Movsar Evloev lost the biggest fight of his career, and now he has to hear the part nobody wants to hear on the flight home. MMA Junkie ran a story Tuesday in which a former UFC champion said Evloev “kind of gave up” against Alexander Volkanovski in the UFC 333 main event.
That’s a nasty thing to say about a man who just got knocked out. I’d also say it’s fair to raise, even if “kind of” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Here’s what we know about the fight. Volkanovski stopped Evloev seconds before the horn in Round 2. Yahoo’s weekly power rankings described Volk as having told everyone what he was going to do to Evloev, then making it look way too easy. That writer moved Volkanovski to No. 1 pound-for-pound, ahead of Islam Makhachev, a man who has beaten Volk twice. When you leapfrog the guy who owns two wins over you, you didn’t squeak by.
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Now the detail that makes the ex-champ’s critique sting even more. Volkanovski was sick on fight day. Home of Fight shared video of him walking through everything he ate: three pieces of toast, three eggs and avocado for breakfast, two more pieces of toast with banana and Nutella before training, rice and chicken afterward, then rice cakes with banana and Nutella three hours before the walkout. That’s a man fighting a cold with a carb load fit for a 10-year-old’s birthday party. And he still put the top contender in the division to sleep inside two rounds.
Why the critique lands
I’m a sucker for a fighter who calls his shot and then cashes it. Volkanovski did that, which means Evloev had a full fight camp to prepare for a plan the champ basically announced in public. When your opponent hands you the script and the ending still plays out the way he wrote it, people are going to ask what you changed and when you changed it.
That’s the itch the former champ is scratching. Losing to Volkanovski is no crime. Plenty of very good featherweights have done it. But the way this one ended, late in Round 2, raises a specific question about urgency. If Evloev felt the fight slipping, where was the shift? Whatever adjustments he tried, none of them kept him upright to hear the bell, and the guy across from him was eating Nutella toast because he felt crummy.
Would I have used the phrase “gave up”? Probably not. It’s a loaded thing to say about anyone who signs up to get punched for a living, and it’s a lot easier to diagnose a man’s heart from a broadcast booth than from the cage. Still, the hedge in the quote tells you the speaker knew it was harsh and said it anyway. Former champs usually pick their words around contenders they might see at a promotional event next month. This one didn’t bother.
The rankings problem
The awkward part for the UFC is that Evloev is still sitting at No. 1 at 145 pounds in the UFC Meta Rankings MMA Mania published Tuesday. Diego Lopes is No. 2, Lerone Murphy is No. 3 and Aljamain Sterling is No. 4. So the man who just got knocked out by the champ is still the top contender on paper, which tells you more about the shape of the division than about Evloev.
Lopes isn’t exactly lining up for a featherweight title shot, either. He headlines UFC 335 against Charles Oliveira on Dec. 12 with the BMF belt on the line, according to the Yahoo power rankings. That leaves the featherweight queue looking a little like a waiting room where everyone stepped out for coffee.
And Volkanovski? When he was asked after the fight about facing lightweight champion Justin Gaethje, Yahoo reported his answer as “I’m down for whatever.” As a guy who lives for big-money champion vs. champion fights, I love that. As a guy who can’t stand divisions frozen in place while the champ goes shopping, I’m side-eyeing it a little. If Volk chases Gaethje, Evloev keeps his No. 1 spot by default, and he’ll be holding it with a former champion’s “gave up” line stapled to his name.
That’s the real damage here. A clean knockout loss to an all-time great is survivable. A narrative about effort follows you into every face-off and every pre-fight interview until you stomp it out with a performance. Evloev needs his next fight booked, and he needs to come out of the first exchange looking like a man trying to prove someone wrong.
Until he does, the only quote attached to his name this week is four words he didn’t even say.
