Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili settle their bantamweight series Saturday night in the co-main event of UFC 333, and the Bloody Elbow staff didn’t split on it. All five writers picked Yan, four by decision and one by knockout. That’s a lopsided consensus for a trilogy that’s sitting at 1-1.
One correction to the framing floating around. Yan is the champion here. Dvalishvili won every round of their first fight at a Fight Night in March 2023, then Yan took the bantamweight title from him in the rematch at UFC 323 last December. The 135-pound tiebreaker sits under a featherweight title fight between Alexander Volkanovski and Movsar Evloev, so the card carries two belts.
Where the rematch turned
The most useful nugget in the whole preview cycle came from Harvey Leonard, who cited Dvalishvili’s recent admission that he knew he was going to lose at the end of Round 2 last December, once Yan had stuffed his takedowns. Leonard said the fight would have been a coin flip for him without that comment. “That comment worries me and makes me question how he will respond if the champ does the same again,” he wrote.
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That’s the technical crux. Dvalishvili’s whole system runs on volume: shoot, get stuffed, shoot again, chain into the next entry, and drown the other guy in attempts until the defense breaks. It works because the opponent eventually stops believing he can keep it standing. If the man doing the shooting is the one who stops believing first, the math flips. Yan doesn’t need to reinvent anything. He needs his first-layer defense to hold early, and he needs to make Dvalishvili pay for the misses.
Donagh Corby framed it as a question of who owns the pace. “If Merab can impose his pressure early, he has a chance, but the longer the fight goes with Yan in charge of the pace, the better it gets for him,” he wrote. Jamie Theodosi was blunter about Dvalishvili’s options. “The issue is that Merab has his style and can’t change from that,” he wrote.
Kyle Dimond flagged Dvalishvili’s injuries as a concern and admitted his confidence in Yan made him nervous, since he’d been equally sure of Dvalishvili last time. Jordan Ellis went furthest, calling for a repeat with “an even better result,” and noting that Yan’s three-fight losing skid never shook his belief in him.
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MMA Mania and MMA Junkie both ran odds and breakdown pieces ahead of the card. The Bloody Elbow panel, for what it’s worth, didn’t leave much room for a Dvalishvili upset.
My take
I’m with the room, though I’d temper the confidence. Theodosi’s point cuts both ways. Dvalishvili can’t really change his style, but his style is built to punish anyone who relaxes, and a five-round fight gives him a lot of shots at it. The tell will come in the first five minutes. If Yan is sprawling and circling off the cage cleanly early, and Dvalishvili starts resetting instead of chaining, that’s the Round 2 feeling from December coming back. I’ve got Yan by decision, and I’d want a long look at how the judges handle any round where Dvalishvili shoots 10 times and finishes none.
