Alexander Volkanovski has looked at the undefeated man standing between him and the end of his featherweight title reign, and he likes what he sees. Speaking on UFC on Paramount+ ahead of his UFC 333 main event against Movsar Evloev, the champion called the challenger “one of the better matchups for me,” which is a bold read on a fighter nobody has managed to beat.
Volkanovski didn’t do it by trashing Evloev, either. He opened with a compliment that would make most challengers blush.
“I think he’s the best outside myself,” Volkanovski said. “I think he beats everyone else in the division.”
Then he flipped it. In his view, Evloev is a nightmare for the rest of the 145-pound division and a comfortable puzzle for him specifically. Volkanovski said he sees other featherweights as more dangerous to him than the man he’s actually fighting.
“He’s more well-rounded; he’s got a lot more tools, a lot more things he can do, but all these other things that give so many other people problems, they just don’t give me any problem,” he said.
The 25-minute problem
Evloev’s ground game is the piece that gives people fits, and he isn’t known as a finisher. His wins come from controlling opponents over the full distance. Volkanovski thinks that formula breaks down over five rounds against him, partly because he believes he’s better than Evloev everywhere the fight can go.
“To try and beat me for 25 minutes is a pretty hard task,” Volkanovski said. “… I just don’t think anyone can beat me for 25 minutes. I know that’s his usual path to victory. It’s just not happening with me.”
He added that he has “a lot of respect” for Evloev’s skills but insisted those skills “just aren’t effective for me. They’re effective for everyone else, just not me.”
The books disagree
The oddsmakers are not buying the easy-night theory. FanDuel has Evloev as a slight -115 favorite, with the champion sitting at -105. Calling that a coin flip would be fair. The detail that jumps out is the sitting titleholder heading into his own main event as the guy getting plus money, or close to it.
That line tells you how the market reads Evloev’s style: a grinder with no losses who wins by making opponents carry his weight for 15 or 25 minutes, and who hasn’t yet run into someone who could make him pay for it.
My take: Volkanovski is right about the one thing that matters most here. Evloev’s résumé is built on decisions, and decisions against a champion over five rounds are a different job than three-round wins against contenders. If Volkanovski can stuff the early entries and make Evloev chase him in open space, that -115 is going to look silly by the championship rounds. If he can’t, every takedown Evloev lands in Round 1 becomes a round Volkanovski has to win back on the feet, and “I just don’t think anyone can beat me for 25 minutes” turns into a much harder sentence to say out loud.
