The bantamweight GOAT trophy has been passed around so often lately that somebody should check it for fingerprints. Saturday night it landed in Petr Yan’s hands. He beat Merab Dvalishvili at UFC 333 at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi on October 24, kept his title, closed out their trilogy 2-1, and the coronation started before the cage was mopped.
Aljamain Sterling isn’t signing the paperwork. On his Weekly Scraps podcast, as MMA Fighting reported, Sterling gave Yan his flowers first and then took a few of them back.
“I would say from a technical standpoint, if you want to say his technique is really, really good and he’s a dog when he’s in there, I 100-percent agree,” Sterling said. “I’m not going to dismiss that, I’m not going to deny that greatness He’s a technical savage when he’s in there.”
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Then came the part that matters. “But what do you consider GOAT? I don’t even know anymore because it seems like the lines are so blurred that I don’t even know what the conversation is about anymore.”
Sterling is right, and he’s right for a reason that has very little to do with Petr Yan.
The line moved too fast
I spend most of my week watching betting lines move, and I’ve learned to distrust a price that swings hard off one result. That’s what happened to the GOAT market here. Not long ago Dvalishvili was the overwhelming favorite for the label. He won the belt, defended it three times, and BJPenn.com described his 2025 run as memorable enough to give him perhaps the strongest case of anybody at 135 pounds. Then he lost to Yan, and the whole market flipped to the other guy overnight.
That isn’t how a career evaluation should work. If a fighter can be the GOAT in the spring and the runner-up by Halloween, then what we’re handing out is a hot-hand award with a fancier name. Sterling’s complaint that he no longer knows what the conversation is about is the most honest thing anybody has said about it this week.
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So set the criteria and run the numbers. Dvalishvili defended the belt three times. Yan, in this reign, has defended it once. Sterling put it plainly: “to just go hands down he’s the GOAT with one title defense is kind of crazy to me.” He also gave Yan credit for being a two-time champion, which he called hard to do on its own. Fair. Winning the belt twice is impressive. Defending it, repeatedly, is what separates the all-timers from the guys with a great stretch.
The head-to-head problem
Here’s where Sterling has a personal stake, and I’ll say it out loud because he’s earned the right to be a little biased. He holds two wins over Yan. That’s a 2-0 record against the current champion from the man being asked to rank him. Add Sean O’Malley’s split-decision win over Yan in October 2022, plus Dvalishvili’s lone win in the trilogy, and the sources alone account for at least four losses on Yan’s record to men who have held or chased this same belt.
Head-to-head isn’t the whole case. Plenty of greats lost to rivals and still finished on top. But a GOAT argument that has to explain away an 0-2 against the guy doing the explaining is a GOAT argument with a soft spot, and Sterling was gracious enough not to lean on it. He could have. He didn’t need to.
What Sterling did instead was put Yan on the short list. “He’s definitely in the mix,” he said. “He’s in the conversation with the Dominick Cruz’s, the Merab’s, T.J. Dillashaw.” That’s the correct placement. Yan sits in the room with the names that matter. He just hasn’t been handed the deed to the building.
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What actually closes the case
The beauty of Sterling’s position is that it gives Yan a clear path. MMA Fighting framed it as defending the belt and separating himself from the pack of former champions, and BJPenn.com noted that if Yan dominates at 135 until he retires, it could swing Sterling’s view. That’s how this should go. Stack defenses. Beat the contenders. Make the debate boring.
One item on that to-do list jumps out at me. O’Malley’s coach, Tim Welch, told BJPenn.com he wasn’t shocked that Yan didn’t call for a rematch after UFC 333. That 2022 fight went to a split decision, which in my line of work is about as close to a coin flip as a result gets. If Yan wants the crown without an asterisk, the O’Malley rematch is the cheapest way to erase a loss that a lot of people already think he won. Until he takes it, Sterling’s “in the conversation” is the right price, and I wouldn’t lay a dime at anything shorter.
