One in Five UFC Fighters Has Never Tried a Submission

Fifty-three of the 284 fighters we hold UFC career data for have never attempted a submission.

Not lost one. Not been reversed out of one. Never started one, across an entire UFC career.

That is 19% of the fighters we hold career data for, and it is not a story about prospects with two fights on the books. Twenty-eight of them are ranked in their division's top fifteen right now — Justin Gaethje, Robert Whittaker, Curtis Blaydes, Paulo Costa, Jamahal Hill, Sergei Pavlovich, Michael Page, Manon Fiorot, Yan Xiaonan.

Where the submission went

Split by division and the gap is not subtle:

• Light Heavyweight — 38% have never attempted one (9 of 24)
• Heavyweight — 36% (9 of 25)
• Lightweight — 19%
• Middleweight and Welterweight — 17%
• Bantamweight — 15%
• Featherweight — 14%
• Flyweight — 4% (1 of 25)

One flyweight in twenty-five, against better than one light heavyweight in three. The two ends of the card are not playing variations of the same sport; they are playing different sports that share a rulebook.

Light heavyweight keeps turning up

We found the same division sitting on its own once before. Measuring takedowns, light heavyweight's median is 0.46 per fifteen minutes while every other men's division runs between 1.13 and 1.39, and six of its twenty-four fighters have never landed a takedown either. Put the two together and the picture is unambiguous: the division that does not wrestle is also the division that does not submit. The ground game has largely left 205 pounds.

The reason is not mysterious. Two very large men with fight-ending power both know that the first clean shot probably decides it, and that shooting a takedown against someone who hits that hard is the most expensive thing you can attempt. Heavyweight has the same arithmetic and nearly the same figure.

What the number is not saying

It is not a measure of grappling skill. Several of the fighters on this list have excellent submission defence and credentials on the mat. Never attempting one is a statement about what wins fights in their division, not about what they can do.

It counts attempts, not finishes. Which cuts both ways: a fighter who fishes for guillotines from bad positions and never lands one posts a healthy number, and the sport's best positional grappler could post a modest one by only committing when it is already over.

The top of the leaderboard is mostly noise. The highest rates on our roster belong to fighters with very little UFC time, where two attempts in one appearance produces a career figure that means nothing. Ronda Rousey at 4.8 is real and earned; most of the names near her are a small denominator. A zero, by contrast, is a zero — which is why the interesting end of this statistic is the bottom.

The one that is genuinely strange

Charles Oliveira sits at 2.6 attempts per fifteen minutes with the most submission wins in UFC history behind him. That is the profile the statistic was designed to catch, and almost nobody else on the list looks like it. The gap between him and the fighters below him is wider than the gap between the rest of them and zero.

Why we think it is changing

Nineteen percent is a snapshot, not a trend, and we cannot prove direction from a single pull. But the divisional split points somewhere: where power is highest, the ground game is thinnest, and the divisions where submissions survive are the ones where a single punch is least likely to end it. If the sport keeps getting bigger and more powerful across the board, the flyweight number is the one to watch — it is currently the last place where a submission is a normal thing to try.