Alexander Volkanovski is officially the UFC's all-time leader in featherweight title wins after his UFC 333 knockout of Movsar Evloev. (Jeff Bottari via Getty Images) Ben Fowlkes Uncrowned Sat, October 24, 2026 at 10:55 PM UTC · 6 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement UFC 333 finished with a bang on Saturday , as both titles up for grabs stayed put in a pair of spectacular showings . Here are the biggest takeaways from the UFC's latest visit to Abu Dhabi.
He didn't just beat another challenger. He knocked out an undefeated top contender. In the second round. At the age of 38. He also set the new record for UFC title fight victories in the division with nine, and he made it look shockingly easy. That's the stuff GOATs are made of, my friends.
Volkanovski has been in the UFC for 10 years now, but at UFC 333 he looked as good as he ever has. It's not supposed to work like that. Especially in the lighter weight classes, fighters are supposed to hit a steep decline once they crack their mid-30s.
So how is Volkanovski out here seemingly adding new tricks to his bag, while also still looking like a prime athlete carved out of marble? We've already seen him clean out the greats of the former era. Now he's starting to do the same to the next one.
If you're waiting around for this guy to fall off and cede his spot to the young bucks of the division, you'd better get comfortable.
And this version of him is going to be tough to beat.
Merab Dvalishvili's strategy for Saturday's finale of this trilogy seemed pretty straightforward. He wanted to overwhelm Yan with takedowns, whether they succeeded or not, in order to force Yan into playing only defense at the expense of his offense.
Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili gave us all all-time classic trilogy.
That worked for the first two rounds. Dvalishvili attempted 19 takedowns in those first two frames, according to the UFC's official stats. He was credited with completing five of them. Over the next three rounds, he attempted 39 (!!!) more and completed zero. Meanwhile, Yan was adding new lumps to Dvalishvili's head with each minute he was permitted to stay upright in punching range.
Yan dominated those final three rounds in terms of damage delivered, and he shut down the best part of Dvalishvili's game in the process. Yan's first win over the former champ was brilliant, but it also seemed like it might have been just one last gasp from a fighter the division once thought it had left behind. This second straight win now proves that it was way more than that. No one can doubt that Yan is the champ again for real now.
(And there might be no one happier about that than Sean O'Malley.)
After starting his pro career with nine straight wins, he did the old win-one-lose-one bit in the UFC just as the competition got stern and the lights got bright. That may have led to some people jumping off the bandwagon (not that a submission loss to Brandon Royval is anything to be ashamed of), but my guess is there will be some pleas for reentry after Saturday's highlight-reel knockout of Ramazan Temirov.
At just 27 years old, there's a lot to like in Kavanagh's game. He's still something of a work in progress, but it feels like we're getting glimpses of the fighter he can become. But now that he's back in the win column, he can expect to meet the upper echelon of the flyweight division soon. And there are no easy nights of work to be found there.
The press conference stunt maybe didn't go off exactly as planned, but it did at least succeed in making him into a topic of conversation . Odds are he didn't think the conversation would center on whether or not UFC CEO Dana White can recognize a top-five heavyweight who's been fighting in his promotion for the past decade, but almost any publicity is good publicity at this point.
Volkov has now won three straight, and with better work by the judges he could easily be sitting on an eight-fight win streak, which is practically unheard of at heavyweight these days. Thing is, though, he still struggles for recognition (literally, at times). He struggles to even get people to remember him outside of the week of his fight. Heavyweight is somehow both a barren wasteland and also an island of misfit toys, with each man having to find his own way to stand out.
Then there's Volkov, quietly winning forgettable decisions while peeking out to show more and more personality. Now we find ourselves asking, does it count as a workable gimmick to be the forgotten man of the division? After this win over Rizvan Kuniev, we might be about to find out.
Is the Alexander Volkov moment finally upon us?!
Don't get me wrong, 20-1 is still a great professional record. And losing to Volkanovski is by no means a sign that your career has hit a dead end. But let's also not pretend like this isn't a tough time to be a wrestling-first, decision-prone fighter in the UFC . The focus now is all on action fighters and quick knockouts. That's what the UFC wants — and what it rewards. Evloev's rise was often the opposite of that. But wins are wins, and at a certain point he'd beaten just about every other viable contender, so he got this title shot almost by default.
Losing Saturday's fight, and in such emphatic fashion, is a major blow for a fighter like Evloev. How does he ever get another shot, at least as long as Volkanovski stays champ? Of the five fighters ranked below him, he's already beaten four of them. The lone outlier, Jean Silva, is someone the UFC might prefer to keep him away from, since he's exactly the style of fighter the brass might want to groom for a future title shot.
It's a tough time to be a guy who sees a lot of scorecards but not a lot of performance bonuses. And after losing his first shot at UFC gold, there's no guarantee Evloev will ever get another.
Source: Sports
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