Takedown numbers only capture who put an opponent on the mat, not what happened once they got there. Submission attempts and reversals fill in that gap, tracking who threatened to finish the fight on the ground and who fought back up from the bottom — and both numbers have real limits worth knowing before you trust them.
What a Submission Attempt Actually Counts
A submission attempt is logged any time a fighter locks in a choke or joint lock that forces the opponent to defend it, whether or not it comes close to finishing the fight. That single category covers two very different situations: a fight-ending guillotine choke that has an opponent tapping in seconds, and a loosely applied triangle choke that gets postured out of before it ever tightens.
Because both count as one attempt, the raw number tells you a fighter went hunting for a finish, not how close they came to getting it. A fighter with five submission attempts in a fight and no finish may have been dangerous throughout, or may have been reaching for holds that were never realistic threats. Watching the fight, or reading a detailed round-by-round breakdown, is the only way to tell those two fighters apart.
Reversals: Who Fought Back From the Bottom
A reversal happens when a fighter who is being controlled — pinned in guard, half guard, side control, or mount — flips the position and ends up on top instead. It's one of the clearest signs of grappling skill a stat sheet offers, because escaping bad position against a live, resisting opponent is genuinely hard to do.
Reversals matter to judges for the same reason: a fighter who spends two minutes pinned on their back but reverses in the final ten seconds has done something that should register on a scorecard, even though the control-time numbers for that exchange still favor their opponent. A high reversal count is a sign a fighter has real bottom-game skill, not just a good top game.
Why These Numbers Undercount Skill
Both stats have a structural blind spot: they only measure what a fighter attempted, not what they threatened without committing to it. A fighter who controls an opponent's posture, sets up an armbar, and abandons it the moment the opponent starts to escape — because chasing it further would mean giving up top position — never shows up in the submission-attempt column, even though that threat shaped the entire exchange.
The same applies to grappling exchanges that never become full reversals. A fighter who works a sweep attempt for thirty seconds, gets stuffed, and resets to guard has done real defensive and offensive work that no single number captures. This is the same problem that makes control time a misleading stat on its own — minutes spent in a position say nothing about who was actually winning inside it.
Reading Them Together, Not Alone
These numbers are most useful side by side with the more familiar takedown stats. A fighter who lands takedowns at a high rate but generates almost no submission attempts is probably using wrestling to control position and rack up decision points, not to hunt finishes. A fighter with a lower takedown rate but a high submission-attempt count is likely more opportunistic, capitalizing on scrambles rather than manufacturing top position from scratch.
Reversal counts add another layer: a fighter who gets taken down often but reverses at a high rate isn't actually losing those exchanges the way the takedown number alone suggests. Combined, the three numbers sketch a rough shape of how a fighter actually operates on the ground, even though none of them, alone, tells the full story.
What to Watch For Live
During a fight, the moment worth tracking isn't the takedown itself but what happens in the ten seconds after it. Does the fighter on top immediately look to pass to a more dominant position, or do they get stuck in guard while the fighter on bottom works for a sweep or a submission attempt? That sequence is where submission attempts and reversals actually get generated, and it's far more informative than the takedown tally on its own.
It's also worth watching who initiates scrambles — the fast, chaotic exchanges that happen when neither fighter has clean control. Scrambles are where a disproportionate number of both submission attempts and reversals happen, because both fighters are moving through positions faster than a stat sheet can cleanly categorize. A fighter who consistently comes out on top of scrambles is showing a kind of grappling instinct that doesn't reduce neatly to any single number.
The Takeaway
Submission attempts and reversals exist to answer questions takedown stats can't: who threatened to finish the fight on the ground, and who fought their way back up when they were losing position. Neither number is complete on its own — both undercount real skill that never quite crosses into a logged attempt — but read together with takedown numbers and control time, they give a far more honest picture of who actually controlled a fight's grappling exchanges than any single stat can on its own.