Where he stands
Thiago Santos is 13-8 across 21 fights on our tape. He's on a 2-fight losing run. Our rating has him at 1587 — 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.
He ends fights
77% of Thiago's wins have come inside the distance. That's a real trait and a volatile one: a finisher's floor is lower than his highlight reel suggests, because the same aggression that ends fights early loses them early. He absorbs 2.6 significant strikes a minute, which is the number to watch — a high finish rate paired with heavy absorption is a career that tends to be short and loud.
Age matters more here than in most sports
Thiago is 42. 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
Two ratings produce a baseline, then the matchup adjusts it: who lands more, who absorbs more, who controls where the fight happens. That's the whole shape of it for Thiago and for everyone else — no manual adjustments, no fighter the model likes.
What we'd flag
Our tape runs from 2015 across UFC and Contender Series bouts, so a long career elsewhere shows only the part we can measure. And variance in this sport is enormous — one punch settles a fight the better fighter was winning, which is why nothing here should be read off a single result.