Two days after UFC 333, Aljamain Sterling sat down for a video on his YouTube channel and did what teammates always do after a close loss. He went back through the fight looking for a different ending. He came out the other side with a draw. The route he took is more interesting than where he landed.
Petr Yan beat Merab Dvalishvili by unanimous decision in the Abu Dhabi co-main event on Saturday. He took back the undisputed bantamweight title and closed a trilogy that has swung hard both ways. When they first met in 2023, Dvalishvili ground Yan down for a unanimous decision and landed 11 of 49 takedown attempts. That number says plenty about The Machine’s pace and about how many times Yan had to peel himself off the mat. Last December, Yan flipped it and dominated the rematch on the cards. This third fight was the close one. Bloody Elbow summed up the general read online as the first two rounds for Dvalishvili and the last three for Yan, which is about as thin as a unanimous decision gets.
The Draw Math
Sterling’s whole case rests on Round 3. He called it a “coin flip of a round three” and said he “would have liked it be 10-10, but that’s never gonna happen and then the fight ends in a draw.” Follow the arithmetic. Dvalishvili gets the first two, Yan gets the last two, the middle round is scored even, and everyone goes home at 48-48.
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The catch is the part Sterling said himself. A 10-10 round in the UFC is close to folklore. Judges almost never hand one out, and a man who held the bantamweight belt knows that better than most. So his draw works as an argument about how judging ought to function. It falls short as a claim that the officials in Abu Dhabi blew it.
Still, the argument points at something real.
What Happened to the Other Damage
The sharpest thing Sterling said had little to do with draws. “It is such a subjective thing, one guy lands a lot more punches and one guy has two big shots, and then all of a sudden he steals the entire round,” he said. A moment later he added: “I know people say damage is what scores and I agree, damage should score. But what happened to all of the other damage?”
That question has followed close fights for years, and it fits bantamweight better than most divisions because the pace is so high. A clean shot that snaps a head back stays in a judge’s memory. A steady pile of smaller strikes gets filed under activity and forgotten. Sterling made a point of saying the shots in that swing round never put Dvalishvili on the canvas or left him rocked and wobbling. His logic is that a couple of eye-catching blows without visible damage shouldn’t automatically outweigh everything else that landed.
He has a point, and judges should hear it. But he’s applying it to the wrong round of the wrong fight.
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By his own description, the fight was moving one way. “Scoring the fight round by round, I don’t feel like we got a definitive answer, you could say the fight was trending in Petr Yan’s way, I agree but that’s the way the decision went and unfortunately we came up short,” Sterling said. He also offered, “Of course, Petr Yan ended the fight strong, kudos to him.” When the man in your opponent’s camp admits the last three rounds belonged to you, a coin flip in the third doesn’t add up to a robbery. It adds up to a close fight with a clear finisher. Yan won the stretch where Dvalishvili has made his career, the late rounds where his conditioning usually breaks people. Considering what Dvalishvili did to him in 2023, that may be the most impressive thing Yan has done at 135 pounds.
Sterling also said, “I don’t feel like there was anyone that stood out in that fight.” I’d push back there. One man got stronger as it went on, and that man has now beaten Dvalishvili twice. Bloody Elbow argued that the second win pushes Yan closer to the conversation about the best bantamweight ever. That claim feels premature to me, but it’s no longer silly.
No Fourth Fight
Sterling seemed to be hinting at a rematch for his teammate. That’s a hard sell after three fights and a 2-1 edge for Yan. The more obvious fight for the 33-year-old champion is Sean O’Malley, with their 2022 fight still argued over and unsettled.
Yan apparently doesn’t see it the same way, or at least didn’t say so. He never mentioned O’Malley in his post-fight interview. According to Bloody Elbow, O’Malley was left baffled by that and insisted no other fight makes sense for Yan. A trilogy just ended on a disputed round, and the champion’s next opponent is already sitting at home annoyed that nobody said his name.
