Volkanovski's next challenger should come out of Sterling vs Vallejos

Saturday in Abu Dhabi answered the question everybody was asking about Alexander Volkanovski. At 38 he walked through the hardest style matchup left at featherweight, stopped Movsar Evloev at 4:54 of the second round, and handed a man who came in 20-0 the first stoppage loss of his career. I wrote the UFC 333 recap on fight night and ended the Volkanovski section with the obvious follow-up: who is next?

Having spent two days with the featherweight rankings, my answer is that there are almost no new names left, and the one fight already booked that could produce one is on November 21.

The man he just beat had already beaten everyone else

Photo: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Brittany Primavera / Public domain

Here is the official board as it stood going into UFC 333, ranks two through seven, with the problem written next to each name:

• No. 2 Diego Lopes (lost to Volkanovski twice, by unanimous decision in April 2025 and again in January; lost to Evloev in 2023; now booked against Charles Oliveira at lightweight on December 12)
• No. 3 Lerone Murphy (lost to Evloev by majority decision in March)
• No. 4 Aljamain Sterling (lost to Evloev at UFC 310 in December 2024)
• No. 5 Jean Silva (knocked out by Lopes in September 2025)
• No. 6 Yair Rodriguez (stopped by Volkanovski in July 2023)
• No. 7 Arnold Allen (lost to Evloev in January 2024)

Five of those six have already lost to the champion or to the man the champion just stopped. The sixth lost to the No. 2, whom the champion has beaten twice. Evloev spent three years doing the division's due diligence one decision at a time, and on Saturday Volkanovski inherited all of it in ten minutes.

Go further down and it is the same story with older dates. Brian Ortega, No. 13, went five rounds with Volkanovski at UFC 266 in 2021. The championship side of featherweight is a closed loop.

The case for running it back

Let me give the rematch its due, because it is not a silly idea. Evloev was winning the first round. He landed three of his four takedown attempts in it and the significant strikes were close, 24 to 20. Volkanovski turned it in the second, 32 of 63 significant strikes and every one of Evloev's three shots stuffed, but the stoppage came six seconds from the horn. A man who had never been finished, losing at 4:54 of round two after taking round one, has a better rematch argument than most.

He also has the ranking. On our projected board after UFC 333, Evloev stays at No. 1 even after the loss.

But the honest version of that argument is "he was close, and then he got knocked out." Volkanovski has gone back to a well before, two straight decisions over Lopes in under ten months, and I don't think anybody would call that the high point of his reign. An immediate rematch with a man he just stopped would be the same thing again.

Lopes is leaving, Murphy is waiting

The No. 2 contender has made the decision for everyone. Lopes is booked against Oliveira in the five-round main event of UFC 335, at lightweight. After two losses to the champion that is a reasonable career call, and it takes the most obvious "next" name off the featherweight table for the rest of the year.

That leaves Murphy, 17-1-1, whose only loss is the majority decision to Evloev in March. Of everybody on that list he came closest to beating the man Volkanovski just stopped. If the UFC wants a title fight in the first quarter, he is the safe pick, and I would not complain about it.

The fight that actually answers something

Photo: MMAnytt / CC BY 3.0

On November 21, at the Prochazka vs Stirling card, No. 4 Sterling fights No. 9 Kevin Vallejos. It is a three-round fight, and it is the only booked featherweight bout that can hand Volkanovski a challenger he has not effectively already beaten.

Sterling, 26-5, has done what was asked since moving up. He lost to Evloev over three rounds in December 2024, then won five-round decisions over Ortega in August 2025 and Youssef Zalal in April. He is a former bantamweight champion, he has never fought Volkanovski, and the wrestling-first problem he poses is the one Evloev posed, minus the part where Volkanovski already solved it on Saturday. I am not sure that is a selling point.

Vallejos is the more interesting answer. He is 24, 14 years younger than the champion, 18-1, and his last two wins came by knockout: Giga Chikadze in the second round in December and Josh Emmett in the first in March. The one loss on his record came against No. 5 Jean Silva, a unanimous decision on the Contender Series in September 2023, and he has won six straight since, four of them in the UFC. He has never faced the champion or anybody the champion has beaten. If he beats a former champion in November, he arrives as a question nobody at the top of the division has answered yet. The last young knockout artist Volkanovski met with the belt on the line was Ilia Topuria, and we all remember how that one went.

The pick

Make Sterling vs Vallejos the title eliminator out loud, before it happens, so the winner does not have to campaign for it. If Sterling wins, he gets the shot his record already earns. If Vallejos wins, the UFC gets something it has not had at 145 in a while: a challenger nobody has seen lose to the champion yet.

Murphy has a real case and should get the one after that. Evloev should get a fight that is not a rematch first.

And if the UFC looks at all of this and books Volkanovski against somebody he has already beaten? Then we will know the rankings were never the point.