Volkanovski vs Evloev: how the champion wins at UFC 333

Here is a number that should change how you picture Saturday's main event. Alexander Volkanovski and Movsar Evloev have each attempted exactly 97 takedowns in the UFC. Evloev landed 51 of his. Volkanovski landed 33. And the champion has spent 59 minutes and 50 seconds in control of his UFC opponents, which is more than Evloev's 57 minutes and 6 seconds.

He has needed 18 fights to get there against Evloev's 10, so this is not a claim that Volkanovski is the better wrestler. It is a claim against the way this fight keeps getting described: the aging striker who has to survive the undefeated grappler. That fighter is not the one defending the featherweight title at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi.

The people who price the fight cannot split them. The consensus across 18 sportsbooks is Volkanovski -111, Evloev -109. Our model is less polite: it gives Volkanovski 33.5 percent, and the only group of inputs it scores in his favor is the striking. I already went through Evloev's 30 UFC scorecards earlier this week. This one is from the other corner. If I'm Volkanovski's coach, what does the plan look like?

The rounds Evloev loses

Start with the evidence that matters most, which is the handful of rounds the judges took away from him. In ten UFC fights there are five rounds that every judge scored against Evloev. Two came in grappling-heavy rounds, the first against Aljamain Sterling and the first against Nik Lentz. The other three look like the same round filmed three times.

Against Hakeem Dawodu in June 2021, the third round: Evloev went 2 of 4 on takedowns and was outlanded 31 to 17. Against Arnold Allen in January 2024, the third round: 1 of 6 on takedowns, outlanded 29 to 17. Against Lerone Murphy in March, the second round: no takedown attempts at all, outlanded 24 to 17. In all three, Evloev was standing at range, his shots were either missing or not coming, and the other man was hitting him more often.

That is the template. Not "stuff 51 takedowns," which nobody does, but build rounds where Evloev is a striker, and a slightly worse one than the man in front of him.

The Murphy fight is the cleanest look at it, because it stayed standing so long. By our position times Evloev spent almost 22 minutes of that fight at distance and around four in the clinch and on the floor combined. At range, Murphy outlanded him 89 to 80. Evloev won anyway, because from the third round on he started shooting. Which brings us to what Volkanovski has that Murphy didn't.

The leg kick is the first tool

Photo: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States / CC BY 2.0

Murphy landed 20 significant leg strikes on Evloev. That doesn't sound like much until you see the rest of the column: Evloev has absorbed 52 significant leg strikes in his entire UFC career, and 20 of them came in that one fight. He has landed exactly 52 of his own. Nobody has made him pay down there, so nobody knows what it does to him over five rounds.

Volkanovski has landed 447 significant leg strikes in the UFC, a quarter of his 1,815 significant strikes. He landed 75 on Max Holloway in their first fight and 67 in the second. That is more in a single night, twice, than Evloev has landed or absorbed in seven years.

Mechanically, the calf kick is the wrestler's problem as much as the striker's. A takedown starts with a level change and a drive off the lead leg. A lead leg that has been kicked 15 times by the third round is slower to plant and slower to push. I can't promise you that is how it plays out on Saturday. I can tell you it is the one weapon in this fight where the gap between the two men is not close.

At range, the gap is real

In the seven Volkanovski fights where we have position times, all of them from 2022 on and three of them losses, he landed 535 significant strikes at distance and absorbed 352. That works out to 5.05 a minute landed against 3.32 taken. In Evloev's four fights with the same data, he landed 176 at distance and absorbed 171, or 3.81 a minute to 3.70. At range, Evloev has been even with the people he's fought. Volkanovski has been well ahead of his.

The reach doesn't help Evloev much either. He has 72 inches to Volkanovski's 71 and is listed an inch taller. Both are orthodox. There is no physical edge here that changes the shape of the exchanges, which leaves the shape to whoever is better at striking in open space. On the numbers, that is the 38-year-old.

Make the wrestler wrestle backward

Photo: Paokara777 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Here is where those 33 takedowns matter. Evloev's takedown defense is good, not perfect: UFC opponents have put him down 14 times in 36 attempts. Twelve of those came from two men. Mike Grundy took him down 6 times in 15 tries, and Sterling went 6 for 8 and held him for 6 minutes and 16 seconds. When someone actually wrestles Evloev, he spends time on the bottom.

Volkanovski does not shoot often, but he shoots late and on purpose. In the fifth round of the rematch with Diego Lopes in January he went 2 for 3, held 142 seconds of control to Lopes's 71, and outlanded him 21 to 3 in a round he had no reason to give away. Against Yair Rodriguez he went 7 for 12 and spent 433 seconds on top before the third-round finish. The threat alone changes Evloev's job. A man who has to think about his own hips cannot chain entries the way he did in Murphy's fourth and fifth rounds.

The honest worry sits in the same column. Islam Makhachev won the first, second and fourth rounds of their first fight on every card, with 124 and 205 seconds of control in the first and fourth. Long control rounds are the ones Volkanovski loses. But look at the fifth: Volkanovski outlanded him 20 to 8, scored a knockdown, held 93 seconds of control to Makhachev's 36, and won it on all three cards. Against the best grappler he has faced, the last five minutes were his.

Rounds four and five belong to him

That fifth round is not a one-off. Take Volkanovski's seven five-round decisions: three against Holloway, Brian Ortega, Makhachev, and Lopes twice. In rounds one through three he outlanded his opponents 562 to 374, about 26.8 to 17.8 a round. In rounds four and five, 471 to 267, about 33.6 to 19.1. His margin per round goes from roughly nine strikes to more than fourteen. He gets busier and the other man doesn't.

Here is the counterpoint, because it is a real one. Evloev doesn't fade either. In his only 25-minute fight he went 8 of 9 on takedowns in rounds four and five and held 3 minutes and 31 seconds of control. If there is a soft spot in his rounds, it is the third round of his three-round fights, where his takedown success drops to 13 of 35 against 30 of 53 in the first two. That is a pacing habit in shorter fights, not proof of a tank that empties. Volkanovski cannot wait for Evloev to tire. He has to make the early rounds look like Murphy's second, so that by the fourth Evloev is chasing a deficit he has never had in the UFC.

What the books are pricing

The line has had a quiet two months with one wobble. It opened at Volkanovski -114 on August 16 and he touched -118 in August and again in late September. At the end of September it flipped, and by October 4 Evloev was the -118 favorite with Volkanovski at -104. By October 12 it was back to even, where it has stayed, with the book count rising from 16 to 18.

The method props say more. Volkanovski by knockout is +435, Evloev by knockout +716, and neither man's submission price is shorter than +991. The likeliest finish on the board belongs to the champion. The likeliest outcome overall is still Evloev by decision at +162, but Volkanovski by decision has come in from +222 when the props opened on October 14 to +189 now. The fight going the distance has moved from -202 to -242. The money, in other words, has drifted toward a long fight and toward the version of it where Volkanovski wins it on the cards. All of this is information, not betting advice.

Our model sees an older fighter on a shorter streak against a better takedown rate, and gives Evloev 66.5 percent. It is not wrong about any of those inputs. What it can't see is the shape of the rounds Evloev has lost, and how closely they match what Volkanovski does best. If the calves are red by the end of the second and Evloev's first shot of the fight comes from too far away, remember the Dawodu third round. If his first shot lands, never mind.

Make your call on the UFC 333 pick'em before the first bell, and check where both men sit on the featherweight rankings.