The two fights are not two samples of the same event; they are two different fights. In 2023 Dvalishvili attempted 49 takedowns and landed 11 — 22.4%, producing 6:53 of control and a 50-45 sweep on all three cards. In 2025 he attempted 29 and landed 2, a 6.9% conversion, while Yan landed five of his own on nine attempts. The mechanism is documented and specific: Yan stopped retreating into the fence, fought Dvalishvili's hands and head above the tie, used arm-drags off the collar, and defended singles by hopping off the trapped leg while posting on Dvalishvili's head. The consequence shows up everywhere — accuracy from 52.4% to 60.4%, output from 75 to 139 significant strikes, and a round-by-round line of 17 → 21 → 25 → 38 → 38 in a fight that had been a 45-50 shutout thirty-three months earlier. A fighter who solves a puzzle once has a technical answer; a fighter who solves it twice has a matchup. Whether December was the first or the only, the third fight decides.
The unusual feature of this pairing is that both men get better deep, which removes the most common way trilogy fights break. Yan's championship-round output index is 134%; Dvalishvili's is 136%. Yan's fifth-round line is 32.0 significant strikes at 65.3% accuracy; Dvalishvili's is 26.0 at 41.3% with 3.00 takedowns landed on 8.40 attempts. Neither will fade first. What separates them late is what the extra gas buys: Yan's fifth round is his most accurate, Dvalishvili's is his most aggressive. At UFC 323 that collision produced a round in which Dvalishvili threw 109 significant strikes — nearly double his career fifth-round attempt rate — landed 35 of them at 32%, and still lost the round on two cards to Yan's 38 of 63 at 60%. That is the fight in one frame: maximum effort against maximum efficiency, with efficiency scoring.
Everything about this pairing screams distance, and that is where the real market inefficiency sits. Yan has not finished a fight since July 11 2020 — nine consecutive bouts to the scorecards or a disqualification, including a five-round 50-45 over Deiveson Figueiredo in which he never came close to a stoppage. Dvalishvili has one finish in his last eight and a knockdown average of 0.05, 40th of 52 bantamweights. Across their fifty shared minutes neither man has scored a single knockdown and neither has ever had the other genuinely hurt; both carry Iron chin tiers and zero career KO losses between them. The model prices the distance at 72% — but it still holds a 17% Yan KO/TKO, because the one plausible stoppage mechanism, a late accumulation stoppage on a challenger chasing a deficit into 63.5%-accuracy counters, is genuinely live and did not exist in the 2023 version of this fight. Qualitatively this is the deepest shared résumé in the division: between them they have beaten Aldo, Cejudo, Sandhagen, O'Malley three times combined, Umar Nurmagomedov, Figueiredo, Song Yadong, Moraes and each other. Both carry a Championship strength-of-schedule tier and neither has a soft win worth discounting.
