Khamzat Chimaev won the middleweight championship at UFC 319, turning in one of the most dominant performances in championship history against Dricus du Plessis. In fact, Chimaev was so dominant in victory that the Chicago crowd booed as Chimaev repeatedly took du Plessis down and patiently worked strikes while dominating positionally.
Du Plessis was never really in the fight until a desperate charge late in the final round. Chimaev finished the fight with a 529 to 45 advantage in strikes landed and had just shy of 22 minutes of ground control time, but that didn’t translate to the most enjoyable viewing experience for many observers.
Among those calling Chimaev’s performance “boring” is former UFC fighter Matt Brown, though Brown wasn’t ready to trash Chimaev for using his wrestling to dominant effect.
“It was boring,” Brown said on “The Fighter vs. The Writer” podcast. “[Georges St-Pierre] had a lot of boring fights. But we don’t really talk about how boring GSP was, do we? We talk about how dominant he was. That’s the game that we’re playing. You can’t take anything away from Khamzat for what he did. It’s cool watching him develop.
“I think we see a lot of these wrestlers come into MMA … we see wrestlers think they’re strikers. I think Khamzat went through that phase a little bit with [Gilbert] Burns and [Kamaru] Usman, and then he was like, ‘wait a minute, I’m the best wrestler here, what am I doing?’ And got back to it. He got a championship out of it.”
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Brown was known as one of the most exciting fighters on the UFC roster for years, but exciting styles don’t always make for championship-level careers, and Brown never challenged for a title in the Octagon.
While Brown understands the criticism of Chimaev’s performance and believes Chimaev could have done more to work for a finish, he also gave credit to the new champ’s intelligent approach to the fight.
“We can’t fault him for that,” Brown said. “It’s so easy to say when we’re sitting out here. He’s the one feeling things, and he’s the one sensing DDP. Look, DDP is a tough son of a bitch. He’s not a guy you want to be taking a bunch of risks with. I thought Khamzat fought very intelligently. I do feel like, again, watching from the outside, I feel like he could have done more. That’s such armchair quarterbacking. He won basically a 10-8 round, probably three or four rounds in a world championship fight. Do you really want to criticize that?
“But at the same time, I do get the criticism because we’re saying he’s that guy. He kind of goes out and just does what he has to, to win, which is what you’re supposed to do. I wouldn’t say an argument, but I was kind of explaining that to some of the people around [saying] ‘it’s boring.’ I’m like, guys, this is a prize fight, and he’s going to win the prize. That’s his object of this fight is to win the prize. Not to make you happy because you want to see blood.”
