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What's Your Favorite Bizarre MMA Statistic? | MMA Mania

Here's a crazy stat I just stumbled across:

You'd think that after a 20-year professional MMA career that saw you compete in 44 fights -- all at Heavyweight -- where you lost 20 of those fights (and 0 by way of submission), that a bunch of those losses would be by (T)KO. This is Heavyweight, after all.

But Roy "Big Country" Nelson only lost by KO 3 times (yes, he lost by decision 17 times). Those 3 KOs include:

Once, early in his career, to Andrei Arlovski at EliteXC: Heat (the same event that saw late-replacement Seth Petruzelli burst the Kimbo Slice bubble).

A second time, 6 years later at UFC Fight Night 52 at the hands of Mark Hunt (the one and only time in the UFC that Big Country was flatlined).

And a third time, 4 years after that at Bellator 207, by the ham hocks Sergei Kharitonov called fists.

But the crazy stat is this: after his 10th UFC fight, Nelson set a new record for the amount of significant strikes absorbed by a fighter without being knocked out, receiving 437 strikes. He'd go on to absorb more, because he wasn't KO'd by Hunt until his 13th UFC fight.

Now I couldn't tell you what Big Country's total absorbed significant strikes before getting KO'd ended up being, because these days, that record most likely belongs to Max Holloway, who's absorbed somewhere north of 2,400 significant strikes across his UFC career and has only been KO'd once (and that wasn't until Ilia Topuria did it two years ago). And I couldn't find any statistic for "absorbed significant strikes" that include "before being KO'd" except for that weird stat pertaining to Big Country specifically.

It's difficult to find such bizarre statistics, and it's unclear if UFC tracks that unique stat specifically.

But one thing is for certain: Nobody who follows combat sports would assume that that record would belong to a Heavyweight.

What's your favorite bizarre MMA statistic? Or hell, in ANY sport. For example, Brett Favre nearly went his entire career never losing a game at home when the temperature dropped below freezing (he won 31 consecutive times in the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field before finally losing one late in his career). That's another good one. So what's yours?

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