Relentless Dvalishvili pursuing history at UFC 323

Merab Dvalishvili’s fight style is relentless. All gas, no brakes. He fights in perpetual motion, constantly bouncing around at distance, moving laterally to change angles, dashing in and out of range with feints and takedown attempts, throwing offence at opponents from all directions.

His volume and cardio are unmatched. On average over his UFC career, Dvalishvili’s landed more than 20 significant strikes and nearly 2.5 takedowns every five minutes. For most UFC fighters, either of those tallies would produce one of their better rounds of a fight and a potential 10-8 score. For Dvalishvili, doing both is merely ordinary.

What’s extraordinary is doing both over five rounds four times in 12 months at the sport’s highest level, while managing the training demands, physical recovery, psychological stress, media requirements, weight management, strategic preparation, and ancillary business opportunities a UFC champion must address between bouts. That’s insane.

Yet it’s what Dvalishvili is positioned to attempt this Saturday when he rocks up to UFC 323 for a bantamweight title fight with Petr Yan, attempting to become the first UFC champion to defend their belt four times in a calendar year.

That it’s Dvalishvili of all people pursuing this unprecedented feat is somehow both fitting and unbelievable. It’s hard to imagine any other athlete in the sport possessing the motor and durability to withstand such a demanding schedule. But it’s also hard to imagine any athlete period having the physical and mental bandwidth to do so while regularly earning five-round decision victories on the back of such a gruelling fight style.

Dvalishvili has the fifth-longest average fight time among active fighters, and ninth longest in UFC history. He’s landed the seventh-most strikes of any UFC athlete ever and will likely move into the top three if Saturday’s fight goes multiple rounds. His 117 career takedowns have smashed a Georges St-Pierre record (90) that stood for decades. At his current rate, he’ll be flirting with 150 sometime late next year. 

And that’s just what we see. We aren’t privy to the hours, days, and months spent sparring and grappling in the gym between bouts to build the conditioning base that allows him to sustain such an absurd amount of volume. Yet here he is, already one of only eight fighters in UFC history to successfully defend a title three times within a year, looking to topple a fourth challenger before the earth’s taken a full trip around the sun.

Of course, a byproduct of Dvalishvili’s relentless schedule is the UFC running out of high-level opponents to throw at him. He’s already beaten each of UFC’s Nos. 1-4 ranked bantamweights once and is currently working on lapping them again. He’s already beaten Sean O’Malley twice and, should he secure a second victory over Yan on Saturday, will potentially have another crack at Umar Nurmagomedov, whom he unanimous-decisioned in January.

You can at least begin to sell yourself on the possibility of a different story against Yan, who first faced Dvalishvili over two years ago. The former champion’s unbeaten in three fights since, unanimously winning nine of 11 rounds in the process. It’s certainly possible Yan’s improved enough to find a flaw in Dvalishvili’s game that others haven’t. But what’s certainly not is that Yan’s experienced anything close to the pressure and pace Dvalishvili can put on him from any of his opponents since.

When Dvalishvili fought Yan in March 2023, he set a UFC record for most takedowns attempted in a fight at 49. His last time out against Cory Sandhagen, Dvalishvili merely attempted 37. Only five fights in UFC history have seen a competitor attempt 30 or more takedowns. Dvalishvili’s responsible for three of them.

But what’s truly wild about Dvalishvili’s first fight with Yan is that he also attempted 401 strikes, the sixth-most ever in a UFC bantamweight fight. That’s two-and-a-half times more strikes than Yan — not exactly a low-output fighter — threw on the night.

When Dvalishvili wasn’t taking Yan down, he was throwing strikes at him. And when he wasn’t throwing strikes at him, he was trying to take him down. Dvalishvili simply spammed offence for 25 straight minutes, suffocating Yan’s ability to initiate any of his own. 

Think about it this way. Dvalishvili attempted 401 strikes and 49 takedowns over five rounds against Yan when they first fought. Yan’s three opponents since combined for 484 and 20 over 11. 

Of course, it was always plausible that a champion could defend their belt four times in a year if they had a first-round knockout or two along the way. Or a couple medium-length fights in which they controlled opponents on the ground and didn’t take much damage in return. 

But for this fighter to do it? Literally the highest-output guy in the sport who’s completed 64:42 of a possible 75 minutes over his first three fights this year? That would have been hard to imagine.

Now, technically speaking, this wouldn’t be the shortest span in which a champion’s defended their title four times. Tito Ortiz did it in 10 months at the turn of the century, beginning at UFC 29 on Dec. 16, 2000 and ending at UFC 33 on Sept. 28, 2001.

But the low double-digit numerals titling those events tell you one thing about how rare anything even close to this feat is and another about the difference in degree of difficulty. 

Twenty-five years ago, UFC was an embryonic sport. A 22-year-old Ortiz’s first professional fight was in 1997 at UFC 13. A fighter that young making their pro debut on a UFC card today is unheard of. And for that guy to be in a title fight only three years later with a 4-2 record? Impossible.

One of Ortiz’s wins on that run was over a title challenger with a 4-4-1 record. Another came against a fighter who weighed in five pounds below the middleweight limit. A third, Evan Tanner, wasn’t even affiliated with a gym, teaching himself grappling and submissions from Gracie family instructional videos. He’d spent the previous year waging one-round, 20-minute shoot wrestling fights. And a year before that, he fought 10 times total between American- and Japan-based regional promotions.

None of this cheapens what Ortiz accomplished. It was just a different time. The scale of MMA’s modernization since, not only within the UFC but the wider feeder system that sustains it, is too profound to comprehend. Today’s most ordinary UFC contender, one good enough to hang around the top 15 in their division but not quite championship-level, might go undefeated if you teleported them back to 1999.

And what if Dvalishvili went and broke Ortiz’s mark anyway? Saturday’s fight will be his third in six months. If he’s successful, turns around to fight again in March, and is successful again, Dvalishvili will have defended four times in nine months. It’s not out of the realm.

Already this year, Dvalishvili’s defeated Nurmagovmedov, O’Malley, and Sandhagen, three contenders with a combined 54-7 record at the time of those fights. Nurmagomedov was a betting favourite, undefeated, in his prime, and raised in Russia’s first family of freestyle wrestling. O’Malley was a former champion with knockouts in six of his nine UFC wins. Sandhagen was one of the division’s most tactical strikers featuring excellent takedown defence. 

Dvalishvili’s strength of schedule this year has been through the roof and in Yan on Saturday, he’ll face an effortless stance switcher with a diverse striking arsenal and 85-per-cent career takedown defence. None of these guys learned to fight off videotape.

If Dvalishvili defeats Yan, we can name him fighter of the year right there in the octagon. We can call him the best bantamweight ever — one of the sport’s most impressive champions. But perhaps most importantly, we should give the man a break. Not that he’ll take it.

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