The relentless Dvalishvili will be chasing history at UFC 323

Mirab Dulishvili’s fighting style is relentless. All gas, no brakes. He fights in perpetual motion, moving around at constant distance, moving late to change angles, throwing offense at opponents from all sides with attempts to get in and out of bounds and takedowns.

His volume and cards are unmatched. On average over his UFC career, Delishvili landed more than 20 significant strikes and approximately 2.5 every five minutes. For most UFC fighters, either of these strikes will produce a better round of their fight and a potential 10-8 score. For Dvalishvili, doing both is just normal.

It’s unusual to be doing more than five rounds four times in 12 months at the highest level of the game, while managing the demands of training, physical rehabilitation, psychological stress, media demands, weight management, strategic preparation, and ancillary business opportunities a UFC champion must address between bouts. It’s crazy.

Yet that’s what Dvalishvili is in a position to try this Saturday when he steps up to UFC 323 for a bantamweight title fight with Peter Yan, attempting to become the first UFC champion to defend his belt four times in a calendar year.

It is Dvalishvili of all people who is following this unprecedented feat that is somehow appropriate and unbelievable. It’s hard to imagine any other athlete in the sport having the motor and stamina to tackle such a demanding schedule. But it’s also hard to imagine any athlete having the physical and mental bandwidth to do so while regularly racking up five-round decision victories on the back of such a hard-fought style.

Dvalishvili has the fifth longest average fight time among active fighters, and the ninth longest in UFC history. He has the seventh most strikes of any UFC athlete ever and will likely move into the top three if Saturday’s fight goes multiple rounds. His 117 career strikeouts broke a Georges St. Pierre record (90) that stood for decades. At his current rate, he will be flat with 150 late next year.

And that’s what we see. We’re not privy to the hours, days, and months he’s spent fighting and fighting in the gym in between to build the conditioning base that allows him to maintain such incredible bulk. Yet here he is, already one of only eight fighters in UFC history to successfully defend a title three times within a year, making a complete trip around the earth’s sun before breaking a fourth challenge.

Of course, Dvalishvili’s relentless schedule is a byproduct of the UFC throwing high-level opponents at him. He has already beaten each of the UFC’s No. 1-4 ranked bantamweights once and is currently working on beating them again. He has already beaten Sean O’Malley twice and, should he get another win over Yann on Saturday, will likely have another crack at Umar Nurmagomedov, who he defeated by unanimous decision in January.

You can at least start selling yourself on the possibility of a different story against Yan, who first faced Dvalishvili two years ago. The former champion went undefeated in three fights, winning nine of 11 rounds by unanimous decision in the process. It’s certainly possible that Yann has improved enough to find a flaw in Dvalishvili’s game that others haven’t. But it certainly isn’t that Yann has felt any closer to the pressure and pace Dvalishvili can put on him than any of his opponents.

When Dvalishvili fought Yan in March 2023, he held the UFC record for most knockout attempts at 49. In his last outing against Cory Sandigan, Devaleshvili made just 37 attempts. Only five fights in UFC history have seen a competitor attempt 30 or more takedowns. Dvalishvili is responsible for three of them.

But what really stands out about Dvalishvili’s first fight with Yann is that he also attempted 401 strikes, the sixth most in a UFC bantamweight fight. That’s two-and-a-half times more strikes than Yan – not exactly a prolific fighter – threw on the night.

When Dolshvili wasn’t taking Yann down, he was attacking him. And when he wasn’t attacking her, he was trying to take her down. Dvalishvili spammed the offense for just 25 straight minutes, stifling Yan’s ability to make any starts.

Think this way. Dvalishvili attempted 401 strikes and 49 takedowns against Yan over five rounds when they first fought. Yan’s three opponents combined for 484 and 11 over 20.

Of course, it was always possible that a champion could defend their belt four times in a year if they had a first-round knockout or two along the way. Or a couple of medium-length fights in which they controlled the opponent on the ground and didn’t take much damage in return.

but for hey Warriors to do it? Literally the most productive guy in sports who has completed 64:42 of a possible 75 minutes over his first three fights this year? that It would be hard to imagine.

Now, technically speaking, that wouldn’t be the shortest streak in which a champion defended his title four times. Tito Ortiz did it in 10 months at the turn of the century, starting at UFC 29 on December 16, 2000 and ending at UFC 33 on September 28, 2001.

But the low double-digit numbers titling these events tell you one thing about how rare something even close to this task is, and another about the difference in degree of difficulty.

Twenty-five years ago, the UFC was a crazy sport. A 22-year-old Ortiz’s first professional fight was in 1997 at UFC 13. A fighter that young is making his pro debut on a UFC card today is unheard of. And for that guy just three years later with a 4-2 record in a title fight? impossible

Ortiz’s streak on that run was topped by a title challenge with a 4-4-1 record. The second came against a fighter who weighed five pounds under the middleweight limit. A third, Evan Tanner, not even affiliated with the gym, taught himself grappling and submissions from Gracie family instructional videos. He spent the last year fighting a round, 20-minute shoot wrestling match. And the year before that, he fought a total of 10 times between American and Japan-based regional promotions.

None of this is cheap that Ortiz got. It was just a different time. The scale of MMA’s modernization, not only within the UFC but the broader feeder system that sustains it, is too great to comprehend. Today’s most common UFC competitor, a good one who can hang around the top 15 in his division but isn’t quite championship-level, can be unbeatable if you teleport them back to 1999.

And what if Dvalishvili went and broke Ortiz’s mark? Saturday’s fight will be his third in six months. If he is successful, turns around to fight again in March, and is successful again, Delishvili will have defended four times in nine months. It is not out of scope.

Already this year, Dvalishvili defeated Nurmagov Madoff, O’Malley and Sandhagen, three candidates with a combined 54-7 record at the time of these fights. Nurmagomedov was a betting favorite, undefeated, in his prime, and raised in the first family of Russian freestyle wrestling. O’Malley was a former champion with six of his nine UFC fights by knockout. Sindhgan was one of the most tactical strikers in the division, with excellent striking defence.

Duvalashvili’s strength of schedule has been through the roof this year and on Saturday in Yan, he’ll face an attempted positional switcher with a different arsenal of weapons and an 85-percent career-ending defense. None of these guys learned to fight with video tape.

If Dvalishvili beats Yann, we can name him Fighter of the Year right there in the Octagon. We can call him the best bantamweight ever – one of the sport’s most impressive champions. But perhaps most importantly, we should give the man a break. Otherwise he will take it.