Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev ran straight through Nikita Krylov on Saturday, stopping the veteran by TKO at 2:38 of Round 1 on the UFC 333 prelims at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi.
That makes him 11-0 as a pro. The UFC’s own account counted it as four consecutive first-round finishes, which is the kind of stat that gets a prospect’s name said out loud in a matchmaker’s office.
The fight was made at 205, and both men stepped on the scale at 206 pounds Friday morning. The betting market saw it coming. MMA Mania listed Yakhyaev as a -470 favorite with Krylov sitting at +360, and MMA Fighting’s staff picked Yakhyaev in its predictions piece. Nobody got rich backing the kid. They just got paid.
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Henry Cejudo liked how he got there. The former two-division champ posted on X during the fight: “What a transition by Yakhyaev and crisp knee to find the finish!”
How they got here
Yakhyaev came in having steamrolled his first three UFC opponents, according to MMA Mania, including a 33-second submission of Raffael Cerqueira in his debut. The UFC billed this one as a fight to “tune in early” for, and for once the promo copy undersold it.
Krylov’s slide keeps going. He’s now dropped four of his last five. Before Saturday, MMA Mania noted, he’d lost three of four, with Robert Whittaker rearranging his jaw in July and earlier stoppage losses to Bogdan Guskov and Dominick Reyes. The lone bright spot in that stretch was a third-round finish of Modestas Bukauskas. Getting stopped inside a round by an unbeaten 25-year-old is a rough way to come back from a broken jaw.
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What’s next
Michael Chiesa was already playing matchmaker before the arena lights cooled. He wrote on X that Yakhyaev has star quality, then added: “No need to rush him given the fact he’s 25.”
Then he rushed him a little anyway, which is what we all do. Chiesa said that if he were UFC matchmaker Mick Maynard, he’d book Yakhyaev against either RDR in a co-main or Robert Whittaker in a main event, ideally on a big Middle Eastern card.
Yakhyaev also did his Octagon interview after the win, which the UFC posted to YouTube.
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My take
Chiesa’s Whittaker idea is the right one, and it isn’t close. Krylov just gave us a clean measuring stick. Whittaker broke his jaw in July, and three months later Yakhyaev needed 158 seconds to stop him. That’s the comparison every fan is going to make anyway, so let the cage settle it. Putting a 25-year-old against a former champion is how you find out what you actually have, and I’d rather Maynard book that than feed him another name off the bottom of the rankings. Make it the main event in the Gulf and let him either look like the future or eat his first real lesson.
