Sean O’Malley has every reason to want Petr Yan leaving UFC 333 with the bantamweight belt. A Yan win this weekend sets up the rematch O’Malley calls the biggest bantamweight fight of all time, and he isn’t shy about cheering for it. So when the guy with the most to gain from a Yan victory starts hedging on his own pick, I’m listening.
O’Malley broke down the Yan vs. Merab Dvalishvili co-main event on his YouTube channel, and he kept drifting back to the champion’s spine. Yan ended Dvalishvili’s title reign last December and got his revenge in the process. Then, instead of a first defense, he went in for a nine-hour back surgery. Nine hours. That’s a full workday plus overtime with a surgical team working on the part of your body that holds the rest of it up.
“This could not be good for Petr,” O’Malley said. “Those surgeries take four months, five months to actually let your body heal.”
Suga has already seen this movie
Plenty of people can guess at another fighter’s medical chart. O’Malley is the rare one who has run this exact experiment on himself, against this exact opponent, and lost.
He fought Dvalishvili a second time at UFC 316 and came up short. He walked into that rematch six or seven months removed from his own back surgery, which he says wasn’t “nearly as bad” as the procedure Yan just had. He now calls the decision to compete on that timeline the biggest regret of his entire career. That’s a heavy admission from a fighter whose whole persona runs on swagger. You don’t often hear Suga talk about regret, and you definitely don’t hear him call one the biggest of his career.
His memory of that night is that Merab kept gaining confidence as the fight went on while O’Malley never got to where he needed to be. Now picture the same setup with a champion coming off a worse surgery, and you can see why the pick changed.
“This really changes my thought process on this fight,” he said. “I thought Petr was going to go in there and dominate but that alone, him getting surgery that close.”
I think he’s right, and I think more people should be treating this as a genuinely live fight instead of a coronation. Yan won the second meeting. Fine. That version of Yan had a healthy back. The version showing up this weekend has a rebuilt one and a short runway to get it fight ready, and he’s facing a guy who already went through a grueling fight with him once and will make the sequel just as grueling. If there’s one opponent at 135 you’d least want testing a fresh surgical repair, it’s the one who already knows what it takes to get to Yan.
Whoever signed off on this date was betting on the calendar. O’Malley is telling you, from personal experience, that the calendar lied to him.
The coach tried to talk him out of it
The funniest part of the breakdown came when O’Malley’s coach, Tim Welch, tried to hand him a reason for optimism. Welch pointed back to the trip they made to Abu Dhabi four years ago to fight Yan, when Team O’Malley flew in several weeks early to adjust. By Welch’s account, Dvalishvili is only landing in Abu Dhabi six days before the event. Jet lag, time zone, climate, all of it compressed into less than a week. That’s a real edge for the champion if it’s true.
O’Malley shot it down almost immediately. He told Welch it took him roughly six days to start feeling okay out there, which means Merab arrives with enough time to get right. So the man rooting hardest for Yan talked himself out of the one silver lining his own coach offered. He sounds genuinely worried his dream fight is about to evaporate.
And that’s what’s on the line for O’Malley. If Yan loses, the “biggest bantamweight fight of all time” goes back on the shelf and O’Malley is staring at a Dvalishvili who has beaten him twice. He knows that math better than anyone. He also knows what it feels like to walk into the octagon with a back that isn’t ready and a guy across from you who smells it.
I’ll still give Yan a real shot, because he already beat Merab and champions don’t forget how. But if I’m picking this weekend’s co-main, I’m doing it the way O’Malley is: with one eye on the scorecards and the other on how freely Yan is moving his hips after the first takedown attempt. If he looks stiff early, O’Malley’s biggest regret is about to become Yan’s.
