Tom Aspinall and Max Holloway have almost the same striking output, and almost nothing else in common.
Aspinall lands 7.63 significant strikes a minute. Holloway lands 6.92. On that column alone they are the same kind of fighter, separated by rounding.
They are not the same kind of fighter, and the number that says so is sitting in the next column along.
The other half of the statistic
Aspinall absorbs 3.62 significant strikes a minute. Holloway absorbs 4.60. Put the two columns together and the picture reorganises itself: Aspinall is +4.01 on the exchange, Holloway +2.32. Both are excellent. They are excellent at different things — one ends the exchange, the other wins it on volume and is willing to be hit to do it.
Strikes landed per minute on its own cannot tell those apart, because it is a measure of activity rather than of success. It counts what a fighter did, not what it bought them.
Where volume goes wrong
The clearest failures are the fighters who post a big landed figure and an equally big absorbed one. Esteban Ribovics lands 7.43 a minute, third-highest on our roster, and absorbs 5.74. Zhang Mingyang lands 7.01 and absorbs 5.55. Those are thrilling fights and they are not evidence of control. A high-volume brawl produces two impressive-looking stat lines and one loser.
At the other end, the best differentials on our roster belong to names that a pure volume ranking buries. Wang Cong is +4.09 (6.82 landed, 2.73 absorbed). Navajo Stirling is +3.91. Neither tops the landed column; both are winning the exchange by a wider margin than anyone who does.
Two traps before you use the differential
Thin samples produce fantasies. The single highest landed figure on our roster is 7.89, and it belongs to a fighter with very few UFC minutes. Per-minute rates computed over one or two appearances swing enormously and mean almost nothing. This is why our Higher or Lower game excludes fighters with too little UFC data from its statistical rounds — a rate built on a single fight punishes anyone who actually knows the sport.
Short fights flatter everybody. Both figures are per minute, so a fighter whose bouts end in the first round is measured over a small, unusually explosive window. A knockout artist looks defensively brilliant partly because the fight stopped before anyone could hit him back. Nothing in either column knows the difference between a fight that was won and a fight that was short.
What the differential still cannot see
It has no idea what landed. A jab and a check hook that folds someone count identically, so a patient point-fighter and a finisher can post the same line. It does not know about the ground: minutes spent in top control produce very few significant strikes for either fighter, which makes a dominant wrestler look inactive and his opponent look defensively sound.
And it says nothing about the order things happened in. A fighter who is battered for two rounds and then finishes the fight has the same season-long averages as one who cruised — which is part of why our fight simulator resolves a bout round by round rather than comparing two career rates and declaring a winner.
The useful version
Read the two columns together, always. A big landed number with a small absorbed number is control. A big landed number with a big absorbed number is a fight worth watching and a fighter worth doubting against someone who can punch. A small landed number can be either a cautious fighter or a wrestler spending his minutes somewhere the counter cannot see.
None of that requires better data. It requires reading the second column, which is free and sitting right next to the first.
Sources & method
Every figure here comes from ufcstats.com, the UFC’s official public fight database, as recorded there on 28 August 2026, covering the 292 fighters on our roster who carry UFC career data. Significant strikes landed and absorbed are per minute of fight time; the differential is simply landed minus absorbed. Career rates move with every appearance, so a fighter who has since competed will read slightly differently. Fighters with too few UFC appearances for a stable per-minute rate are excluded from the statistical rounds of our games, and one such figure is referred to but deliberately not named here. Fighter ratings elsewhere on this site are our own model, not UFCStats data.