Yan vs Dvalishvili 3: 0 for 39 on takedowns after round two

Ten minutes into the trilogy, Merab Dvalishvili was winning the way he has always won. He had landed five takedowns, held Petr Yan down for 1:35, and all three judges had him up two rounds to none. Then he shot 39 more times, and none of them worked.

Yan kept the bantamweight title at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi by unanimous decision, 48-47 on all three cards. Darryl Ransom, David Lethaby and Vito Paolillo scored it identically: the first two rounds for Dvalishvili, the last three for Yan. The fight took Fight of the Night. The scorecards look close. The takedown column does not.

The first ten minutes went to plan

Photo: Margo Martin / Public domain

Start with what the rested version of Dvalishvili looked like, because that was the open question going in. In the preview I leaned on the idea that the December fight, where he went 2 of 29, was a tired man on his fourth five-round fight of 2025, and that 322 days off would bring back the other one. For two rounds, it did.

In the first round he shot ten takedowns and finished one, held 41 seconds of control, and threw 40 significant strikes to Yan's 11. Yan landed six. That is a champion spending five minutes on defense, which is exactly the Dvalishvili template: you do not have to finish the shots to win the round if the other man is too busy stopping them to fight back. In the second he went 4 of 9 with 54 seconds of control. Four takedowns in one round is double what he finished in all 25 minutes at UFC 323.

One detail from those two rounds matters later. Dvalishvili landed zero ground strikes in the entire fight. His rounds were won on entries and time on top, not on damage from top. That is a perfectly good way to win rounds, as long as the entries keep landing.

Then 39 shots, zero takedowns

Here is the whole fight, round by round. Significant strikes are landed of attempted, control is in seconds.

Read the takedown column down. 1 of 10, 4 of 9, then 0 of 13, 0 of 15, 0 of 11. Control time goes 41, 54, 17, 0, 2. The fourth round, where he shot 15 times and spent no time at all on top, is the most takedowns he has attempted in a single round in his UFC career. His 58 for the night is also a career high, nine more than the 49 he shot in the first Yan fight in 2023.

That is not a man who gave up on the wrestling. It is a man whose wrestling stopped paying and who kept spending anyway.

It also breaks a pattern that held for his whole title run. In his six previous five-round UFC fights, Dvalishvili finished at least two takedowns after the second round every time. Against Cory Sandhagen it was 11 of 20. Against Umar Nurmagomedov, who stuffed all four of his early attempts, it was 7 of 26 once the fight got long. The championship rounds were where he usually pulled away. On Saturday they were where he ran dry.

Yan's output: 6, 17, 24, 29, 52

Photo: MMAnytt / CC BY 3.0

The other side of the takedown column is Yan's attempt line: 11, 28, 44, 57, 88 significant strikes thrown per round. Every stuffed shot handed him another exchange at range, and he took more of them each round without his accuracy falling apart. He landed 56 percent of what he threw on the night, 128 of 228, against Dvalishvili's 36 percent.

The fifth round is the one to keep. Yan landed 52 significant strikes from 88 attempts, more than double what he landed in the first two rounds combined (23). It is the second-busiest round of his UFC career, behind only the fifth round against Jose Aldo at UFC 251, the one that ended in a stoppage. He also tried a takedown of his own in that round and spent eight seconds on top, which is a champion who no longer felt any need to respect the shot.

Look at where those strikes went. Of the 34 significant strikes Yan threw at the body and legs all night, he landed 33: 18 of 19 to the body, 15 of 15 to the legs. You do not keep attacking the legs of a man who is shooting 58 takedowns unless you are very sure of your base, and Yan was right to be. Dvalishvili, for his part, threw 298 strikes at the head and landed 100.

The judges did not score the shots

There is a wrinkle in the table that deserves a sentence of its own. Dvalishvili outlanded Yan in significant strikes over the 25 minutes, 131 to 128. He outlanded him 31 to 24 in the third round and tied him 29 to 29 in the fourth. All three judges still gave both rounds to Yan.

I think they got it right, and the reason is the takedown column again. The scoring criteria reward effective grappling, meaning takedowns that land and positions that are held. An attempt the other man stops is not on that list. Thirteen and fifteen of them in a round, with 17 and 0 seconds of control to show for it, describe a fighter who spent a large share of those rounds being stopped. Dvalishvili's extra strikes were real, but they came at 40 and 34 percent accuracy while Yan was landing more than half of his, and from the third round on the fight was happening where Yan wanted it.

Wall or tired man

The preview ended on a question: was Yan's 27 of 29 takedown defense in December a wall, or a tired man? Saturday answered it, and not the way I picked.

Dvalishvili was not tired. His significant strike attempts went up every single round: 40, 67, 78, 85, 93. His takedown attempts stayed in double figures from start to finish. The motor that won him the belt was all there. What changed after the second round was that the shot itself stopped landing on Yan, and the trilogy shows that trend has been building for three fights.

Across the three fights Dvalishvili has now shot 136 takedowns at Yan and finished 18 of them, 13.2 percent. Against his 15 other UFC opponents he is 106 of 260, 40.8 percent. Yan is not the only man who has stopped Dvalishvili's wrestling for a round. He is the only one who has learned to stop it for longer each time they meet.

Our model gave Dvalishvili 57.1 percent going in, and I wrote that I agreed with it. Both of us were reading his career, and his career was right for ten minutes. The full card and every result are on the UFC 333 event page, and the division Yan still runs is on the bantamweight rankings.

If there is a fourth fight, the first ten minutes will tell you nothing. Watch round three.