I love a fighter who calls his shot, and Merab Dvalishvili just called two of them. According to MMA Sucka, Merab believes he and Aljamain Sterling will both be UFC champions again, and at the same time. Merab keeps the 135-pound end of the deal. His longtime teammate goes up and takes featherweight. Two friends, two belts, one very loud group chat.
It’s a great pitch. Half of it is a lot more believable than the other half, and the less believable half gets decided this Saturday by two guys who aren’t named Merab or Aljo.
The Merab half
I’ll buy Merab’s side of the bet without much haggling. This is a man who spends his free time wrestling Olympic gold medalists for fun. He beat Henry Cejudo by decision on the Real American Freestyle Wrestling mats in July, then lost the rematch, so the two are 1-1 and Cejudo is already angling for a trilogy. Most fighters with Merab’s résumé would be on a yacht. He’s out there scrambling with a 39-year-old double champ because he can’t sit still.
The one asterisk is Petr Yan. Merab has spoken publicly about the moment at UFC 323 when he knew Yan had his number, and that’s an unusually honest admission from a guy whose whole brand is relentless forward pressure. I respect it. Fighters who can name the exact moment a fight got away from them are usually the ones who come back and fix it. If anybody can turn a bad night into a training camp, it’s the guy who treats a wrestling match with Cejudo like a Tuesday.
The Sterling half
Now for the hard part. Sterling’s path to 145-pound gold has a 20-0 problem, and his name is Movsar Evloev.
Evloev is 10-0 in the UFC, and Sterling is one of those 10. That win sits in a four-fight run over Lerone Murphy, Sterling, Arnold Allen and Diego Lopes, which is about as rough a stretch of featherweights as you can stack back to back. Evloev hasn’t finished anybody in the Octagon. He doesn’t need to. He told MMA Fighting’s José Youngs that he still has “zero finishes in the UFC” and is fighting for the title anyway, which is his way of saying the scorecards have been very kind to him.
This Saturday in Abu Dhabi, Evloev challenges Alexander Volkanovski for the featherweight title in the UFC 333 main event. If Evloev wins, Merab’s prophecy runs straight into a wall. Sterling would be chasing a champion who has already beaten him, and rematches against a guy who got the better of you are the hardest sell in this sport. You have to convince the matchmakers, the fans and yourself that the second time goes differently.
So here’s my take. Aljamain Sterling should be the loudest Volkanovski fan on the planet this weekend.
Why Volk winning helps Aljo
Volkanovski is arguably the best featherweight the UFC has ever had. He’s defended the belt six times across two reigns, with wins over Max Holloway, Jose Aldo and Lopes. Sterling would be an enormous underdog against that guy too, so on paper this sounds backward.
It isn’t. Listen to what Volk is already saying. On the Who The Fook Are These Guys podcast, he floated a lightweight title superfight with Justin Gaethje as a send-off for both of them, then said the divisions could “sort themselves out” afterward. That’s the champion of 145 publicly daydreaming about leaving 145. Gaethje is fresh off beating Ilia Topuria at the White House and doesn’t sound interested in rematches, so the idea isn’t crazy.
If Volk beats Evloev and then wanders up to lightweight for a farewell fight, featherweight gets shaken up, and a shaken-up division is exactly where a former bantamweight champion with Sterling’s grappling can sneak in and grab something. That’s my read, not reporting, and plenty has to break right. It’s still a real door, which is more than Sterling has if Evloev leaves Abu Dhabi with the belt.
Sterling isn’t short on people doubting him, either. When Mike Malott flattened Joaquin Buckley with a knee at 2:32 of Round 2 at UFC Fight Night 291 in Edmonton last weekend, fans online immediately compared it to Marlon Moraes’ knee knockout of Sterling. That clip is still in circulation years later. Nothing shuts down an old highlight like a new belt.
Merab’s prediction is the kind of loyal, slightly delusional confidence I want from fighters. He believes in himself, he believes in his guy, and he said it out loud. I’d bet on Merab getting his half done. Sterling’s half gets decided by somebody else first, and the UFC 333 main event goes down Saturday, Oct. 24, in Abu Dhabi.
