The instinct with a 35-10 record against a 7-1 record is to price the veteran heavily. The reason this model does not is that Ding's forty-five fights are almost entirely a measurement of how good he is against Chinese regional opposition, and the four times he has stepped outside that pool the answer has been mixed: a knockout win and a knockout loss in ONE Championship's Hero Series, a decision loss on the Contender Series, and a split-decision loss in the Octagon. His sample is enormous and his relevant sample is four fights, of which he has won one. Nelson's sample is tiny and his relevant sample is zero. Neither man has demonstrated much at this level — one has simply demonstrated a great deal at a level below it.
Almost every statistical claim on this page comes with a sample-size caveat. One does not. Across ten years, forty-five fights, five promotions and three countries, Ding has been submitted four times and knocked out twice. That ratio held on the Chinese regional circuit and it held against a Brazilian in the ONE cage. It is the most durable, most repeatedly-tested finding in his entire file — and the opponent is a Renzo Gracie affiliate who submits 43% of the men he beats. When a decade-old vulnerability meets a specialist in exactly that vulnerability, the market's instinct to price on win-loss records is exactly the instinct a model should correct.
Ding is also two different fighters depending on the clock. In Round 1 he is one of the most dangerous men on this card: seventeen first-round wins, an 80% knockout rate among his victories, a low-line attack that compounds from the opening bell. By Round 3 he is a fighter whose last four significant defeats — Rae Yoon Ok, Kuerbanjiang, Rami Hamed, José Souza — all arrived there, three of them on the cards. There is no ambiguity about which round each man should be trying to reach.