Movsar Evloev has never lost in the UFC. Ten fights, ten wins, and on 24 October he headlines UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi against Alexander Volkanovski for the featherweight title.
On our featherweight board he is No. 2. He is also the least dominant winner in the top 15.
Those two facts don't contradict each other, and the gap between them is about the clearest example we have of what the Index is trying to measure.
All ten of his UFC wins went to the judges. Nine came at featherweight (the other was at a catch weight, which no division board counts), and only one of those nine scored 85 or more, our line for a dominant win: a unanimous decision over Diego Lopes in 2023, in Lopes's first UFC fight. That makes him 1 of 9. The next lowest share in the top 15 is a third: Arnold Allen at 4 of 12 and Pat Sabatini at 3 of 9. Evloev's average winning score, 80.4, is also the lowest of the fifteen.
So how is he second? Because a rating cares about two things and he is very good at one of them. A win's score says how clearly you won. The opponent's rating says what beating them was worth. Evloev's last three opponents were Arnold Allen, Aljamain Sterling and Lerone Murphy, and all three were among the highest-rated featherweights in our numbers when he fought them. You don't have to finish people like that to climb. You have to beat them, and he has, every time.
What he hasn't done is beat them by much. The Murphy fight in March was a majority decision, two cards at 48–46 and one at 47–47, after he lost a point in the fourth for a low blow. We scored it 75.5 out of 100. A win like that still counts. It just adds less than a clear one would.
The result is a record that is very hard to argue with and easy to undersell. A fighter who wins every round by a little is still winning every round. What the numbers can't tell you is whether the margins are a ceiling or simply how he likes to fight.
Volkanovski sits ten points above him on the board. That is closer than the system can honestly separate two fighters, so the order of the top two means very little until they meet on the 24th. The board updates after the card.
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