-the-women.md): Women finish fights by submission at precisely the rate comparable men do — 19.1% against 19.2%. What they do not share is the target. One game hunts the neck. The other hunts the arm, and it is the only place in this database where the two sports genuinely part company on the mat.
- [The leg lock that never arrived](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-leg-lock-that-never-arrived.md): Grappling spent a decade rebuilding itself around one hold: the heel hook. Inside the UFC cage there are whole years with none at all — and almost every one that lands now belongs to the same heavyweight.
- [The First Fight](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-first-fight.md): Every fighter gets one night to answer a question the promotion is asking about them, and the answer sticks harder than it has any right to.
- [Throwing More,Landing Less](https://fightstats.online/insights/throwing-more-landing-less.md): Every fighter who is losing reaches for the same lever. It is a weaker lever than accuracy by a distance — but it is not, as the sport tends to assume, the wrong one.
- [The Price of Control](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-price-of-control.md): The least popular thing in mixed martial arts turns out to have a price list, and almost everything anyone argues about sits below the line where it starts costing anything.
- [Survive the Round](https://fightstats.online/insights/survive-the-round.md): A knockdown looks like the end of a fight, and 86% of the time it is — but the fighters who hear the bell before the referee waves it off are in a very different fight from the one the highlight reel suggests.
- [The Ten-Centimetre Rule](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-ten-centimetre-rule.md): Commentary reads the tale of the tape before every fight, and for most of those fights it is reading out a coin flip — the number only starts to mean anything past ten centimetres.
- [The Southpaw Problem](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-southpaw-problem.md): Every coach in combat sports says the same thing about left-handers, and the record of 2,430 UFC fights says they are right — by about three and a half points.
- [The Undefeated Opponent](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-undefeated-opponent.md): Every fighter eventually loses to the same opponent, and the tape is unusually clear about what it takes first — not the offence, which barely moves, but everything on the other side of the ledger.
- [The Third Scorecard](https://fightstats.online/insights/the-third-scorecard.md): 828 times, two judges watched a fight and agreed. The third saw a different fight entirely. This is the UFC's one-in-five problem.
- [The Undisputed King - The rear naked choke](https://fightstats.online/insights/life-of-the-rear-naked-choke.md): Techniques rise, get solved, and vanish. The armbar had its era. The triangle had its highlight reels. One choke never needed a comeback, because it never left. This is what inevitability looks like in the data.
- [Gravity Always Wins](https://fightstats.online/insights/gravity-always-wins.md): 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.
- [When the Knockout Comes](https://fightstats.online/insights/when-the-knockout-comes.md): The knockout has a schedule. Across 2,721 KO/TKO finishes in UFC history, the median one lands at 4:46 of the fight — fourteen seconds before the round-one bell. This is the KO clock, read minute by minute.

## Data & Method

- [Data & Method](https://fightstats.online/data): coverage, statistical method, licence, and how to pull these numbers into something else.
- [Sitemap](https://fightstats.online/sitemap.xml): every page on the site.
- [Full corpus](https://fightstats.online/llms-full.txt): every published story above, concatenated into one document.