Ben FowlkesUncrownedWed, December 3, 2025 at 10:17 PM UTC·4 min readYou ever see a guy with more get-up-and-go than Merab Dvalishvili? I mean that in just about every sense. It’s not just that the UFC men’s bantamweight champ fights at such a ridiculously high pace, it’s also that he competes the same way.
Those are different things, by the way. Former UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, for instance, fought at a very high pace. Always in your face, never letting you rest, plunging you headfirst into a frantic rinse cycle designed to make you quit or simply fall too far behind to ever catch up.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut in terms of competition pace? He never defended his belt twice in the same calendar year. It took Nurmagomedov the better part of three years to notch three title defenses. Dvalishvili has hit that same mark just in 2025 alone. At UFC 323 in Las Vegas on Saturday, Dvalishvili will attempt to set a new record, defending his belt for the fourth straight time in one calendar year.
If he’s successful in this rematch with Petr Yan, he’ll have pretty much locked up any and all Fighter of the Year accolades. How do you choose anyone else over a guy who essentially cleaned out his division in less time than it takes to get an associate degree from a community college? I have a neighbor who started putting siding on her house back when Merab was still a contender. He finished his project of becoming the UFC’s bantamweight GOAT before she finished hers — and he’s still not done.
A win on Saturday not only gives Dvalishvili a new UFC record, but it also gives him one of the greatest single years in the history of this sport. Only three UFC champs in the past 15 years — Demetrious Johnson, Kamaru Usman and Alex Pereira — have defended their belts three times in one calendar year. No one has even attempted four title defenses in a year until now.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut even if you look beyond reigning UFC champs, Dvalishvili’s work rate still stands out. There have been fighters who logged (slightly) more fights than this in one year. Kevin Holland famously fought five times in 2020, winning every one. Then again, that run also included a couple opponents most fans couldn’t pick out of a lineup — not top title contenders.
If you’re looking at fighters at or near the top of their divisions, you can go all the way back to the year Fedor Emelianenko had in 2004. He fought four times that year and won the PRIDE heavyweight grand prix, eventually defending the heavyweight title against Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira — who was then one of the world’s top heavyweights — after a no-contest caused by a head-butt a few months earlier.
Jon Jones, whose output slowed noticeably later in his career, was also once a busy young bee. The year he won the UFC light heavyweight title (2011), he fought and won four times, the last three of which were title fights. He was also in his mid-20s at the time, and it was a work rate he’d never hit again for the rest of his career.
Dvalishvili is 34. He’s hovering right there on precipice of when lighter-weight fighters typically go downhill, or at least slow way down. But if anything, he’s speeding up. Unless something terrible happens in the next few days, he’ll end up logging more fights as champion this year than he did in any of the years he spent climbing the ranks of the UFC.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHe’s also in the process of chasing down a historic winning streak. If Dvalishvili is victorious on Saturday, that will make it 15 straight victories, all in the UFC. The only two fighters to do better than that are Anderson Silva, who won 16 straight fights in the UFC, and Islam Makhachev, who just matched that mark last month.
The crazy part is, Dvalishvili seems like the only thing holding him back from even more title fights is a lack of contenders and events to headline. This is a guy who goes five rounds and then shows up hitting spinning kicks in jeans at the afterparty. And if the rumors can be believed, that’s all after starting his day with five full rounds of sparring.
More than any other UFC champ we’ve ever see, Dvalishvili seems like a human windup toy who only needs to be pointed in the right direction and then released. That would be impressive enough on its own even if he weren’t winning every single time against the very best that a talent-rich division has to offer.
But he is. He has. And there’s no reason to think he’ll stop any time soon. If he can pick up another win against Yan on Saturday, it seems like Dvalishvili’s record-setting days might be only just beginning.
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