Volkanovski's striking defense and chin since 2023, round by round

He’s still hard to hit

The fairest way to judge defense is against each opponent’s own standard. Max Holloway lands a lot of head strikes on everyone, so the real question is how many he landed on Volkanovski compared with what he usually lands. The chart compares each opponent’s head-strike accuracy against Volkanovski with their accuracy in their other UFC fights.

In ten of his last twelve fights, the opponent landed a smaller share of head strikes than usual. Add it all up and his opponents landed about 75% of the head strikes they would normally land from the same number of attempts. That’s 75% for his title years, 2019 to 2022, and it’s 75% again since 2023. His defense hasn’t moved.

He’s also being hit less often. Since 2023 he has absorbed 1.6 head strikes a minute, down from 2.3 in his title years. Of the 56 featherweights and lightweights with at least an hour in the cage since 2023, only nine have absorbed fewer.

The exception is Islam Makhachev. He landed at or above his normal rate in both fights, and the second one, which Volkanovski took on less than two weeks’ notice, lasted barely three minutes.

Round by round

Here is every round of those twelve fights, with the number of head strikes Volkanovski absorbed in each one. The red rounds are the ones where he went down.

In his title years he took 13 or more head strikes in 13 different rounds, ten of them against Holloway, and he never went down. Since 2023 he has gone down in three rounds, with 13 to 15 head strikes landed in each, and those counts include the shots that followed once he was hurt. Makhachev dropped him with a head kick in the first round of their rematch. Ilia Topuria knocked him out in the second round of a fight where Volkanovski had landed more, 47 significant strikes to 35. And Diego Lopes dropped him with ten seconds left in the second round of their first fight, then hurt him again in the fourth.

His chin, by the numbers

The simplest way to put a number on a chin is to count how many head strikes it takes to knock a fighter down.

From 2016 to 2022, Volkanovski absorbed 443 head strikes in the UFC and went down once, against Chad Mendes in 2018. The average UFC fighter goes down about once every 115 head strikes, and fighters 35 and older about once every 100. So for most of his career his chin was far better than average. Since 2023 he has gone down once every 54.

Age is part of it. Across the UFC, fighters aged 37 and older go down about 40% more often per head strike absorbed than fighters under 27. Volkanovski was 34 when he first fought Makhachev and 37 in the Lopes rematch.

Look who was hitting him

That isn’t the whole story, because the men he has fought since 2023 hit much harder than the men he beat in his title years. This chart shows how often each opponent knocks someone down for every 100 head strikes he lands, in his fights against everyone else.

Holloway, whom Volkanovski fought three times, is a volume striker who needs about 290 head strikes for each knockdown. Topuria needs about 47 and Lopes about 50. So far more of the head strikes Volkanovski has taken lately came from real punchers.

If I take the strikes he absorbed and work out how often each opponent’s usual power would have dropped an average fighter, he should have gone down nearly twice in his title years, and he never did. Since 2023 he should have gone down two or three times, and he went down three. So his chin has gone from exceptional to roughly ordinary. Three knockdowns is a small number, so this can’t say exactly how much he has lost, but the edge he used to have is gone.

How he fights now, and what it means against Evloev

Volkanovski seems to have adjusted. In the Lopes rematch in January he landed 3.9 significant strikes a minute, against 5.5 to 8.6 in his title-years fights that went the full five rounds, and he absorbed 1.3 head strikes a minute, the fewest in any of his five-round fights that went the distance. He took Lopes down twice and spent more than two minutes of the fifth round in control. He won 49–46, 49–46 and 50–45, and this time he didn’t go down.

Evloev is a different kind of problem. He’s 10–0 in the UFC, every win by decision, and he has never knocked anyone down in the UFC. What he does is wrestle: 51 takedowns in those ten fights. So the danger for Volkanovski on October 24 is less about his chin and more about how much of the fight he spends underneath a wrestler.

The verdict

Volkanovski’s defense hasn’t faded. Opponents land about three-quarters of what they usually land on him, just as they did when he was beating Holloway. His chin has faded. It used to take hundreds of head strikes to drop him, and now it takes about 50, partly because of his age and partly because he has been fighting bigger punchers. Against Evloev, who doesn’t knock people down, that weakness matters less than it did against Topuria or Lopes.