The UFC kicked off fight week Monday by posting the first episode of UFC 333 Embedded on YouTube. The headliner gets the red-carpet treatment: featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski turns up at the Sydney premiere of Street Fighter, which MMA Junkie billed as his Hollywood side. His challenger, Movsar Evloev, stays in Abu Dhabi finishing camp, and the UFC’s own clip of him on X carried one line: “The undefeated record doesn’t pressure me.”
UFC 333 goes Saturday, Oct. 24, at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, with the main card streaming on Paramount+ at 2 p.m. ET. MMA Junkie noted it’s the promotion’s 10th numbered event of the calendar year. Two title fights sit at the top.
The main event pits Volkanovski (28-4 MMA, 15-3 UFC), a two-time featherweight champ, against Evloev (20-0 MMA, 10-0 UFC). That’s 10 UFC wins with no losses. The co-main is the third fight between bantamweight champion Petr Yan (20-5 MMA, 12-4 UFC) and former titleholder Merab Dvalishvili (21-5 MMA, 14-3 UFC). Yan is also a two-time champ at 135, and Dvalishvili wants the belt back.
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The episode bounces around the card. Dvalishvili throws a barbecue with his team up in the mountains. Yan signs autographs. Volkanovski spars with Colby Thicknesse, who is also fighting on the card, and Thicknesse later takes his blind cat for a walk, which is the most relaxed anyone looks all episode. Losene Keita, getting ready for his UFC debut, goes back to the place where he started fighting. Aaron Pico goes shopping in Morocco. MMA Weekly framed its writeup around the idea of taking other fighters’ zeros, which is about as clear a mission statement as fight week gets for a card built around an unbeaten challenger.
The matchup math is simple. Volkanovski has 32 pro fights and 18 in the UFC, and the three UFC losses on his record are the only blemishes in that stretch. Evloev has never lost, but 20 fights is still 12 fewer than the man across from him, and nobody has had to walk through a five-round championship fire to build that zero the way Volkanovski did to win the belt twice. The bantamweight fight runs the other direction. Yan and Dvalishvili have already shared the cage twice, so there’s no mystery left, just adjustments.
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My take: undefeated guys always say the zero doesn’t weigh on them, and I’ve lost enough money on undefeated guys to stop believing it on reflex. Evloev’s 10-0 in the UFC is real, though, and I’m not handing a 28-4 champ the benefit of the doubt just because he looked comfortable in a suit in Sydney. The guy grinding in Abu Dhabi while the other guy works a premiere has my attention. Volkanovski still has the bigger resume. Evloev gets to fight in the city where he’s been training. Episode 2 should land later this week, and the scale on Friday will tell us more than any trailer.
