Was 2024 a great year or a meh year for big fights and fun events? That’s a subjective question that will differ depending on who you ask. But now we have the complete dataset for the past twelve months and there’s no denying this cold hard fact: 2024 was the worst year in a decade for UFC finishes.
Not only that, but the UFC ended up dead last for finish rates when ranked alongside nine other major MMA promotions. Yeesh.
We know this now because data scientist Nate Latshaw took the time to crunch the numbers. The UFC’s finish percentage in 2024? A measly 44.8%. Compare that to PFL which had a 53% finish rate, or Rizin FF which had a 61.8% rate.
Many commented on the UFC having the lowest 2024 finish rate of the 10 promotions examined in my prior post.
To that point, 2 things are true at once:
1⃣ 2024 was a 10-year low for UFC finish rates
2⃣ None of the last 10 annual UFC finish rates would finish above 9th in 2024 https://t.co/jNnASmtO7Y pic.twitter.com/o4NteK6QU3
— Nate Latshaw (@NateLatshaw) January 3, 2025
To a degree, this shouldn’t be surprising. The UFC is the crème de la crème, so you’d expect the best fighters in the world to be more difficult to finish. But 2024 was bad even by UFC standards. The UFC in 2023 had a 52% finish rate. That number dropped by seven percentage points to 45% in 2024.
While there’s no firm conclusion offered, we’d point towards the UFC’s new gloves as a reason for the drop. According to Latshaw’s data, the UFC KO/TKO rate with the new gloves was 20% lower than old glove rates.
That shouldn’t be as big of an issue in 2025. Coming into UFC 309, the UFC announced that they were ditching the new gloves and going back to the old ones. The official reason? Fighters ‘liked the old gloves more.’ We guess you can’t really say ‘The old gloves cause more knockouts’ without potential legal liability, but UFC brass were definitely wondering whether the old gloves cause more knockouts in the months leading up to their decision.
The new gloves didn’t lower eyepoke rates, and may have even caused worse cuts. So all in all, a failed experiment. Let’s never try anything new again and see what the data brings in 2025!
