Where he stands
Stephen Thompson is 7-8 across 16 fights on our tape. He's on a 3-fight losing run. Our rating has him at 1540 — it moves with every result and weights who he beat, so a win over a ranked opponent counts for far more than one over a debutant. A record on its own says very little in this sport — two fighters at 12-3 can have faced completely different opposition, which is exactly the gap the rating is built to close.
No single dominant tool
Stephen's rates don't point hard in any direction — 3.7 strikes landed a minute, 0.1 takedowns per 15, 59% takedown defense. That's the most common profile in the sport and the hardest to project, because the matchup rather than the fighter decides which skill ends up mattering.
Age matters more here than in most sports
Stephen is 43. MMA decline tends to arrive suddenly rather than gradually — durability goes before output does, so a fighter can look sharp on the stats right up until he doesn't. The model factors age in, and it's one of the places we'd trust the number least on any individual fight.
How the model reads him
The number attached to Stephen is a matchup output, not a ranking. Rating versus rating, then style versus style, then the things that bite in this sport specifically — age and time off. It gets graded on the fight board like every other call.
What we'd flag
Two limits worth carrying. We only hold UFC and Contender Series fights from 2015, so anything before that is invisible to these numbers. And a single punch can settle a fight the better fighter was winning — this sport punishes confident predictions more than most.