Best Takedown Defense in UFC History

About Best Takedown Defense in UFC History

Share of opponent takedown attempts stuffed. Minimum 20 attempts faced across at least 5 fights.

This leaderboard ranks UFC fighters by takedown defense: the percentage of opponent takedown attempts they stuffed. We build it by matching every fighter's scored rounds against their opponent's takedown line from the same round of the same fight, then totalling attempts faced and takedowns conceded across an entire career. To qualify, a fighter must have faced at least 20 takedown attempts across a minimum of five fights, which keeps small-sample flukes off the board and guarantees that every name here has been repeatedly tested by real wrestling.

What separates good takedown defense from great

Stopping takedowns is rarely about raw strength. The fighters at the top of this list tend to combine a handful of traits: heavy hips that refuse to be lifted, quick underhooks that kill a shot before it develops, comfortable footwork that keeps them off the fence, and the discipline to throw strikes that do not leave them out of position. Distance management matters as much as anything physical, since a wrestler who cannot close the gap cleanly never gets to attempt the takedown in the first place. Elite defenders effectively remove an entire dimension from an opponent's game plan, which is why so many of them are strikers who force fights to stay exactly where they want them.

There is an important limit to what this number proves. Takedown defense counts entries stopped, not time spent free. A fighter can post a superb percentage and still lose rounds to an opponent who pins them along the fence in a clinch that never registers as a completed takedown, and the stat says nothing about what happens once a fighter does hit the mat. It also rewards being attacked: fighters who are never shot on cannot qualify, so some of the sport's best wrestlers are absent simply because opponents refused to grapple with them. Read it as a measure of how hard a fighter is to put down, not a verdict on their overall grappling.

Used carefully, this is one of the most predictive stats in the sport, because a wrestler with no path to the mat is often a wrestler with no path to victory. Cross-reference the leaders here with their standing in our ELO rankings to see how that defensive foundation translated into wins, read it against most taken down for the raw count of takedowns conceded, and see takedown accuracy and control time for the attacking half of the grappling picture. The rest is in our UFC stats hub.