Dolidze vs de Ridder: the takedown numbers behind the odds

Reinier de Ridder has attempted 48 takedowns in the UFC. He has landed 12 of them.

I want to start there, because the way this fight is being priced suggests almost nobody has looked it up. Across 24 sportsbooks, de Ridder sits at a consensus of -390 for Saturday's light heavyweight bout against Roman Dolidze at UFC Fight Night in Sacramento. Dolidze opened at +262 and has drifted out to +292. That is a market treating a grappler with a 25 percent takedown success rate as a near lock against a man whose grappling record it appears to have read exactly once, on the wrong night.

The 32 percent that is really one bad evening

The number people cite about Dolidze is that his takedown defense in the UFC is 32 percent. Seventeen takedowns landed on him across 14 fights, on 25 attempts. It is an ugly figure and it is, in the flat sense, true.

Nine of those seventeen came in a single fight.

On August 9, 2025, Anthony Hernandez took Dolidze down nine times out of eleven attempts and submitted him in the fourth round. Hernandez does that to everyone. He has spent 52.3 percent of his UFC middleweight career in control position, second among all UFC middleweights since 2015 behind only Khamzat Chimaev, and he is headlining this same card on Saturday. Using him as the baseline for whether someone can be wrestled is like using a hurricane as the baseline for whether your roof leaks.

Take that night out and the record reads: eight takedowns conceded on fourteen attempts across 13 fights. Fifty-seven percent. That is an ordinary, unremarkable number, and it is nowhere near a hole you build a three-to-one price around.

Dolidze is usually the one doing the grappling

Photo: ID MENTOR / CC BY 3.0

The framing that has Dolidze as a striker waiting to be dragged down does not survive his own per-fight numbers. He has landed 14 takedowns of his own on 32 attempts, and the control time he has accumulated is not incidental:

• 10 minutes 11 seconds against Nassourdine Imavov over five rounds
• 9 minutes 37 seconds against Laureano Staropoli
• 7 minutes 16 seconds against John Allan
• 7 minutes 7 seconds against Christian Leroy Duncan this March
• 3 minutes 33 seconds against Anthony Smith, at light heavyweight

He has thrown submission attempts in four different UFC fights, including three in the night he stopped Jack Hermansson with strikes in the second round.

The Duncan fight deserves its own line. In March, Dolidze landed three takedowns and controlled Duncan for 7 minutes and 7 seconds of a fifteen minute fight, and lost a unanimous decision. Whatever you think about that scorecard, and I have my view, the tape is not of a man being grappled. It is of a man doing the grappling and getting nothing for it.

De Ridder's problem is that everyone above 185 has been too big

Photo: ReinierdeRidder / CC BY-SA 4.0

De Ridder's UFC run started 4-0 and it was a genuinely spectacular four. He submitted Gerald Meerschaert, submitted Kevin Holland in the first round at UFC 311, stopped Bo Nickal in the second, and took a split decision from Robert Whittaker in a five round main event.

Look closer at that Whittaker night and the pattern starts: he attempted 15 takedowns and landed two.

Then came the two losses, and both were losses in the grappling.

Brendan Allen beat him at his own game last October, controlling de Ridder for 11 minutes and 39 seconds to de Ridder's 7 minutes and 5 seconds before stopping him in the fourth. In March, Caio Borralho stuffed six of eight takedown attempts and narrowly out-controlled him on the way to a unanimous decision. De Ridder has now been out-grappled in consecutive fights by men who are not, on paper, better grapplers than he is.

And Saturday he moves up to light heavyweight, which is the weight class where his career has already been interrogated. Anatoly Malykhin knocked him out at heavyweight in December 2022 and knocked him out again at light heavyweight in March 2024. His only win above middleweight since is a TKO of Magomedmurad Khasaev at UAE Warriors 51 in July 2024.

Dolidze, meanwhile, has been at light heavyweight in the UFC before and won all three times: Khadis Ibragimov by first round TKO on his debut, John Allan by split decision, and Anthony Smith over three rounds in June 2024.

And if he cannot get it down?

The fair counter to everything above is that de Ridder does not actually need the takedown to win, and there is one piece of evidence for it: he attempted 15 takedowns against Whittaker, landed two, and still took a split decision in a five round main event.

But look at what he does with the other twenty three minutes. In six UFC fights and 82 minutes of cage time, de Ridder has landed 203 significant strikes. That is 2.5 per minute, the lowest output of any fighter on Saturday's main card. Dolidze lands 3.2 per minute and has scored four knockdowns to de Ridder's two.

De Ridder's ceiling is grappling. When the grappling has failed him, as it did against Allen and Borralho, he has not had a second gear to reach for, and both times a man who could out-wrestle him simply did.

The common opponent

Both men have fought Kevin Holland inside eleven weeks of each other.

Dolidze knocked Holland out in the first round at UFC 307 in October 2024. De Ridder submitted Holland in the first round at UFC 311 in January 2025. Neither result separates them, but it does establish the thing the price seems to have forgotten: Dolidze finishes people. Five of his UFC wins are knockouts, and four of them came in the first round: Ibragimov at 4:15, Kyle Daukaus at 1:13, Phil Hawes at 4:09, and Holland. Hermansson went at 4:06 of the second.

What I actually think

De Ridder should be favored. He is four years younger, he is the more complete submission grappler, and 21-4 against 15-5 is a real gap in career quality.

But -390 is not "should be favored." It is "the fight is a formality," and the numbers underneath it say the opposite. It asks you to believe that a man landing one takedown in four will impose grappling on a light heavyweight who stuffs 57 percent of the attempts against him when he is not fighting a statistical outlier, who has won at this weight three times, who has knocked out five UFC opponents, and who out-controlled his last opponent for seven minutes and only lost because three judges did not care.

The last two men to beat Reinier de Ridder did it by grappling with him. Dolidze grapples. Somebody at 24 sportsbooks priced this as though he does not.