Neck Crank

Neck18 Finishes · 1% of All Submissions

Total Finishes

Share of All Subs

Most by One Fighter

Peak Year

2022

Year by Year

13 Years with a Finish

Statistical overview

The 11th most used submission in the UFC

Every figure below covers complete years only, from 1995 through 2025. The current year is left out until it is finished, because a part-season is both a smaller sample and a lopsided one — this section rewrites itself each January.

16finishes

1.0%of all 1,644 submissions

#11of 39 distinct submissions

2022peak year, 3 finishes

How’s it trending?

+39%on a good run

Across the last 1,000 men’s fights the neck crank finished 3 against 2.2 its earlier rate predicts — 0.30 per 100 fights against 0.22 before. It sits below our threshold for calling a trend shift, though. On 3 finishes in a window this size, a run like this turns up often enough by chance that we will not call the underlying rate changed — a genuine move and a good spell look the same until more fights land. Worth watching rather than worth re-planning a camp around.

And over the long run

0.8%of submissions1995–2020

1.6%of submissionslast five years, 2021–2025

The neck crank first appears in 1995. That looks like a gap, but on 448 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same. Over five years it is holding roughly the share it always had.

That looks like a gap, but on 448 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same.

1.6% against 0.8% · 7 of 448 · 95% range −0.4 to 2.1 points

95% range −74% to 392% · 2024-06-28 to 2026-09-19, men’s divisions. Measured as the rate at which the neck crank ends a fight, not its share of submissions — share moves whenever the overall submission rate moves.

When does the finish come?

50.0%Round 1

25.0%Round 2

18.8%Round 3

0.0%Round 4

6.3%Round 5

neck crank every other submission

50.0% of these finishes come in the first round, against 51.1% for every other submission. That looks like a gap, but on 16 it is well inside what chance alone would produce. Treat the two as the same. Within the round itself the median comes at 2:44 against 2:52 — 8 seconds earlier.

Does weightclass matter?

Welterweight and middleweight0.6%3 of 488

Featherweight and lightweight0.7%3 of 446

Light heavyweight and heavyweight1.7%4 of 240

Flyweight and bantamweight2.1%5 of 235

Women's divisions0.0%0 of 168

The neck crank is at its weakest in women's divisions at 0.0%, 1.1 points below the rest of the sport, interval −1.6 to −0.6.

The men’s and women’s divisions

Across the women’s divisions the neck crank accounts for 0.0% of submissions — 0 of 168 — against 1.1% everywhere else. That is a real difference — 1.1 points less of the women's game, and big enough that chance does not explain it. That said, the women’s sample is 168 submissions in total, so it moves on a handful of fights in a way the men’s does not.

Anything out of the ordinary

One night

2 in a single evening at UFC 282: Blachowicz vs. Ankalaev

2022. A card that size predicts 0.0 of them; it produced 2. Nothing links the fights on a card beyond the night they share, so a cluster like this is a coincidence worth seeing rather than a cause worth explaining.

See the card →