Have you ever met a more dynamic person than Merab Dvalishvili? I mean that in almost every sense of the word. Not only does the UFC men’s bantamweight champion compete at such a ridiculously high rate, but he does it the same way.
By the way, these are different things. For example, former UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov fights at a very fast pace. Always in front of you, never letting you rest, throwing you headfirst into a frantic flushing cycle designed to make you quit or simply fall too far behind to catch up.
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But in terms of competitive pace? He has never defended his belt twice in the same year. It took Nurmagomedov the better part of three years to defend his title three times. In 2025 alone, Dvalishvili achieved the same goal. At UFC 323 in Las Vegas on Saturday, Dvalishvili will attempt to set a new record and defend his belt for the fourth consecutive time in one year.
If he succeeds in his rematch with Petr Yan, he will be a lock for almost all of the Fighter of the Year honors. How do you choose someone other than a guy who basically cleaned up his department in less time than it took to get an associate’s degree from community college? I have a neighbor who started putting siding on her house when Merab was still a competitor. Before she accomplished her goal, he accomplished his plan to become the UFC’s bantamweight GOAT — and he’s not done yet.
Saturday’s win not only sets a new UFC record for Dvalishvili, but also cements him as having one of the greatest single seasons in the history of the sport. Over the past 15 years, only three UFC champions — Demetrius Johnson, Kamaru Usman and Alex Pereira — have defended their belts three times in one year. So far, no one has attempted four title defenses in one year.
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But even if you look beyond the reigning UFC champion, Dvalishvili’s work rate still stands out. Some fighters log (slightly) more fights than this number in a year. Kevin Holland played five notable games in 2020 and won every one of them. Then again, this round also includes some opponents that most fans wouldn’t be able to pick out of the lineup – rather than top title contenders.
If you’re looking at fighters at or near the top, you can go back to Fedor Emelianenko’s year in 2004. He fought four times that year and won the PRIDE Heavyweight Championship, eventually defending the heavyweight title against Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, one of the top heavyweights in the world at the time, after a headbutt that resulted in a no-contest a few months earlier.
Jon Jones’s production slowed down significantly late in his career, but he was once a busy little bee. The year he won the UFC light heavyweight championship (2011), he fought and won four times, the last three of which were title fights. Still only in his 20s at the time, it was a productivity he would never again achieve for the rest of his career.
Fun fact: Merab Dvalishvili fought five rounds before doing this, just because.
(Sean M. Hafey, Getty Images)
Dvalishvili is 34 years old. He’s teetering on the precipice of the usual decline for lightweights, or at least slowness Way down. But if anything, he’s accelerating. Unless something terrible happens in the next few days, he’ll have more fights this year as champion than any other year he’s been in the UFC rankings.
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He’s also chasing a historic winning streak. If Dvalishvili wins on Saturday, it will give him a 15-fight win streak, all in the UFC. The only two fighters better than that are Anderson Silva, who has won 16 straight fights in the UFC, and Islam Makhachev, who just tied that streak last month.
The crazy thing is, it seems like the only thing holding Dvalishvili back from more title fights is a lack of contenders and headlines. This is a guy who went five rounds and then did spin kicks in jeans at the afterparty. If rumors are to be believed, then so be it back He starts his day with five full rounds of sparring.
Dvalishvili is more like a human wind-up toy than any other UFC champion we’ve seen, and just needs to be pointed in the right direction and then released. Even if he doesn’t win every time against the best players the talented department has to offer, that’s impressive enough in itself.
But he is. He has. And there’s no reason to think he’ll stop anytime soon. If he can win again against Yan on Saturday, Dvalishvili’s record-setting days may just be beginning.
