The full main card for UFC 331 on September 19th, 2026 has finally been revealed and features the return of top ranked Arman Tsarukyan … against Mauricio Ruffy? For weeks multiple reports had Tsarukyan facing Charles Oliveira in a rematch of their hotly contested UFC 300 fight. Instead, “Akhalkalakets” will face the flashy Brazilian striker who most recently trounced Michael Chandler at the White House in June.
While the match-up feels somewhat random, Ruffy is certainly taking it seriously. He sees it as an opportunity to jump from the bottom of the top 10 (No. 7 according to the Media Panel Rankings and No. 10 according to the Meta Rankings) right into a title shot.
“Winning this fight takes us straight to the title,” Ruffy declared in a new social media post. “I don’t feel pressure at all. I feel privileged, very grateful to God for this. I’m going there for the knockout, I don’t want to leave the octagon without that result. If it’s not that, so be it, but I’m 100% committed to it.”
Ruffy built his career up as part of the Fighting Nerds, but announced back in May that he was no longer with the team. He now trains with Alexander Volkanovski and Joe Lopez at Freestyle MMA.
“I’m going to Australia to do the full camp there,” Ruffy said. “I’ll be offline, I won’t be responding much here, I’ll just be focused on training.”
Ruffy will have a lot to prepare for. Tsarukyan is considered one of the best wrestlers in the UFC and an extremely dangerous submission specialist. Ruffy has shown a weakness in that area, getting tapped out by Benoit Saint Denis a year ago in Paris. Spending the next six weeks in Australia with Alexander Volkanovski will undoubtedly help, but will it help enough?
What a title run costs
Ruffy is talking about jumping from the bottom of a top ten to a championship fight on the back of one win. The archive is a useful check on how those runs actually accumulate.
Walking all 336,562 careers in the record and finding the longest unbroken run of wins inside each one:
| Longest win streak in a career | Fighters |
|---|---|
| 5 or more | 13,017 |
| 10 or more | 1,375 |
| 15 or more | 209 |
| 20 or more | 40 |
Thirteen thousand fighters have put five together. Fewer than fourteen hundred have managed ten. Two hundred and nine have reached fifteen, and forty have reached twenty, out of everyone who has ever competed.
The reason a title shot is usually described in terms of three or four wins rather than ten is written into those numbers. At the level Ruffy is fighting, the sport does not hand out long streaks, and matchmakers know it — which is precisely why one high-profile win over a ranked opponent has historically been worth more than a longer run against lower-ranked ones.
The counter-argument is in the same table. Streaks are rare because opposition quality rises with every win, and the fighter who beats a top-ranked contender is the one who has just proved he can survive that rise.
Method: figures drawn from the MMAHIT fight archive of 1,049,038 recorded bouts across 347,296 fighters, events dated December 1963 to May 2026. Each bout is stored once per corner and has been de-duplicated. Draws and no-contests are excluded from win-rate calculations. Streaks are measured across a fighter's dated bouts in the archive regardless of promotion, so a run built across several organisations counts as one streak; draws and no-contests break a streak only if the archive records them as a loss.
