Where he stands
Paulo Costa is 8-4 across 12 fights on our tape. He's on a 2-fight winning run. Our rating has him at 1643 — 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
63% of Paulo'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 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
Paulo is 35. 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 Paulo 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.