Petr Yan kept the bantamweight title in Abu Dhabi by winning a fight the totals say he lost. Merab Dvalishvili landed more significant strikes (131 to 128), took him down five times to none, and held 1:54 of control to Yan's 0:23. All five takedowns came in the first two rounds, and all three judges gave both of those rounds to Dvalishvili.
Then the fight turned. Dvalishvili kept shooting, on his way to a UFC record for takedown attempts in a single fight, and Yan kept getting up. Across the last three rounds Dvalishvili landed no takedowns and had about 20 seconds of control in total. Yan took rounds three, four and five on every card. 48-47, three times.
We score it 76–24 to Yan. That is the base score for a unanimous decision with nothing added. The dominance part of our score only rewards a winner for the stats he wins, and over the full 25 minutes Yan won none of them. It is the lowest score any unanimous-decision winner can get from us. Judges score a fight round by round, and our score reads the whole fight. Here they told different stories, and both are accurate.
The main event was the opposite kind of night. Alexander Volkanovski, No. 1 on our featherweight board, stopped No. 2 Movsar Evloev in the second round, the first loss of Evloev's career. We score it 89–11, a dominant win.
Seven of the 14 wins on the card were dominant (85 or more), and six of those were first-round finishes. The highest score of the night was Dominick Reyes over Azamat Murzakanov, 91–9, from a head kick and punches at 2:40 of round one. The closest was Colby Thicknesse's split decision over Asaf Chopurov, 73–27.
Ratings and board places from this card update with the weekly update.
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