Khamzat Chimaev is offering Sean Strickland $1 million, and the offer has an expiration date. Bloody Elbow reported the deadline on X on Friday under the headline “Khamzat Chimaev puts strict deadline on $1 million offer to Sean Strickland,” quoting Chimaev’s condition: “If he accepts tomorrow.”
That came three hours after an earlier Bloody Elbow post saying Chimaev had suggested a “simple solution” to Strickland’s pay dispute with the UFC. Neither post laid out the full terms, so the fine print of the offer is still unconfirmed. The number is big, though, and it’s easy to remember.
Strickland’s money fight with the UFC has been public enough to draw Joe Rogan into it. ClutchPoints ran a piece Friday on Rogan weighing in on the dispute.
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Here’s why Chimaev’s offer gets noticed. Strickland is the current UFC middleweight champion, and it’s his second run with the belt. He’s 31-7, trains out of Xtreme Couture and sits No. 1 in Knockout Daily’s middleweight rankings. Chimaev is a former UFC middleweight champ, 15-1 and No. 3 in our rankings, fighting out of Allstars Training Center. Both men last competed on May 9, 2026.
Chimaev hasn’t exactly been sitting by the phone since then. He signed with Real American Freestyle in April and has turned it into a side job with a body count. He pinned Dillon Danis in 44 seconds at RAF 10 on June 13, the fastest pin in RAF history, then pinned Tyron Woodley in the first round at RAF Moscow on Sept. 5 and beat Gilbert Burns by technical fall at RAF 13 on Sept. 18. He’s booked for the RAF 14 co-main event against Robbie Lawler on Oct. 23.
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The RAF 14 press conference on Thursday turned into a brawl involving Danis, Arman Tsarukyan, Chimaev and members of their teams. Ariel Helwani wrote on X that one security guard was bleeding. Video posted by Red Corner MMA caught Chimaev yelling at Danis, “Hey you don’t know who is your daddy btch! I’ll fck you up.”
So the guy handing out million-dollar deadlines spent the night before getting pulled out of a scrum. That’s fight week for him now.
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I’ll take a fighter putting cash on the table and a clock on it over another month of contract talk by press release. Strickland answers questions straight, so whatever he says about “tomorrow” probably won’t take long to show up on X. Chimaev has Lawler on the mat first, Oct. 23 at RAF 14.
