Page vs. Ruziboev: The Finisher Whose UFC Fights Never End Early
Michael Page is 4-1 in five UFC fights, all decisions. Nursulton Ruziboev has finished three of his four UFC wins. The numbers behind their Paris clash.
I have never hidden being a Michael Page mark. Nine years of watching a converted karateka land counters that should not work against people who train professionally to avoid them will do that to a fan. So here is the disclosure before anything else: every number below comes straight off our own fighter pages and I checked each one twice, specifically because I did not want to be the guy overselling his favorite fighter's highlight reel.
The numbers argue against the highlight reel anyway. Saturday's UFC Paris card at the Accor Arena puts Michael Page, the sport's most switch-stance, angle-heavy finisher, across from Nursulton Ruziboev, a middleweight who has stopped almost every opponent he has ever beaten. And the hardest fact to explain about this fight is not Ruziboev's finishing rate. It is that Page has fought five times inside the Octagon and not one of those five fights has ended before the scorecards came out.
Five Fights, Zero Finishes
Page is 4-1 since debuting against Kevin Holland in March 2024, currently ranked #8 on the official middleweight board. Every result since, wins and the one loss alike, has gone to the judges: a unanimous decision over Holland, a unanimous decision loss to Ian Machado Garry, a unanimous decision over Shara Magomedov, a unanimous decision over Jared Cannonier, and a unanimous decision over Sam Patterson this past March. Five fights, five trips to the scorecards, zero knockouts, zero submissions, in either direction.
That is not the fighter who built his 25-3 record. Strip out the UFC run and Page is 21-2 elsewhere, having finished 16 of those 21 wins, 13 by knockout or TKO and three by submission, a 76 percent finish rate that made him appointment viewing against a run of Bellator welterweights. The switch-stance karate offense that ended fights against Ryan Sanders and Richard Kiely in under a minute has simply not shown up on MMA's biggest stage yet. His only finish loss anywhere, a second-round TKO to Douglas Lima in May 2019, happened five years before he ever set foot in the Octagon, and it remains the last time Page's own chin was seriously tested.
None of this requires a decline story. UFC middleweight is a deeper, more durable pool than the one Page spent most of his career swimming in, and five fights is a small sample against elite competition. But five-for-five toward the judges, for a fighter whose entire pre-UFC identity was built on finishing, is a real and specific pattern. Saturday puts it against the single most finish-happy opponent of his Octagon career.
The Man on the Other Side Finishes Almost Everyone
Photo: SPORTS UZ / CC BY 3.0
Ruziboev's UFC file reads nothing like Page's. He is 4-2 across six Octagon appearances since 2023, and three of his four wins have ended early: a first-round TKO of Sedriques Dumas, a second-round TKO of Eric McConico, and a first-round submission of Andrey Pulyaev this past June, his most recent walk to the cage. His lone UFC decision win, over Dustin Stoltzfus in May 2025, is the outlier on the resume, not the pattern. Even his two UFC losses carried the same live-wire quality: a first-round TKO defeat to Brunno Ferreira in his promotional debut, and a decision loss to Joaquin Buckley that at least made it to the final horn.
Stack the two Octagon records on top of each other and the split gets stark fast. Between them, Page and Ruziboev have fought 11 times in the UFC. Four of those fights ended before the scheduled distance. All four involve Ruziboev, three times as the man doing the finishing and once as the man on the wrong end of it. Page has been party to precisely zero of them.
His full career leans into finishing even harder. Ruziboev's pro record sits at 37-9-2, and on our own numbers, only three of his career wins have ever needed a judge's card: 15 by knockout or TKO, 21 by outright submission. That submission column is the one Page's corner almost certainly circled first. Page has never lost by submission in 28 professional fights and carries a 70 percent UFC takedown defense into Saturday, but he has also never faced a grappler who finishes at anything close to Ruziboev's rate, from any position on the mat.
The Stats That Explain the Gap, and the One That Probably Will Not Matter
UFC-only career numbers tell a version of the same story from a different angle. Page lands 2.28 significant strikes per minute at 58 percent accuracy, the profile of a fighter who waits for a precise opening rather than volleying volume, and absorbs only 1.51 strikes per minute himself, a 62 percent strike-avoidance rate that ranks among the better defensive marks in the division. Ruziboev lands more often by volume, 2.38 per minute, but at just 46 percent accuracy, and he absorbs 2.68 strikes per minute against a strike defense of only 49 percent. Put plainly, Ruziboev gets hit at nearly triple the rate Page does, which is one reason he keeps ending up on either side of a finish and Page keeps ending up in front of three judges.
There is one number on Ruziboev's page that looks alarming and probably is not relevant Saturday. His UFC takedown defense sits at just 33 percent, the leakiest figure on either man's stat sheet, against an 80 percent takedown accuracy rate when he is the one shooting. Page, though, attempts a mere 0.19 takedowns per fifteen minutes in the Octagon and lands 16 percent of the ones he tries. Wrestling has never been how Michael Page wins fights, and it is not becoming the gameplan on fight week. If Ruziboev's takedown defense gets stress-tested this weekend, it will not be by the man across the cage from him.
There is also a seven-year age gap that the finish numbers alone do not capture. Page turns 40 next April; Ruziboev is 32. Page's scorecard streak has run through the back half of his thirties against opponents mostly in their physical prime, which cuts against any easy read that soft matchmaking explains the lack of finishes. It also means Saturday is not just a style clash, it is a real test of whether the reflexes that made him a finisher in his twenties are still there when a live finisher starts throwing with bad intentions.
What the Line Says, and What It Does Not
Sportsbooks list Page as a modest favorite at -163 to Ruziboev's +138 heading into fight week. Read generously, that price is a bet that Page's spotless UFC durability, five fights, zero finishes taken, holds up one more time against a division full of live finishers, the way it always has so far. Whether the market has priced that correctly is a separate conversation, and not one I am going to have here. What the record actually shows is narrower and, to me, more interesting: the fighter ranked seven spots higher has not landed or absorbed a single finish in three years of UFC action, and he is about to share a cage with the one opponent on his resume built almost entirely around ending fights early.
Something about that pairing has to give Saturday night. Either Page's streak of scorecard-only Octagon fights survives its hardest test yet, or Ruziboev adds a sixth name, his own, to a UFC ledger where nobody wearing Michael Page's gloves has heard the final horn sound early.