Volkanovski vs Evloev breakdown: three takedowns, 35 seconds

Movsar Evloev did exactly what both of our previews said he had to do. He shot in the first round at UFC 333, and he finished three of his four attempts. Three takedowns in a round is something no UFC opponent had ever done to Alexander Volkanovski. It bought Evloev 35 seconds of control, and Clemens Werner, Ben Cartlidge and David Lethaby all scored the round 10-9 for Volkanovski.

Five minutes later Marc Goddard was waving it off at 4:54 of the second round, and a man who walked in 20-0, with ten UFC wins that all went to the cards, had been stopped for the first time.

I have no footage to freeze-frame here, and I won't pretend otherwise. What I have is the official stat sheet, split by round, target and position, plus the cards for the one round the judges got to score. It shows a wrestler who got his takedowns and couldn't keep any of them.

A takedown is a door, not a room

Photo: Press Service of the Head and Government of the Republic of Ingushetia / CC BY 4.0

Judges don't score putting someone on the mat. They score what you do once he's there, and a takedown that turns straight into a scramble is an expensive way of changing the subject. Evloev built his UFC career on the other kind. Before Saturday he had landed 51 takedowns in ten UFC fights and banked 57 minutes and 6 seconds of control, and in the six previous rounds where he finished three or more, his control ran 66, 79, 132, 216, 262 and 274 seconds. Dan Ige in 2022 was the low mark, at 66.

Against Volkanovski: three takedowns, 35 seconds. That works out to under 12 seconds on top per takedown. Volkanovski logged 18 seconds of control in that same round without a takedown of his own, so the round was not all spent underneath. Across the whole fight Evloev had 50 seconds of control, the lowest of any UFC fight in which he landed a takedown. His previous floor was 132 seconds against Enrique Barzola.

Now put that round next to the template from my Evloev game plan. At UFC 284, Islam Makhachev won the first round on every card with one takedown and 124 seconds on top, while losing the striking 11 to 10. One takedown that stuck beat a small striking deficit. Evloev's first round was the mirror image: three takedowns that didn't stick, a striking deficit of 24 to 20, and a 10-9 the other way on all three cards. The plan said "one a round, and make it stick." He got the first half three times over.

One strike from the floor

Here is the number I keep staring at. In 9 minutes and 54 seconds of fighting, Evloev landed exactly one significant strike on the ground. Three takedowns, one ground strike. Whatever he did in those 35 seconds, it wasn't hitting anybody.

Where he did do real work was in the clinch, and this is the honest counterpoint to my headline. Evloev won the clinch exchanges 8 to 3, and eight of his 40 significant strikes went to the body, against three for Volkanovski. Those are the shots you land when you're tied up against the fence on the way to a level change. The problem is the other 31 of his landed strikes came at distance, where he landed 31 of 55 to Volkanovski's 42 of 90. He was the more accurate man at range. Volkanovski was simply throwing 35 more strikes out there.

There is also one key from our Volkanovski game plan that never showed up at all. I led that piece with the calf kick, on the strength of 75 leg strikes landed on Max Holloway in one night. On Saturday Volkanovski landed five. Five from five, so every one he threw landed, but this was not a leg-kick fight. Forty-eight of his 56 landed significant strikes went to the head. He hunted high, and he hunted volume.

Round two, the busiest round anyone has had on Evloev

Photo: Paokara777 / CC BY-SA 4.0

In the second round Volkanovski landed 32 significant strikes from 63 attempts. That is the most any opponent has landed on Evloev in a single UFC round. The previous high was Hakeem Dawodu's 31 in the third round of their 2021 fight, and Dawodu had the full five minutes to do it. Volkanovski did it in 4:54.

The wrestling went backward at the same time. Evloev shot three more times in the second and landed none. Volkanovski shot once and finished it, and spent 86 seconds in control. That is more control in one round than Evloev managed in the whole fight. That is the "make the wrestler wrestle backward" idea from the Volkanovski preview, and it didn't wait for the championship rounds.

There is a nice rhyme in the champion's own record, too. Before Saturday, exactly one UFC opponent had landed two takedowns on Volkanovski in a single round: Chad Mendes, in the second round at UFC 232, two from two with 36 seconds of control. Volkanovski stopped him later in that same round. Evloev took that record from Mendes with three in a round and 35 seconds of control. Volkanovski stopped Mendes in the round he got taken down, and stopped Evloev in the round after. Two UFC opponents have put him on the mat more than once in a round, and neither saw the third.

What the stat sheet can't tell you

There were no knockdowns in this fight, on either side. A TKO without a knockdown is usually a stoppage on accumulation, a referee deciding a man is no longer defending himself intelligently, rather than one punch that shut the lights off.

I can't tell you what the finishing sequence was. The fight-level split shows 11 of Volkanovski's 56 landed significant strikes came on the ground, all of them to the head, and his 86 seconds of control in the second round makes it likely most of those came late. But the round-by-round sheet doesn't break out position, so whether the end came from top position, from a scramble or on the feet is a question for the replay, not for me. Anyone who tells you otherwise from the box score is guessing.

Grading the two game plans

Our model gave Volkanovski 33.5 percent going in, and alongside age and record, the inputs it held against him included the grappling gap: 4.8 takedowns per 15 minutes for Evloev against 1.6, and 5.4 minutes of control against 3.0. That gap was real. Evloev did land more takedowns. What the model had no input for is the conversion rate from takedown to control against this particular man, and that was the whole fight. The sportsbook consensus had it near even all camp (Volkanovski opened -114 on August 16, Evloev was the -118 favorite by October 4, and fight day sat right around -110 each way), and on fight day the over 4.5 rounds was priced at -277. Nobody's numbers saw a ten-minute fight coming.

The principle is old and it is the one Makhachev already taught everybody in 2023: against Volkanovski, the takedown is the entry fee, not the prize. Evloev paid it three times in five minutes and never got in the room. If the featherweight rankings hand him a rematch, as we argued they might not, the question for his corner is not "did he shoot?" It's "how long did he stay?"

For the rest of the night in Abu Dhabi, including Yan and Dvalishvili, see the UFC 333 results.