Khamzat Chimaev made ‘a lot of mistakes’ in dominant UFC 319 win over Dricus du Plessis

Khamzat Chimaev had a stellar performance to capture UFC gold, but were there mistakes?

Chimaev challenged du Plessis for the 185-pound gold inside the United Center in Chicago. “Borz” stuck to du Plessis throughout the fight with his relentless grappling. The result was nearly 22 minutes of control time in a 25-minute fight. Chimaev earned scores of 50-44 to secure the UFC Middleweight Championship.

While there’s no doubt that Chimaev turned in a one-sided showing, one of his former opponents thinks errors were made. During a recent edition of the “Pound 4 Pound Podcast,” Kamaru Usman said that he saw some mistakes in Chimaev’s execution (h/t MMAJunkie).

“Khamzat Chimaev possessed this one skill that can make you look like a middle school wrestler,” Usman said on his “Pound 4 Pound” podcast with Henry Cejudo. “That’s all that was, and even watching that, Khamzat made a lot of mistakes that I think would have got him that finish before that third round. He got to a position where it was so easy, it was almost him controlling himself. He had to control his own emotions. He had to control his gas tank because that’s not easy to dominate a guy like that. Everything is working because, in your mind, you’re wanting resistance. Resistance is how you gauge how much output I need to put out. If everything is going right, you can’t gauge how much output to put out.”

Chimaev and Usman collided back in 2023. “The Nigerian Nightmare” gave Chimaev all he could handle in the grappling department, but he fell short via majority decision. It was the last highly competitive fight Chimaev was a part of, as he followed it up with a first-round submission over Robert Whittaker and the aforementioned grappling clinic against du Plessis.

Time will tell if another middleweight contender can capitalize on the “mistakes” that Usman mentioned.