Dayne Fox made a point in his Sherdog column this week that I keep turning over. UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi has two title fights at the top, and the history riding on them has been treated like an afterthought in the promotion. He guessed it might be because Alexander Volkanovski, Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili don’t pull eyeballs the way Max Holloway or Sean O’Malley do. I think he’s right about the neglect, and I’d go further. One of these fights can settle a featherweight argument outright, and the other can hand bantamweight its strongest historical claimant in years.
The case for Volk gets simple
Start with the uncomfortable part, because Volkanovski’s critics have it memorized. He lost three of four at one point. He got the 145-pound belt back without going through Ilia Topuria, the man who took it from him, and then had two uneventful fights with Diego Lopes. Fox described him as feeling more like a placeholder than an unquestioned king, and I understand why a reign that starts that way feels unfinished.
Now break the losses down. Two came at lightweight against Islam Makhachev. Only one, the Topuria fight, happened at featherweight. That’s one loss in the division across his entire run, fewer than Holloway and fewer than Jose Aldo, the two names anyone serious puts next to his. He also owns three wins over Holloway.
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The Topuria problem works the way Conor McGregor’s win over Aldo does. Nobody sensible ranks McGregor above Aldo at 145 off that one night, because Aldo stacked years of elite wins and McGregor didn’t. Topuria, who went on to become lightweight champion, holds the head-to-head over Volkanovski, but he never built a long featherweight resume against elite opposition. Same rule, same result.
That’s why Saturday matters so much. Beat Evloev and Volkanovski collects his ninth UFC featherweight title-fight win, breaking his tie with Aldo. He’d do it at 38, against a man who has never lost, in a division that usually wears fighters down well before that birthday. If his hand goes up, I’m done hedging. He’s the greatest featherweight the UFC has had.
Give Evloev his due
Evloev deserves better than the way he’s been discussed. He waited through 10 UFC wins, every one of them a decision, before this shot came, and a lot of the talk around him has been about whether he’s entertaining enough. That debate says more about matchmaking priorities than about him. Undefeated is undefeated. He isn’t in a GOAT conversation yet and nobody should pretend otherwise, but a long reign could start this weekend. If he loses, Fox noted, an immediate rematch would probably require an unusually compelling first fight, and after how long the first shot took, his road back would be murky.
Bantamweight’s harder math
The co-main is where I think the bigger shift can happen. A Reddit thread on r/MMA framed it well: each man carries an asterisk in the form of a loss to the other, and the trilogy is the only way to erase one.
Dvalishvili’s case reads clean on paper. Fourteen straight wins and three title defenses. When Yan beat him in the rematch, Merab was chasing something nobody had done, a fourth successful UFC title defense in a single calendar year. Yan was excellent that night, and I won’t take that from him, but it’s fair to wonder what that schedule did to Dvalishvili’s body. He’s had more than 10 months off since. A win gives him five UFC bantamweight title-fight victories, level with T.J. Dillashaw’s divisional record.
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Yan’s case lives in the fine print. Four losses in five appearances looks ugly until you read them closely. The first Aljamain Sterling loss was a disqualification for an illegal knee to a grounded opponent, after Yan had taken control of the fight. That foul was on him, but it tells you little about who the better fighter was. He beat Cory Sandhagen for the interim belt, then dropped a split decision to Sterling in their rematch, one the majority of media scorers compiled by MMA Decisions gave to Sterling. Then came the O’Malley split decision, where only one of 26 media scorers listed by MMA Decisions had O’Malley winning. I’d call that a robbery by any reasonable standard.
Even so, Yan is in his second reign without a single successful defense. Win the trilogy and he has a serious argument, mostly among people who watched the fights rather than skimmed the record. Win a rematch with O’Malley after that, which Fox called plausible given how eager the UFC seems to promote O’Malley, and the argument gets loud.
If you’re asking me which winner walks out with the stronger claim, it’s Dvalishvili. Tying Dillashaw’s record on top of 14 straight and a rubber-match win over the only man to beat him in that stretch produces a resume you can read without footnotes. Yan’s resume needs the footnotes explained to every new fan, and that will follow him even with the belt.
Jed Meshew and Mike Heck built MMA Fighting’s preview around whether Volkanovski can cement his GOAT status. He can, and so can Merab. Both fights go Saturday, Oct. 24, in Abu Dhabi, after 12 other bouts set the table.
