UFC 273 takeaways: Khamzat Chimaev may not be superhuman, but he’s still going to be UFC champion by the time this is done

Alexander Volkanovski remains the man to beat at 145 pounds, Aljamain Sterling defied the doubters, and the Khamzat Chimaev hype train may not have continued its carefree ride, but it’s still on the tracks after one of the wildest fights of the year. Between Volkanovski’s brutal burial of “The Korean Zombie” Chan Sung Jung, Sterling’s long-awaited redemption over Petr Yan, Chimaev’s war with Gilbert Burns and more, there’s plenty to discuss after UFC 273.

Let us take a look at our top five lessons learned.

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1. So, Khamzat Chimiev turns out to be a human.

You know what? That’s OK.

The Chechen wolf’s historic start to his UFC career was never going to last forever. That’s why it was historic — because we’d never seen anything quite like it. The majority of all-timers can’t make it through the maze of top five without getting a few scrapes.

Given the fervor of the MMA industry heading into Saturday’s show, it was impossible to expect anything less than another extraordinary performance. That being said, it’d be foolish to let the weight of our own outsized expectations obscure us from what just played out in front of our eyes: A man with 10 professional MMA bouts, who made his pro debut a mere four years ago and wasn’t even a proper UFC fighter when Kamaru Usman and Jorge Masvidal collided for the first time at UFC 251, just strolled into Jacksonville, Fla., and laid down a “Fight of the Year” contender against one of the most talented welterweights in the world, walking out victorious in just his fifth octagon appearance. It’s amazing and quite impressive.

Chimaev is now a card-carrying member of the club — he’s one of the best welterweights on planet Earth. This is a fact. And while he may be less of a mystery on this Sunday morning than he was on Friday night, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because UFC 273 may have been exactly what Chimaev needed — a big win, but also a stark reminder that you can’t walk through everyone in this game. It was clear that his corner had a lot of frustration at his style throughout the fight. Chimaev even admitted it himself post-fight, at least in a roundabout way — he fell a bit too much for his own hype. He still has all of the physical and technical tools. But his heart, his chin, his recoverability, and most of all, his gameness — they’re all on a world-class level as well. Life is different when you reach the top five. He won’t be able to take this for granted the next time.

Photo by James Gilbert/Getty Images

That’s why Saturday was probably a necessary result in the long run. It was the perfect way to settle us all down and ground Chimaev’s path a bit more in reality. There’s no rush now. Fanciful thoughts about three-division potential gold won’t continue. We can all just chill. Leon Edwards earned his title shot against Usman 10 times over, so that bout can still move forward as planned. For Chimaev, the Colby Covington fight suddenly makes more sense than ever, because there are seemingly plenty of vocal critics who think a win over a top-3 welterweight “exposed” Chimaev as a fraud (which is patently absurd), so hey, let’s have the Covington fight answer some lingering doubts. Chimaev won’t be the betting favorite against the pound-for-pound No. 1 fighter in the game anymore, but he probably shouldn’t have been anyway. He’s 27 years old and just getting started.

The question remains: Is Khamzat-Chimaev as good? After Saturday, we know he’s not invincible, but he’s also an undeniable title contender. And if he can keep progressing at a natural rate, whether it’s a few years down the line or at the end of 2022, there is no doubt in my mind: By the end of this story, “The Wolf” will be a UFC champion.

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2. Go ahead and inject Herb Dean’s stoppage of Alexander Volkanovski vs. Korean Zombie into any and all training curriculum for MMA referees moving forward.

Dean has been a much-maligned figure over the past few years — most of it deserved — but his willingness to save Chan Sung Jung from himself was one of the shining moments of his decades-long career as an MMA official. Really, it was a boxing stoppage — and Dean did Jung a mercy, because the outcome was only headed in one direction. We didn’t need to see a veteran like Jung, who’s already given so much of himself to the game, reach whatever place that fight inevitably was going to reach. In MMA, there are not enough proactive stops. Hopefully Dean’s timely trigger at UFC 273 — and the overwhelmingly unanimous praise it received from the community — leads to more of its kind.

What more could you ask for from the champ?

Volkanovski was a heavy favorite to win on Saturday, but even so, the way in which he pulled it off was as close to a flawless victory as exists in high-level MMA. Volkanovski was three steps ahead of Jung from the opening bell. His quick-trigger decision-making and sublime in-cage IQ continues to be a thing of beauty to watch. And the numbers are starting to reach rarefied air. Volkanovski is now a perfect 11-0 to start his UFC run. Let’s take a look at who the other modern fighters are that have achieved or exceeded this feat. This is a very short list: Anderson Silva, Khabib Nurmagomedov and Kamaru Uman. You want to talk about keeping good company? Sheesh. If Volkanovski hadn’t lost a random fight as a welterweight (!) way back in 2013, we’d be talking about an undefeated UFC champion with a 25-0 record who’d likely be drawing lofty comparisons. Although it seems absurd to believe that, it is true.

Pound-for-pound is always a fairly stupid and subjective argument, but it’s getting harder to deny Volkanovski as a top three, top two, or even top one talent in the sport. Just look at his last seven fights: Darren Elkins (who was on a career-best six-fight UFC win streak at the time), Chad Mendes, Jose Aldo, Max Holloway x2, Brian Ortega, and now Jung. That’s wild. It’s not an easy name to remember among these men. Although I am not yet ready to rank Volkanovski higher than Kamaru Usman on the pound for pound list, it is probably time to make him a healthy No. 2.

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3. The unbridled feelings of “F*** YOUOOOUUUUU!” that swept through Aljamain sterling’s body after Saturday’s fight must have caused unbelievable schadenfreude. I believe “The Funkmaster”, who is set to take a triumph lap, deserves it. Sterling has been the butt of the joke for more than a year now, ridiculed everywhere he went, largely due to factors outside of his control. Every innocuous post he made on social media wound up bathed in idiocy from the peanut gallery — idiocy which only doubled down upon itself once Sterling was forced to withdraw from October’s scheduled rematch with Petr Yan because of lingering complications from a neck surgery that was supposed to take “20 to 30 percent” of his mobility away.

( Seriously, read Alan Jouban’s account of the experience with this same procedure. You’ll have a renewed respect for Aljo. )

All the while, Sterling was left to languish on the sidelines, watching the world celebrate the man who nailed him in the face with a blatantly illegal knee.

Regardless of whether you like him or not, that’s a lot to handle.

Yet here he is, more than a year later, still champion, the belt still wrapped around his waist, and Yan suddenly mired in an 0-2 hole and being left to beg for a trilogy fight.

The schadenfreude should be tasty.

At some point after March 2021, the broader MMA world seemed to convince itself that Sterling was some schmuck who didn’t deserve to be in the same cage as Yan, even despite the fact that their first fight was a back-and-forth affair until the championship rounds. In retrospect, that’s absurd — Sterling and Yan fought nine rounds. The majority of these rounds were competitive. You can call Saturday’s second fight a close one, although it wasn’t an act of robbery. Yan didn’t give the kind of performance that would justify outrage at the outcome. I still need another rewatch, but either a draw due to a 10-8 second round for Sterling or an outright Sterling win made the most sense to me. Although the first round was the most decisive, it was close and Sterling had two of the dominant stanzas by a large margin.

I understand that Sterling and UFC want to challenge T.J. Dillashaw for the UFC’s next step. This is a great matchup with lots of heat and intrigue. It’s not something I hate, but it’s also something I do not love. This is partly due to the fact that Dillashaw must have lost against Cory Sandhagen using any sensible scorecard and partly because it seems improbable to give a cheater a title shot with only one unsuccessful fight back.

But as much as the old head in me wants to figure out a way to fit Jose Aldo into the title picture — I think he has legitimate paths to victory against Sterling and, if I’m being real, I just want to see him win one more belt before he’s gone — even my nostalgia-loving self can’t make the mental gymnastics work to get Aldo there. Dillashaw will be the fighter.

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4. Few sights in MMA are more harrowing than watching a strawweight get trapped in the jaws of death that is Mackenzie Dern’s ground game. We saw it again on Saturday. Watching Tecia Torres desperately fend off Dern while trying to keep her limbs attached to her body in that second round was high theater, like watching a hapless swimmer fend off an entire school of starving sharks. There’s nothing quite like it in women’s MMA.

Despite Dern’s biggest victory, Dern still needs a takedown that she can rely on to win fights against top-level opponents.

At this point, that glaring hole is the lone thing holding Dern back from competing against the elite of the elite, because she’s making marked improvements elsewhere in every fight. She just beat the highest-ranking high-level gatekeeper of the division in a fight where she was able only to control the pace for one round. This is a remarkable feat.

Dern is still just 29 years old and was always going to be a work in progress for the first few years of her UFC run. She will be crowned champion if that is resolved.

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5. What exactly did the world look like when Aleksei Oleinik made his MMA debut? Let’s see. Bill Clinton just beat Bob Dole in his second term to become the U.S. president. Hot new act the Spice Girls were the talk of the musical world after releasing their debut album. Kobe Bryant was the youngest ever NBA player. And 7-year-old me was out on the playground tricking gullible idiots to trade their rare Mewtwos for my super special Rattatas. Yet, at age 44, Oleinik is still out here doing the damn thing, competing at the highest levels and submitting random 20-somethings under the UFC umbrella.

It’s impossible to overstate how impressive that is.

“The Boa Constrictor” notched the 60th win of his MMA career on Saturday when he stopped Jared Vanderaa with his 47th career submission. It was a scarf hold, of course, because few fighters in combat sports have fashioned better or longer runs out of simply playing their hits over and over again. Afterward, the old warhorse said he’ll probably fight for another five or 10 years, chuckled a bit, then walked backstage and immediately started sharing a few pointers with Vanderaa about his Ezekiel choke mastery.

There aren’t many odes written for the pioneers who played the long game — the nature of the content beast in this industry often just doesn’t allow it — but after 26 years, Oleinik’s train is still chugging along the tracks, undeterred as ever. This one is for those who are not well-known trailblazers. Let’s book a how-in-the-hell-has-this-fight-not-happened-yet date with Andrei Arlovski next and do this for another five to 10 years.