Khamzat Chimaev kept his wrestling resume rolling at RAF 14 on Friday night inside the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, running up the score on Robbie Lawler in a match that was over almost as soon as it started. Chimaev piled up points in rapid fashion and Lawler never found an answer. Afterward Chimaev turned his attention to Colby Covington, promising to break his neck the next time they meet.
It is a bold line from a fighter who is not walking in hot off a win in the UFC. Chimaev sits as the promotion's number one ranked middleweight and carries a 1549 Elo rating built over four bouts, but his last time out came back in May, when he dropped a decision to Sean Strickland.
The main event belonged to Arman Tsarukyan, who put on a shutout performance against Dillon Danis and then stepped on him once it was finished. Security was already on edge heading in, since Tsarukyan had reportedly attacked Danis at the pre event press conference just a day earlier, and the mat did not cool things down. Tsarukyan, the UFC's number two ranked lightweight, enters with a 1618 Elo mark across six bouts and is coming off a first round elbow knockout of Mauricio Ruffy back in September, so the shutout tracks with the form he has been showing.
The undercard delivered its own chaos. Michael Caliendo, a massive plus five hundred fifty underdog, stunned Olympic gold medalist Jordan Burroughs by a score of 8 to 5 in one of the bigger upsets in RAF history. And twenty three year old Bella Mir, back after her Contender Series run, flattened her opponent with a huge slam on her way to a 10-0 technical fall.
