SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24 FROM THE ETIHAD ARENA IN YAS ISLAND, UAE
EARLY START TIME WARNING | EARLY PRELIMS 7 AM PDT / 10 AM EDT | PRELIMS 9 AM / 12 PM | MAIN CARD 11 AM / 2 PM
Enjoy this. In terms of on-paper production it’s the UFC’s strongest card in months, and the only one like it for the rest of 2026. Two of the best, most-anticipated title fights in years, one (silly) title eliminator, three or four really good prospect tests, and Jacob Malkoun, the greatest fighter alive. You know our irregularly-featured how-much-does-the-UFC-care-about-this-card metric for how many fighters booked on an event are coming off a win vs a loss and how close it is to the 50/50 average? 75% of your competitors this week are coming off wins.
UFC 332 was headlined by the worst championship fight in years, UFC 331 had Gable Steveson and Iwo Baraniewski on the main card, UFC 330 had Kauê Fernandes in its featured bout, but 333’s topline is absolutely rock-solid. Maybe the best they’ve done all year.
Coincidentally it’s in Abu Dhabi, divorced from the vast majority of their audience and airing at 7 AM for the entire Pacific time zone, but the prestige will make the UAE happy and ensure they give the UFC more money.
Funny how that goes.
MAIN EVENT: THE ARC OF TIME
FEATHERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alexander Volkanovski (28-4, Champion) vs Movsar Evloev (20-0, #1)
I have rarely felt so many conflicting feelings about a fight.
When I talk about how exhausted I am by my own cynicism with MMA these days, Alexander Volkanovski is almost always the grounding element I point to as the last bastion of my genuine wellspring of love for the sport. His series with Max Holloway, his first stab at Islam Makhachev, his changing-of-the-guard-that-wasn’t loss to Ilia Topuria, all of them were great fights against generational fighters and still stand in my head as reminders that all of the bullshit currently involved in following the UFC doesn’t mean it can’t have moments where it does things right. Moments where the best fighters fight the best fighters and the sport briefly reasserts itself over the business.
This is one of those moments. Alexander Volkanovski is the best Featherweight alive and one of two acceptable choices for the greatest Featherweight of all time. Movsar Evloev is his undisputed top contender, a best-of-the-best grappler who’s undefeated despite years of facing top competition. This is a fight I, the audience, and even Volkanovski himself have been seeking for years. This is what championship fights are supposed to be. This is what makes me feel joy about mixed martial arts.
But there’s a thick cloud of ambivalence that I have to dig through to get to that joy.
Part of it is how much work that “supposed to be” had to do to become reality. The UFC did not want this fight. Ordinarily when I say that, some part of it is supposition. This time, it’s fact. The UFC told Alexander Volkanovski they did not want this fight. When Volk was informed he was main-eventing UFC 325 in Australia this past January he presumed he was fighting Evloev, who at the time was 19-0, on a nine-fight winning streak, and had been ranked in the top five since 2024. The matchmakers replied, no, you’re fighting Diego Lopes. Volk pointed out that he had just fought Diego Lopes. It was his last fight and he beat Diego by a unanimous decision. It was only nine months ago and Diego had only won once since. Volk said Evloev made the most sense, and failing that, Lerone Murphy was the next top contender Volk hadn’t yet fought and the UFC had already indicated he’d earned a shot at the title.
The UFC helpfully clarified the situation for him: It was the Diego Lopes rematch or Volk wasn’t fighting at all. It was more important to them that Diego got a second shot at the belt than their only Australian champion got to fight in the main event in Australia.
So Diego got his second shot, and Volk, as he almost always does, performed better in the rematch, taking a second unanimous decision one judge called a shut-out. Evloev and Murphy wound up fighting each other to determine who had next.
Which was, funnily enough, the second time the UFC had tied their booking together. Or, as I introduced it back in July of 2025:
This was supposed to be the card where Movsar Evloev put his #1 contendership on the line against Aaron Pico, and I had vowed to make the entire writeup “fuck you” typed by hand thousands of times. Fortunately, that fight has been cancelled thanks to an Evloev injury! Unfortunately, they’re trying to reschedule the fight for UFC 319 next month, so the fuckening is simply postponed.
As a top-ranked Featherweight with an enormous winning streak over multiple people the UFC valued highly--including Diego Lopes!--the UFC looked at Movsar Evloev and said, no, you need to fight Aaron Pico. Pico was a superprospect back in the mid-2010s, a successful wrestler whom Bellator signed three full years before his actual debut because, like the UFC with Mackenzie Dern, they saw him as a sure thing. Undoubtedly a future champion. Undoubtedly a superstar of the sport. Bellator thought so highly of Pico they had him make his professional debut against the 8-2 Zach Freeman, because Freeman was a relative journeyman who’d struggled with anything approaching serious competition and they knew Pico would annihilate him.
Freeman clubbed and subbed Pico in twenty-four seconds. Pico spent the next seven years failing to make it to the top. By 2024, when the PFL ate Bellator, Pico was a good fighter, an accomplished fighter, but the stiffest competition he’d beaten in his life was an almost-40, about-to-retire Henry Corrales.
The UFC looked at him in free agency and hoped to god he could rid them of Movsar Evloev.
Movsar is one of the best fighters in the world. This is not a subjective statement, but a measure of objective reality. He’s beaten world champions, he’s beaten title challengers, he’s made it twelve years and twenty fights without anyone getting the better of him. He’s also the polar opposite of what the UFC wants. His last finish was back in Russia almost eight and a half years ago. Everything else has been a factor of grappling people to death the long, slow, inexorable way. If you’re a fan of technical wrestling he’s incredible, both for his indefatigable grappling offense and his ability to turn the corner, adjust, and find ways to beat people who’ve learned to counter him.
If you’re in marketing, he’s the worst. No knockouts? No cool submissions? No shitty soundbites*? You might have to actually promote a fighter instead of letting them do lion’s share of the work for you? Unacceptable. Send in Pico.
*Do not look up Movsar’s thoughts on women’s MMA. Russian fighters, please stop being huge weirdos about women being allowed to fight.
But, as said above, Evloev got injured. Rather than accepting that the universe was trying to stop them from making a huge mistake the UFC booked Pico against Lerone Murphy instead, hoping that he could springboard into the top ten over the other undefeated Featherweight contender they didn’t want. Instead Murphy notched one of the best knockouts of the entire year by obliterating Pico in one round with a reverse spinning elbow. Brilliant finish. Brilliant performance. The UFC had already agitated that the winner of Murphy/Pico should be in line for a title shot, and with a devastating finish, Murphy was a clear contender.
Didn’t matter. The UFC wanted Diego. He got the rematch. Evloev and Murphy got each other. And it was a weird fucking fight.
I don’t know if Evloev wanted to prove he was marketable or if the UFC threatened to shoot his dog, but Movsar, the career wrestler, didn’t shoot a single takedown in the first two rounds. By the end of the third, that had risen to a grand total of one--which he landed easily. He gave the first half of the fight away trading punches with Lerone just to prove that he could, and consequently, he lost both rounds. Once he began wrestling in the back half of the fight, he ran away with it. The result would’ve been a unanimous decision had a low blow in the 4th not cost Evloev a point--but that was still only enough to drop it to a majority decision.
Bizarre fight. Bizarre choices. But Movsar won and established himself as the sole, unquestioned, indisputable top contender to the Featherweight throne. It’s the best fight to make for the division. It’s the only fight to make for the division. After years of resistance, after multiple cracks at marketing experiments, after so many write-ups where I’ve whined incessantly about their attempts to get around just booking this extremely obvious, very good match-up, we are finally here.
And some part of my ambivalence is, boy, I don’t know if I want to see it actually happen.
There is no wholly positive outcome of this fight. Alexander Volkanovski is at worst the second-greatest fighter of this generation, his time on top has been an absolute treat to watch, and he also turned 38 last month. He’s still amazing, but it’s impossible to miss the way everything he does is getting harder for him to do. His mind for strategy is as sharp as ever, as he proved by shutting out Diego, but the movement is a bit slower, the punches a bit softer, the takedowns a bit more labored, the chin a bit more suspect. Even diminished he’s the best in the goddamn world, but as Topuria’s fists demonstrated, that sentence is only true until it very abruptly isn’t. Volk already turned back the clock by reclaiming his title once. If he loses it again, I don’t know that time will give him a third opportunity.
Time is not Movsar’s enemy: Boardrooms are. Let me reiterate that they looked at him, unquestionably one of the best to ever do it, and said, no, not this guy. Go get us that Bellator kid from the card where Matt Mitrione knocked out Fedor. They just fired Farid Basharat on an undefeated record and a seven-fight winning streak because they didn’t like the cut of his jib; they will go right back to the Diego Lopes Infinite Title Shot Cheat Code days if Movsar fails. Maybe, if he’s lucky, Volk will retire, Diego will beat Jean Silva for the vacant title, and they’ll let Movsar have one shot at him because he beat Diego way back when. But most likely? This is it. This is the chance. If he fails, it’s very, very unlikely he’s ever getting another.
We’re at a high likelihood that whoever loses this fight loses their time on top of the sport and I’m not sure I’m ready to see either guy fall off the mountain.
In terms of physicality and wrestling technique, this is Evloev’s fight. We saw Lopes and Islam and even Brian Ortega get Volk off his feet: If Evloev wants him down, he’s going to get him there. Keeping Volk down is much harder. Moreover, I cannot stop thinking about Evloev almost throwing the Murphy fight because he wanted to prove he could win without wrestling when he very demonstrably could not.
Letting his ego run away with him--or, at least, his well-founded fear of being passed up by matchmaking--could doom him. Volk is still amazing at timing out and disassembling his opponents. Diego’s one of the best brawlers in the sport and we just watched Volk catch his timing and outstrike him. He’s slowed down, but he’s still capable of dancing in the raindrops, and Movsar’s striking has never been more than a drizzle.
Ultimately? It’s Alexander Volkanovski. I don’t bet against him. One day soon I don’t think I’ll have the choice anymore, but I’m hoping today is not that day. ALEXANDER VOLKANOVSKI BY DECISION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: UNEXPECTED RIVALRIES
BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP:” Petr Yan (20-5, Champion) vs Merab Dvalishvili (21-5, #1)
Ten months ago, Merab Dvalishvili defended his championship against Petr Yan.
There’s no two ways about it: Yan’s probably going to lose. Everyone outside of Yan’s camp agrees to the point that despite being one of the most accomplished Bantamweights of this generation Yan is around a +350 underdog. You can’t erase that first fight from memory. Folks thought Yan could put his hands on Merab and box him up and tire him out and hurt him too much to engage in his gameplan and Merab drowned him without even breaking a sweat. In the time since then, Merab has put progressively more impressive beatings on the top of the division, and Petr Yan dropped a round to Marcus McGhee. The biggest question mark here isn’t if Yan has become a brand new fighter who can stop Merab, but if Merab’s level of activity means he’s flying too close to the sun and is about to immolate.
This is the difficulty of sport. Merab’s beaten four out of his top five contenders already. There’s no one left without going to Song Yadong at #5, and the UFC’s already booked him against Sean O’Malley next month. Yan’s the most successful top contender left, and he’s still elite among the elite. He’s still brutal and dangerous and one of the most well-rounded fighters in the entire sport, and he’d be a favorite against damn near any Bantamweight on the planet.
Just not this one. MERAB DVALISHVILI BY DECISION.
There’s this sentence from the pop-science things-exploding annals of Mythbusters that lives in my hindbrain: “I’m always pleased to be completely wrong.” I watched Merab completely drown Petr Yan in 2023, win the title Yan once held in 2024, and go on to a stellar title reign over the entirety of 2025. Over that same period of time I watched Yan go tooth-and-nail with Song Yadong, harm but not finish Deiveson Figueiredo, and beat but still lose a round to Marcus McGhee. I woke up on December 5, 2025 completely certain Merab was going to beat Yan even worse than he did the first time and record the greatest championship year in MMA history, and the entire world agreed with me.
At least, the entire world save Petr Yan.
Yan knew everyone was overlooking him after the way their first fight went, and he came in ready to make sure no one ever overlooked him again. As a big underdog against the man everyone was already embracing as the greatest Bantamweight of all time, Yan didn’t just beat Merab, he schooled Merab. Hurt him repeatedly on the feet, stuffed 27 out of 29 takedowns, and, shockingly, he outwrestled Merab. Yan and his team prepared immaculately for all of Merab’s approaches and practiced how to hurt him in every opening he would inevitably give them, and when the moment arrived, Merab didn’t have an answer for any of it.
Which, much like our main event, isn’t supposition. In an interview just a couple weeks back Merab did his own postmortem of the rematch, and admitted that midway through the second round he realized he wasn’t going to be able to take Yan down, wasn’t having any luck hurting him and could no longer see a real path to victory, so he elected to just have fun for the rest of the fight, where “fun” means “get repeatedly struck in the abdomen while occasionally screaming in pain but refusing to fall over,” because Merab is still a fucking madman.
Yan won. You can’t say Yan won easily, in the sense that he was busting his ass and there was clearly nothing easy about it, but he beat Merab in every avenue of the fight, came close to knocking him out a couple of times, and walked away with a unanimous decision that you could have scored anywhere from 48-47 to 50-45, but you in no possible universe could have given to Merab.
So that’s it, right? A rubber match is logical in the sense that they’re 1-1, both fights were blowouts in opposite directions, Merab was one of the company’s strongest champions and thus he, and the world, deserve an ending to the trilogy, but it was less than a year ago and it’s an immediate rematch so it’s not as though any of the math has changed. We can just pencil Yan in as the champ heading into 2026 and safely move on with our lives.
Right?
If at this point in Merab Dvalishvili’s career you’re ready to count him out of anything, I don’t think you have been paying attention. We’ve seen him adjust and improve before. The Merab who went tooth-and-nail with Frankie Saenz and Ricky Simón bears little resemblance to the Merab that stifled José Aldo and suffocated, oh, Petr Yan. Even his title reign was indicative. In September 2024 he took the belt off Sean O’Malley with a competitive decision that a lot of folks--including two judges--had as a close 48-47, and O’Malley came dangerously close to knocking him out in the final round. Nine months later the UFC gifted O’Malley a rematch and Merab ran right through him and submitted him after nearly wrenching his head off in the third round.
Petr, for his part, has been on medical leave all year. Before January ended Yan announced he was going under the knife for lumbar surgery and wouldn’t be back to training shape until the Summer. The Bantamweight division has been eating itself while laying in wait for the return of its champions. Song Yadong is in line for a title shot now! Payton Talbott has been jetpacked into contendership! Raul Rosas Jr. is in the top ten because his opponent almost fucking died in the middle of kicking his ass!
But Petr and Merab, the top of the division, have been gone. Petr’s been fixing his back, Merab’s been chasing sidequests in Eric Bischoff’s fake-real amateur wrestling promotion while refusing to get his perpetually broken nose fixed, this rematch has stayed frozen in amber long enough to get a social security number and now both men are coming into it in uncertain physical states with no light separating it from their last meeting.
For once? That’s probably fine. These two men are the best Bantamweight fighters of this generation and they’ve not only split a series, but split it such that each fight was remarkably one-sided. This is the rare case where an instant rematch isn’t just philosophically required, but openly aided by its immediacy. If Merab still wants to be the best, we need to know if he can adjust to the way Yan shut him down.
If Yan wants to finally achieve the legacy everyone’s expected him to have, we need to know if he can finally be consistent.
This is the second time Petr Yan has held UFC gold in the last six years--the third, if you count his time as the interim champion while Aljamain Sterling was injured--and despite his greatness, despite his deserved reputation as one of the best 135-pound fighters the sport has ever seen, he has never successfully defended his title. He infamously lost his belt to Aljo in a DQ, he lost the interim title to him in their rematch, and his path back to the belt was blocked by a bullshit decision loss against O’Malley.
If he beats Merab, he gets it all. He fully avenges the worst loss of his career, he shuts the door on a rivalry that’s plagued him for three and a half years, and he finally cements himself as a champion of record. If Yan loses? He’s a what-if. He’s the man who ultimately failed to defend three separate belts.
Yan deserves his flowers. He deserves his moment in the sun. There is a screaming in my blood to pick Merab anyway, because I do genuinely believe in his ability to step up his game and find a way to drown Yan like he did the first time, but the masterful way Yan took him apart has made me a believer in his ability to do it again. PETR YAN BY DECISION. But I hope his back is as up to snuff as he says it is, because if he’s physically compromised, Merab’s going to overwhelm him.
MAIN CARD: THERE’S STILL SOME BULLSHIT, THOUGH
FLYWEIGHT: Lone’er Kavanagh (10-2, #6) vs Ramazan Temirov (20-2, #10)
Lone’er Kavanagh has been stuck on the marketing rollercoaster and it has taken a toll. If you had to make a matrix of traits the Contender Series was designed to find, the phrase “20something Irish-Chinese striker who knocks people out with spinning heel kicks” blazes such a hyperspecifically desirable path through it that you can envision Hunter Campbell and his poorly-paid assistants pulling the full Tex Avery Slick McWolf the first time they saw him. Kavanagh’s booking shows it, too. His debut fight was against another debutant, which is sensible, and his followup against a 1-2 fighter coming off a loss, which is predictable, and his third appearance was supposed to be a layup of a fight against the middlingly successful Charles Johnson, who was also coming off a loss--keep that in mind for a minute, we’ll come back to it--which ended with Johnson putting Kavanagh’s lights out in the third round. Did that loss change the UFC’s plans? Of course not! Kavanagh was short-notice main-eventing against former champion Brandon Moreno (who was coming off a loss) immediately afterward. And he won! They got Kavanagh into the top ten and lined him up with former top contender Brandon Royval (who was coming off a loss) so as to finish Kavanagh’s coronation as the next big thing. And then Royval big brothered the shit out of him and choked him out.
So the UFC is going to start pursuing other options, and we’re in the UAE, and we conveniently have a big Flyweight prospect whose name ends in a V. Remember a few sentences ago when I asked you to keep that Charles Johnson loss in your head? That was good ol’ Ramazan Temirov who teed him up as a seemingly easy fight for Lone’er. Temirov was a big international prospect who had just finished knocking people out in Rizin when the UFC stole him in 2024, and he made good on his reputation by taking on CJ Vergara, a journeyman known for being an exceptionally tough out who’d never suffered a knockout loss in his life, and obliterating his liver with a left hook in one round. He followed that up with that decision over Johnson, looked poised to have a breakout year as a UFC contender, and promptly went right back into the void after becoming one of the conspicuously few casualties of the UFC’s drug testing program. His suspension was up this past July and he came off it by immediately crushing Steve Erceg, and having now recorded a knockout over someone the UFC actually cared about at a point in time, Temirov is on the list of people it is permissible to push.
I’ve never been a big Kavanagh believer. I think he’s fun and creative and as solid as Flyweights almost always are, but watching Royval break him with pressure and power didn’t do much to change that, nor does it give me hope for his chances against Temirov. RAMAZAN TEMIROV BY TKO.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Alexander Volkov (40-11, #2) vs Rizvan Kuniev (15-3-1, #7)
Sisyphus, thou art a Heavyweight contender. At the end of 2024 Alexander Volkov was on a four-fight winning streak (over Heavyweights you’ve actually heard of!) that concluded in a victory over the division’s scariest puncher, Sergei Pavlovich. As the division’s top contender, Volkov, instead of a title shot, got to fight Ciryl Gane, who’d already lost two championship fights. In the eyes of 19 out of 20 media scores and the virtual entirety of the fans, Volkov won. Adalaide Byrd, one of the most denigrated judges in the history of combat sports, disagreed. The UFC very publicly agreed it was a miscarriage of justice and swore they’d make it up to Volkov, and as anyone who has followed this sport for more than a few years already knew, that was the kiss of death. This is Volkov’s third straight fight down in the rankings. First they tried to pawn him off on Jailton Almeida and Volkov beat him, then they tried to get Waldo Cortes-Acosta to a title fight using Volkov’s body.
And now it’s Rizvan Kuniev, who is 2-1, and whose victories came over Jailton--whom Volkov had already beaten and who was fired immediately after losing to Kuniev--and Tyrell Fortune, who had exactly one fight in the UFC. From those successes, a match-up with the #2 man in the division, who is, coincidentally, 20 fights into a UFC tenure that started when they signed him as a serious international prospect in the pre-Contender Series era, meaning he probably costs exponentially more than Kuniev to book. Not to cast aspersions or make assumptions about the way the Heavyweight division is getting all of its double-digit veterans churned through like fucking meat in favor of new people they can trick you into watching instead. Did you know that according to the UFC’s fake bullshit robot rankings, Ante Delija and Aleksandar Rakić aren’t ranked, but Anthony Wint is?
Just food for thought on our foot trip through Hell. ALEXANDER VOLKOV BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Aaron Pico (14-5, #11) vs Losene Keita (17-2, NR)
That’s right, motherfuckers. Did you think I was just talking about Aaron Pico at length during the main event because I believe in scene-setting and narrative relevance? I am lazy and tired and I wanted you to already know the story so I don’t have to do it again here. We could talk about anything in this paragraph. I played a really good, three-hour horror point-and-click named Carnival! It’s about eldritch horror in 1920s Venice over a backdrop of rising fascism and communal bigotry! I think I need to get on with writing editorials because there’s a lot more appetite for them than event previews, even when those previews are, themselves, editorials! I don’t think beating Patricio Pitbull in 2026 is a great argument for getting into the top fifteen!
Oh, dammit. I talked about Aaron Pico, I lose. We’ve spent multiple weeks now discussing the Nathaniel Wood paradigm of how easily and unapologetically the UFC will sideline you if they don’t like you, and Losene Keita is the living embodiment of the opposite end of that spectrum, to the extent that he did, in fact, lose to Nathaniel Wood, and the UFC responded by booking both of them on the same day, only now Wood was stuck in the prelims and Keita was in the main card, and Wood got eaten up by an unknown prospect while Keita knocked the absolute shit out of a man coming off a knockout loss, and now Keita is booked into a ranked fight and Wood isn’t booked at all.
Much like Lone’er Kavanagh, I have never fully bought into Main Event Aaron Pico. He’s still a fantastic athlete, but his striking is more wild and explosive than technical and he’s too in love with it to fully commit to his future as a wrestler. Also, one fight ago Keita knocked a man out so hard he was able to jump into the front row, sit in a chair and applaud his own work before he got up. I think Keita catches his timing and his fortunes with it. LOSENE KEITA BY TKO.
PRELIMS: LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT’S DAY OUT
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Azamat Murzakanov (16-1, #7) vs Dominick Reyes (16-5, #8)
AND
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Nikita Krylov (31-12, #15) vs Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev (10-0, NR)
We’re gonna break format, combine these fights, and rant a little. It’ll be cleansing.
A funny thing happened this week. Magomed Ankalaev, the former 205-pound world champion, the man who beat Alex Pereira, did a podcast and said the UFC was talking about a fight between him and Dricus du Plessis. Morne Visser, Dricus’s coach, confirmed the story but said they turned the UFC down. This means the UFC has a bunch of possible options and they’re waiting to see what works out, but one of those options, apparently, was “What if the former champion and current #1 contender with one loss in eight years fights a Middleweight who’s 2-0 against the current Middleweight champion but would rather move up for an instant shot at the top of a division despite having never competed there?”
Here’s the thing: You could tell me that fight was for an interim title and I would believe it. You could tell me they were finally stripping Carlos Ulberg and letting former Welterweight Dricus du Plessis fight for the undisputed Light Heavyweight Championship of the World and I would not be remotely shocked. You could also tell me the fight has no true stakes for one-half of its participants and after Ankalaev dribbled Dricus off the mat like a basketball to the drumline of Spitting Image’s “I’ve Never Met a Nice South African” they made him fight a rematch with Bogdan Guskov and I would say, Yes.
Yes, I believe you. Light Heavyweight is a land of dust and despair. I believe anything you would tell me about how dry and brittle its bones have become.
Azamat Murzakanov is 5’11” and closing in on 38 and he was Light Heavyweight’s best prospect until he got knocked out by Paulo Costa, who had one ranked victory in the last half-decade, and that was at Middleweight, and now that Paulo’s a top ten contender at Light Heavyweight, he only wants to fight for the belt and more money and is publicly demanding the UFC release him.
Dominick Reyes is one slot below him, already got flatlined by the champion in one round, only recently battled back from one of the saddest losing streaks in the sport, and is still in the top ten thanks to the dictionary definition of a coinflip split over Johnny Walker, who, himself, was 1 for his last 5 until he went up to Heavyweight earlier this month.
Nikita Krylov beat Walker! Six years ago. In said six years he’s 4 for 9, and in the last year and a half he’s 1 for 4, with three violent knockout losses--including one to Reyes--and just the slightest hair over three months ago Robert Whittaker, who, much like Dricus, fought at 170 before becoming a Middleweight champion, smashed Krylov, but no one rests after a TKO anymore.
Abdul Rahman Yakhyaev is the new guy. 25 years old! Undefeated! Near-perfect finishing rate! 3-0 in the UFC! Dusts people in seconds! Every one of those opponents was coming off a loss and their total UFC records combine to a staggering 5-13 and one of those five was just from fighting amongst themselves. And now he can get into the rankings by beating another man who’s coming off a loss and has spent the past several years getting repeatedly knocked out.
We’ve talked about the Light Heavyweight ladder being inherently broken multiple times this year, but every time we discuss it, it has somehow gotten worse. The champ’s been out since April with no word about his return. Half of the top fifteen either went to Heavyweight or came up from Middleweight. You have two new top contenders in Paulo Costa and Navajo Stirling: one wants out of the company and the other is about to fight for the #2 spot despite the UFC only putting him on TV outside of the Apex once in the last two years, and it was on a card that started at 7 in the morning for half of their audience.
And they might leapfrog him with yet another Middleweight if Dricus du Plessis fights and beats Magomed Ankalaev, the nearly-unbeaten former world champion they refuse to ever promote.
I can’t even drift off into one of my big punchline overwrought reveries. What am I going to do, write “salt the Earth” and “turn it into a potter’s field” like I always do? The Earth has been salted. The dirt is salt. This land has become completely inhospitable to life. There is no Light Heavyweight division left to mock.
Let it fester. AZAMAT MURZAKANOV BY KO and ABDUL RAKHMAN YAKHYAEV BY TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Abus Magomedov (29-7-1, #12) vs Cam Rowston (15-3, NR)
I started to liken this fight to those videos of giraffes fighting by whipping their heads at each other like whips, and then I remembered the UFC won’t let Cam Rowston be called “Battle Giraffe” anymore and I got sad. They had plans for Abus once upon a time, to the point that Sean Strickland got his shot at Israel Adesanya for knocking Abus out, but that time has long since passed and now he’s a utility player. Borderline top fifteen, good at everything, but not good enough to get past the Joe Pyfers of the world, so he gets prospect duty instead. Rowston’s one of them. Big, tall dude with a lot of good finishes and a long winning streak that absolutely falls apart if you look at it closely. His three wins in the UFC alone came from the perennially troubled Andre Petroski, the ever-present journeyman Cody Brundage, and Robert Bryczek, who we discussed last month as the only non-retiree to lose to UFC jobber Ihor Potieria.
From this, a shot at the top fifteen. Abus has a lot of problems balancing his gas tank with his output, but I think he has more overall tools than Rowston. ABUS MAGOMEDOV BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Grant Dawson (24-3-1) vs Nurullo Aliev (12-0)
Poor, poor Grant. They never liked you. In another era of this sport you would’ve been a standout. All-American wrestler who virtually always wins at one of the toughest divisions in the sport? They would’ve at least given you the begrudging Jon Fitch respect. But you had the temerity to wrestle during the WME era, when grappling became illegal, and for that they had to sidetrack and destroy you. Sure, one fight ago you were the first man to ever submit Mateusz Rębecki, but you may have subtly noticed that Mateusz got a fight with a near-sure knockout victim after that, whereas you? You get the undefeated Nurullo Aliev, arguably the best fighter from Tajikistan, in the middle of Abu Dhabi.
To which I say: Motherfucker, Shem Rock took him down, you can do it too. You get in there and you make that crowd miserable and you refuse to stop being a thorn in the company’s side. GRANT DAWSON BY DECISION.
EARLY PRELIMS: COLBY CODY JACOB OKI
BANTAMWEIGHT: Colby Thicknesse (9-1) vs Asaf Chopurov (11-0)
The internet has been rooting for Colby Thicknesse, the most prominent Redditor in mixed martial arts since the halcyon days of Joe Lauzon, but the goings have been pretty rocky. He lost his debut against Aleksandre Topuria, he won a squeaker of a decision over Josias Musasa, who was taking over the fight until Colby hit him with a massive (and unpunished!) kick to the groin at the start of the third round, and this past May he got a coinflip call against Vince Morales. This is why, instead of holding him for their next trip to his native Australia in February, he’s fighting Asaf Chopurov in the UAE. Undefeated fighter, scores of finishes, multiple championships as an amateur and a UAE Warriors title for good measure, and unlike a lot of people we say those things about, Chopurov’s actually fought really solid competition. His UAE reign alone saw him stop Demarte Pena, the Bantamweight champion of France, Adriano Ramos, a strong prospect and titleholder out of Brazil who once knocked out Vinicius Oliveira, and ONE Championship standout and near-champion Reece McLaren.
He’s legit, and if Colby can beat him it’s a massive, massive feather in his cap, but as is so often the case, I foresee only tragedy for Reddit. ASAF CHOPUROV BY TKO.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jacob Malkoun (10-3) vs Abubakar Vagaev (25-4)
Someone asked me once how ironic my support for Jacob Malkoun was, and motherfucker, there is not a shred of irony in it. In an era that so disdains wrestling it fires people who do it, Malkoun double-leg dares you to fire him when you are hoarding every Australian talent you can keep your hands on. If it weren’t for a badly-aimed elbow at Cody Brundage’s brainstem, Malkoun would be on a five-fight winning streak, and if it weren’t for the whims of the judges in a fight media scores split straight down the middle, Malkoun would’ve beaten Brendan Allen back in 2022 and we’d have been talking about Top Ten Jacob Malkoun right about now. The man knocked out Andre Petroski by smacking him in the face with his hip. I know Abubakar Vagaev is very good. I know I talked about him as one of my favorite new prospects during his debut back in July. I know that despite moving up from Welterweight to Middleweight for this fight, Vagaev is actually the bigger and likely stronger man.
I do not care. No power on Earth can make me care. Wrestle, Jacob. Wrest and Le, until it is done. JACOB MALKOUN BY DECISION.
FEATHERWEIGHT: Daniel Santos (13-3) vs Bolaji Oki (10-4)
This is probably going to be one of those “we’re here for a good time, not a long time” fights. Daniel Santos is a really fun, offensively-focused fighter whom the UFC inexplicably set on a quest to defeat their entire contingent of South Koreans that ended in failure when Dooho Choi punched out his liver last May. Bolaji Oki is a legitimately good fighter who can’t get out of the starting blocks without getting got by better ones. There’s no shame in losing to Chris Duncan, Mason Jones or Manoel Sousa, all three of those men are very good at what they do, but when you run into all three of them in the space of four fights it kills your momentum dead.
And, sorry as I am to Bolaji about it, I think Daniel is on that list too. DANIEL SANTOS BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Noah Gugnon (10-2) vs Kody Steele (8-1)
Kody Steele, I believed in you. I really liked your tape, I liked what I saw of your performances, I had some real hopes for you as a prospect. Then you got beat by Rongzhu and my faith faltered. But then you ruined an entire season of Road to UFC by effortlessly heel hooking its winner in one round, and our love blossomed anew. But I expected even less from Noah Gugnon when he showed up in Serbia in August, and Noah proceeded to absolutely steamroll Miloš Janičić and choke him out in a minute twenty. So I must now decide between my constantly incorrect preconceptions and my desire to believe in Kody Steele, who by name alone was assuredly the star of a young adult “what if James Bond smoked candy cigarettes and only had chaste, tongueless kisses before marriage” fiction series when I was a child.
But boy, I did like Tom Swift once upon a time. KODY STEELE BY DECISION.
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Iasmin Lucindo (18-6) vs Nicolle Caliari (9-4)
Congratulations on your victory, Iasmin. With a couple of exceptions--Krylov/Yakhyaev has been correctly identified by the markets as a sacrificial lamb bout and the oddsmakers do not at all believe in Colby Thicknesse--as far as the betting deltas go, this is a very evenly-booked card. This fight is one of the exceptions. Iasmin Lucindo is a good fighter with a bunch of good wins and she’s coming off a victory over the ever-tricky Angela Hill, which makes it weird that Angie’s ranked and Iasmin isn’t. Nicolle Caliari got beaten to a split decision by the 1-2-1 Ernesta Kareckaite and got knocked out easily by Carli Judice (who lost a split decision to Kareckaite), and that was just enough losing to make the UFC think Nicolle might just be capable of losing a fight to Shauna Bannon, whom they keep repeatedly trying with, for some reason. Caliari choked her out.
So you have “beat Angela Hill and Marina Rodriguez” on one side of this equation and “dropped a round to Shauna Bannon” on the other. I understand the nature of the odds. IASMIN LUCINDO BY DECISION.