Ground and Pound Kings in UFC History

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Alexander Volkanovski

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2026 Stats

About Ground and Pound Kings in UFC History

Significant strikes landed from the ground: minimum 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 landed 461 ground strikes, but he needed 22 statted bouts to get there; Khabib Nurmagomedov's 380 came in 13, about 29 a fight, and Frankie Edgar's 409 took 30. Fighters can arrive at similar numbers from very different styles, so read the total together with the bouts behind it, and with control time for how long the position was held.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

What counts as a ground strike here?

A ground strike is a significant strike thrown while the fight is on the mat. UFCStats splits every significant strike by the position it was thrown from — distance, clinch or ground — and this board sums the ground column across a fighter's whole UFC career. Credit goes to the fighter throwing, so being ground-and-pounded does not earn anything. The split records position rather than who is on top, so upkicks and strikes from guard are counted too, but they are a small fraction of these totals, which is why the leaderboard reads as a roll call of top-position wrestlers.

Why can the best ground-and-pound fighter rank below a longer career?

Because a career total rewards the number of bouts as much as the damage in them. Khabib Nurmagomedov landed 380 ground strikes in 13 statted UFC fights, about 29 a bout, while Frankie Edgar needed 30 bouts to reach 409, about 14 a bout, and Georges St-Pierre's 461 came from 22. The total tells you who has done it most; the per-fight figure tells you whose fights were spent pounding from the top.

What is the minimum to appear on this board?

At least 100 significant strikes landed from the ground, across at least 5 bouts with recorded round-by-round stats, and the top 50 are listed. The basis is the UFCStats position split, which only exists for bouts that were statted, so early UFC cards with no per-round data cannot contribute. Ground strikes land roughly 70 percent of the time — far above any fighter's standing accuracy, and the single best argument for the position.

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