How Ateba Gautier beats Roman Kopylov: the first five minutes

Ateba Gautier has spent 27 minutes and 33 seconds fighting in the UFC, across five fights, and he has knocked somebody down in every one of them. Roman Kopylov has spent 147 minutes and 8 seconds in there, across twelve fights, and he has been knocked down once. Put those two lines next to each other and you have the whole middleweight fight on the UFC 332 main card in Salt Lake City this Saturday. One of them has to bend.

Our model gives Gautier 59.4 percent. The market is more confident: the consensus line opened at -190 and sits around -213 today, roughly 65 percent once the bookmaker margin comes out. The model is moving the other way. It had Gautier at 69.9 on Tuesday, when I lined the whole card up against the market, and this morning's refresh took ten points off him. Information only, not betting advice.

Both numbers have the Storm favored, and I think the reason is a clock. So let's look at the clock.

The knockdown clock

Gautier has landed 110 significant strikes in the UFC and scored six knockdowns with them. That is one knockdown for every 18 strikes that land. Kopylov has landed 668 and scored nine, one for every 74. Soldado is no pillow-fisted point fighter (five UFC knockout wins, three knockdowns of Marco Tulio in May), so the gap is not about who hits hard. It is about concentration. Gautier lands 3.99 significant strikes a minute at 37.5 percent accuracy, which is modest, and he does not need more than that because so much of what lands ends something.

And it ends early. Four of his six UFC knockdowns came in the first round. Three of his five UFC wins never saw a second round: 3:32 against José Medina, 1:10 against Robert Valentin, 1:41 against Tre'ston Vines. Add up every first round he has fought in the UFC and he has landed 73 significant strikes and absorbed 42.

Now the mechanics, as far as the numbers can carry them. The stat sheet does not tell me whether a strike was a jab or a right hand, only where it went and from what range, so that is what I will stick to. Of Gautier's 293 significant strike attempts in the UFC, 254 went at the head. That is 86.7 percent. Of the 110 that landed, 93 landed at distance. Pair that with a 6-foot-4 frame, an 81-inch reach and a switch stance, and the stat line describes a long man hunting the chin from the outside. His opponents have landed 84 significant strikes on him in five fights, 82 of them at distance and two in the clinch. Nobody has been allowed close enough to do much else.

One footnote: he has attempted only 17 clinch strikes in the UFC and landed 12, including four of the six he landed on Vines at UFC 320.

Where Kopylov gets hit

Here is the part of the Kopylov file that Gautier's path runs through. Kopylov absorbs 5.08 significant strikes per minute in the UFC, and 442 of the 747 that have landed on him went to the head. Lately the rate has climbed. In his last four fights he absorbed 393 significant strikes in 60 minutes, 6.55 a minute: 142 against Chris Curtis, 99 against Paulo Costa at UFC 318, 90 against Gregory Rodrigues and 62 against Tulio.

The catch is that the chin has held. The lone knockdown on his UFC record came from Costa, in the first round. Nobody has stopped him with strikes in the UFC. His five losses are two submissions (Karl Roberson, Anthony Hernandez) and three decisions. Hitting him a lot is not a plan by itself.

This is where I would change one thing about how Gautier fights. His body shots land 65.7 percent of the time (23 of 35), twice his accuracy upstairs, where only 83 of 254 head attempts have landed. He throws about one strike in eight to the body. Kopylov has eaten 179 body strikes in the UFC, 41 of them from Costa alone. Against a man whose chin has lasted 147 minutes, the body is the lane that is open and underused, and a few more of those early would make the head hunting land more often later.

How Kopylov wins: the other clock

Kopylov's numbers run on a different clock. Across twelve UFC first rounds he has been outlanded 279 to 253 and scored one knockdown. Across second rounds, outlanded 295 to 237 and scored four. In the eight fights that reached a third round he out-landed his opponents 178 to 173 and scored four more. Eight of his nine UFC knockdowns came after the first round, and all five of his UFC stoppage wins came in round two or three, the latest of them against Chris Curtis at 4:59 of the third. He is a slow burn who gets more dangerous as the other man slows down.

Gautier has barely seen that part of a fight. His total UFC time after the first round is 11 minutes and 10 seconds, and in those minutes he has landed 37 significant strikes and absorbed 42. The only man to take him the distance, Andrey Pulyaev at UFC 324, outlanded him in all three rounds (19 to 8, 24 to 15, 16 to 11) and 59 to 34 overall, with 19 of those 59 to the body. Gautier still won a unanimous decision, and he dropped Pulyaev in the first round and again in the second. It is the most useful fight on his record for this matchup. (Pulyaev fights Damian Pinas on this same card, which is a nice bit of scheduling.)

Kopylov's tools for dragging it there are already on his sheet. He works almost entirely at range, 614 of his 668 landed strikes at distance, and he mixes targets: 99 leg strikes landed on 108 attempts and 128 body strikes on 162. Gautier has absorbed 12 leg strikes and 26 body strikes in five UFC fights, six and 19 of them from Pulyaev. Chop at a long man's legs and body in round one, take away the range his reach is built for, survive into round two, and Kopylov is fighting in the only minutes of this matchup that belong to him.

The grappling footnote

Our model agrees with most of this. Its biggest reasons for Gautier are age (24 against 34), the unbeaten UFC run and size (81 inches of reach to 75, six-four to six-foot). Striking it calls close to neutral. The one input that pulls toward Kopylov is grappling: he lands 1.1 takedowns per 15 minutes to Gautier's 0.4, and Gautier has conceded 2.6 minutes of control per 15. That control figure counts his Contender Series win, where Yura Naito shot 11 times, landed one and held him down for 5:07. In the UFC proper, opponents are 0 for 5 on takedowns against him.

Kopylov is not a wrestler by trade, but he has used it. He landed 5 of 9 takedowns against César Almeida at UFC 302, piled up 8:39 of control and won a split decision. Against Tulio he landed one, held him for 2:34 and threw 11 ground strikes around three knockdowns. For Kopylov, a takedown in round one is not about winning on the mat. It is a way to spend minutes away from the most dangerous part of Gautier's clock.

Two cards they have already shared

Both men fought at UFC 318 and both fought at UFC 328. At 318, Gautier needed 70 seconds for Valentin, and Kopylov went 15 minutes with Costa and lost. At 328, Gautier finished Ozzy Diaz 1:10 into the second round after a wild first (12 of 55 landed), and Kopylov dropped Tulio three times and still had to wait for the judges. The main card starts at 8 p.m. ET Saturday (5 p.m. PT, 1 a.m. Sunday in the UK).

If the horn goes on round one and Kopylov is still upright and still kicking, he is in the part of the fight he has lived in for his whole UFC career. If it does not, none of the rest of this will have mattered much. Make your call on the UFC 332 pick'em.