Dolidze vs de Ridder: the failed takedown is the whole point
Dolidze vs de Ridder headlines the co-main in Sacramento. De Ridder lands 29% of his UFC takedowns and controls 28 minutes anyway. His first fight at 205.
There is a number on Reinier de Ridder's record that, read cold, would tell you he cannot wrestle.
In six UFC fights he has attempted 48 takedowns and landed 14 of them. Twenty-nine percent. For context, that is the kind of accuracy figure you find on a striker who shoots twice a fight out of desperation, not on a former two-division ONE champion whose entire reputation is built on getting people to the floor and drowning them there.
He is 5-1 in those six fights, with two submissions and a knockout.
So either the takedown accuracy stat is measuring the wrong thing, or de Ridder is the luckiest man in the division. I think it is the former, and I think Saturday's co-main against Roman Dolidze at UFC Fight Night in Sacramento is the fight where we find out whether it still holds twenty pounds up the ladder. It is de Ridder's first light heavyweight fight in the UFC. All six of his previous ones were at 185.
Photo: ReinierdeRidder / CC BY-SA 4.0
Twenty-eight minutes
Here is the same six fights measured a different way. Across those bouts, de Ridder has accumulated 28 minutes and zero seconds of control time. Exactly 28 minutes. His opponents, cumulatively, have managed 20 minutes and 24 seconds against him, and 11:39 of that belongs to one man, which we will get to.
Twenty-eight minutes of control out of 14 successful takedowns is a ratio that does not happen by accident. It works out to roughly two minutes of top position per takedown landed, and that is before you account for the clinch time, the fence time, and the front headlock time that the takedown column never sees at all.
This is the thing about a certain kind of grappler that a box score is structurally incapable of showing you. The takedown statistic records a binary event: he shot, he finished or he did not. It has nothing to say about what happens in the eight seconds after a shot fails, which for de Ridder is where the fight actually gets decided. He shoots, he does not finish, he does not disengage. He stays on the hips, walks the opponent to the fence, re-attacks off a failed single into a body lock, drags to a knee, and by the time anybody has scored anything he has spent ninety seconds with his forehead in someone's sternum.
The missed takedown is not a failure in that system. It is the entry.
The Whittaker fight is the proof
If you want one bout that isolates the mechanism, it is Robert Whittaker in July 2025.
De Ridder attempted 15 takedowns. He landed 2.
He also produced 9 minutes and 6 seconds of control time in a 25-minute fight, against a former middleweight champion, while Whittaker managed 36 seconds. De Ridder won a split decision.
Sit with those numbers for a second, because they are absurd on their face. Thirteen failed takedowns against an elite defensive wrestler, and the man still spent more than a third of the fight in a controlling position. Nobody produces nine minutes of control from two completed takedowns unless the failures themselves are doing work: the fence rides, the re-shots, the reset attempts that Whittaker had to spend energy denying over and over. A cleaner wrestler with a 60 percent finish rate on his shots would have taken Whittaker down more times and controlled him less.
The pattern repeats down the sheet. Against Gerald Meerschaert, 5 takedowns from 13 attempts, submission in the third. Against Kevin Holland, 2 from 2 and a submission inside a round. Against Bo Nickal, a decorated NCAA wrestler, de Ridder landed zero takedowns from three attempts and knocked him out in the second, which is its own kind of joke.
Where it stopped working
Two fights ago it broke, and it is worth being precise about how.
Brendan Allen, October 2025. De Ridder landed 3 takedowns from 7 attempts and put together 7:05 of control, which by his standards is a productive night. Allen put together 11 minutes and 39 seconds and finished him in the fourth. That is the only time in the UFC that anyone has out-gripped him for a full fight, and it happened because Allen is comfortable in exactly the positions de Ridder wants to live in. The failed-shot-into-fence-ride sequence stops paying when the other man is equally happy there and heavier on top.
Then Caio Borralho in March: 2 takedowns from 8, and only 2:46 of control across three rounds. Borralho did not out-grapple him, he simply refused to let the sequence start, and de Ridder had no plan B that produced anything. He threw 141 significant strikes and landed 55 of them, more volume than in any UFC fight but the Whittaker decision, and it bought him nothing.
So the diagnosis is not that his wrestling is fake. It is that his wrestling has a floor and a ceiling that are close together: he cannot generate much offense without it, and when the control does not come, nothing else does either.
Dolidze gives it up, except when he does not
Now the other side of it, and this is where the fight gets picked.
Across 14 UFC bouts, opponents have shot 25 takedowns at Dolidze and completed 17 of them. That is 68 percent, and it is not a fluke of one bad night: his career takedown defense figure sits at 32 percent, which is close to the worst number you will find on a ranked fighter in either of these divisions.
The most recent demonstration was a year ago on this same matchup tree. Anthony Hernandez, who headlines Saturday, took Dolidze down 9 times from 11 attempts in August 2025, held 7:48 of control, and submitted him in the fourth. Dolidze's own control time in that fight was 45 seconds.
If the entire de Ridder question is "can he get his sequence started," Dolidze's record answers it in the affirmative more clearly than almost anyone else he could have been matched with. Our model gives de Ridder 72.8 percent. The 25-book consensus gives him 76.4, DraftKings has him at -375, and for once I do not think anybody is being unreasonable.
The part that gives me pause
Dolidze has fought three times at light heavyweight in the UFC.
He is 3-0 in them.
Khadis Ibragimov in 2020, John Allan later that year, and Anthony Smith in June 2024, and across those three fights opponents landed exactly one takedown on him. One. The same man who gets folded up by middleweight wrestlers has never really been grappled at 205, partly because the people he met there were not trying to.
He is also, at 38, the older man by three years, and he has lost his last two, to Hernandez and then to Christian Leroy Duncan in March. I am not building a case for him. I am pointing out that the division he is walking into on Saturday is the only one where his worst attribute has never been tested, and that de Ridder is arriving in it for the first time carrying a body that spent six fights making 186 pounds.
Height and reach do not save him either: de Ridder is the taller man at 6-foot-4 with a 78-inch reach against Dolidze's 6-foot-2 and 76. The 20 pounds are the only variable that is genuinely new.
What to watch
Round one, first exchange on the fence. If de Ridder shoots, gets stuffed, and stays attached, the fight is going where everybody expects. If he shoots, gets stuffed, and has to reset in open space because Dolidze is heavy enough to shrug him off the hips, then we have learned something real about what a chain-grappling system costs when the chain has more weight hanging on it.
Either it scales or it does not. That is the whole fight, and it is a better one than the odds make it look.