Ground and Pound Kings in UFC History
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About Ground and Pound Kings in UFC History
Significant strikes from the ground: 211 fighters with 100+ landed across 5 or more statted bouts
This leaderboard ranks UFC fighters by the number of significant strikes they have landed from the ground position. UFCStats records every significant strike with the position it came from, so a fighter's career ground total can be added up round by round. It is the only public measure of what a fighter actually does once the fight hits the mat, as opposed to how often he gets it there.
Why the grappling stats needed this one
The rest of the grappling section answers different questions. Takedowns counts how often a fighter changes the level of the fight. Control time counts how long he keeps it there. Submissions counts how often he ends it. None of them can tell a smothering top game apart from a punishing one, and the difference is the whole argument between a fighter judges reward and a fighter opponents fear. Ground strikes landed is the missing column, and the names it produces — St-Pierre, Edgar, Khabib, Teixeira, Usman, Randy Couture, Matt Hughes, Tito Ortiz, Merab Dvalishvili, Zhang Weili — are the ones the argument has always been about.
Read the rate, not just the total
A career total is partly a measure of how long a career was. Georges St-Pierre leads outright with 461, but he needed 22 statted bouts to get there; Khabib Nurmagomedov's 380 came in 13, and his 29.2 landed per fight is the highest figure on the board. Neil Magny sits sixth on 353 from 37 bouts, a rate of 9.5 — a very different fighter from the two above him, arriving at a similar number. That is why every row carries its per-fight rate alongside the career total.
Two honest limits are worth carrying away. First, the position split only exists for bouts that were statted, so a fighter's real career figure can be higher than what is shown here. Second, the split does not separate top position from bottom, so a small share of these strikes were thrown off the back rather than driven down from above. Neither changes the order at the top, but both are the sort of thing that should be said out loud. Compare this page with the rest of our UFC stat leaderboards and the ELO rankings to see how the ground-and-pound specialists rate against the roster as a whole.