The UFC counts more about a fight than any other combat sport publishes.
Almost all of it is on one page per fight, free, and most people read it wrong — not because the numbers are hard, but because every one of them answers a narrower question than it appears to. Here is what each column actually measures, and the specific way each one lies.
Significant strikes landed per minute
What it is: how many meaningful strikes a fighter lands for every minute of cage time across their career.
How it misleads: on its own it measures activity, not success. Tom Aspinall lands 7.63 and Max Holloway 6.92, which makes them look like the same fighter until you read the absorbed column. Always read it next to strikes absorbed — the difference between the two is the closest thing here to "who is winning the exchange". We wrote that one up at length.
Significant strikes absorbed per minute
What it is: how often they get hit, per minute.
How it misleads: it flatters short fights. The rate is per minute, so a knockout artist whose bouts end in round one is measured across a small and unusually fresh window. It also makes a wrestler's opponent look defensively excellent, because minutes spent under top control generate very few significant strikes for anybody.
Striking accuracy
What it is: the share of attempted significant strikes that land.
How it misleads: it punishes styles built on feints and volume. Dominick Cruz records 33%, the lowest on our roster, and is obviously not a poor striker — he misses more by design and wins anyway. A cautious fighter who throws only when certain will out-measure him and be the lesser striker.
Takedowns landed per fifteen minutes
What it is: offensive takedown volume, scaled to a three-round fight.
How it misleads: it says nothing about what the takedown bought. A fighter stood back up in three seconds scores the same as three minutes of control, and only one of those wins a round. Merab Dvalishvili's 5.97 is genuinely enormous; a 1.5 could be either a competent wrestler or someone who scores one and does nothing with it.
Takedown defence
What it is: the share of opponents' takedown attempts stopped.
How it misleads: more than any other column here. The denominator counts what opponents chose to try, so an offensive wrestler nobody dares shoot on ends up with a sample made entirely of the hardest cases. Curtis Blaydes records 35%. It is the most misread number in the sport, and it is only trustworthy when it comes with volume — Ilia Topuria's 95% and Islam Makhachev's 91% mean something because both have been shot on constantly.
Submission attempts per fifteen minutes
What it is: how often they go for a finish on the ground.
How it misleads: the top of the list is dominated by fighters with barely any UFC time, where one busy appearance produces a career rate. The bottom is the informative end: 19% of fighters have never attempted one, and at light heavyweight that rises to 38%.
Three rules that cover most of it
Check the denominator before you quote the top line. Every figure here is a rate, and a rate is a decision about what to divide by. Most of the misreadings above are denominator problems wearing different clothes.
Distrust anything built on one or two fights. Per-minute rates swing wildly at small samples. This is why the statistical rounds in our Higher or Lower game exclude fighters without enough UFC time — a quiz that asks you to guess a number drawn from a single appearance is punishing knowledge.
Nothing here measures a chin, cardio or fight IQ. There is no column for them because nobody counts them. Strikes absorbed is sometimes used as a proxy for a chin, and it is a different thing wearing similar clothes — it tells you how often somebody got hit, not what happened when they did.
What to do with it
Read pairs, not columns: landed against absorbed, takedowns against takedown defence, accuracy against volume. A single figure almost never survives contact with the fight it came from, and two figures together usually tell you the style. Then go and watch the tape, because the stat sheet has no idea which of those strikes hurt.
Sources & method
Every figure quoted comes from ufcstats.com, the UFC’s official public fight database, as recorded there on 28 August 2026, across the 284 fighters on our roster who carry UFC career data. Significant strikes are per minute of fight time; takedowns and submission attempts are per fifteen minutes; accuracy and takedown defence are percentages of attempts. Career rates move with every appearance, so a fighter who has since competed will read slightly differently. Fighter ratings elsewhere on this site are our own model and are not published by or derived from the UFC.