For most of two rounds on Saturday, Renato Moicano was exactly where a grappler wants to be. He took Tom Nolan's back twice, locked a body triangle on and stayed there. By the end he had 7:17 of control. Nolan had 1:10.
Moicano also landed nine significant strikes. Nolan landed 69, got on top early in the third and the referee stopped it at 1:28.
Watching it, the control felt like it should have counted for more. So we went and looked at whether it ever does.
What we counted
Every UFC fight since January 2018 with full statistics and a winner. That's 4,429 fights, up to and including Saturday's card. In each one we found the fighter with more control time, which is the clock UFCStats runs while someone is holding a dominant position, and checked whether he won.
Most of the time, he did: 69%. Give him two minutes or more of extra control and it rises to 75%. So control matters. What we wanted to know was what it's actually doing.
Control with damage, and control without it
Take those 1,989 fights with a two-minute control edge and split them by who landed more significant strikes.
If the fighter with the control edge also out-landed his opponent, he won 92% of the time. That's 1,145 of 1,242 fights, close to a sure thing.
If he was out-landed, he won 46%. That's 326 of 717. Over a third of the time the man in control wasn't the man doing the damage, and in those fights all that control was worth about as much as a coin toss.
It gets worse as the striking gap grows. Out-landed by one to nine strikes, the control leader still won 68% of the time. By 10 to 19, 48%. By 20 to 39, 28%. By 40 or more, 12%. Moicano was out-landed by 60. Counting him, 92 fighters have controlled a fight by two minutes or more and lost the striking by 40 or more. Eleven of them won.
Checking it holds up
We didn't want a neat number that falls apart when you lean on it, so we tried three things.
Chance. We resampled the fights 2,000 times to see how far each figure could plausibly wander. The 92% stays between 91% and 94%. The 46% stays between 42% and 49%. They don't come close to meeting.
Finishes. A fighter who finishes a fight usually lands a flurry at the end, so in a stoppage the strike count partly follows the result. Decisions don't have that problem, because everyone goes the distance. On decisions alone the out-landed control leader won 46% of the time, the same as before.
Time. It's been steady for years: 44% from 2018 to 2020, 50% from 2021 to 2023 and 43% since 2024.
The one thing we can't tell you is why. This describes how fights have gone. It isn't a model of what wins them. Our best guess is that a fighter losing the striking often shoots because he's losing the striking, and holding someone down isn't the same as beating him. But that's a guess, and we haven't tested it.
Where this leaves our scores
Control time is one of the things we score, along with strikes, knockdowns and how the fight ended. We only credit a winner for the parts of the fight he won, though, so Moicano's seven minutes earned him nothing on our card. Nolan's 94 came from the striking and the stoppage.
Saturday felt like a surprise. On the numbers it was the more likely result: fighters who hold a position without doing damage with it have been losing about half the time since at least 2018.
The Dominance Index is built and run by Hidden Labs. Spot a number you think is wrong? Tell us and we’ll check it.