Joe Rogan was in awe of Petr Yan‘s title-winning performance at UFC 323.
Yan (20-5 MMA, 12-4 UFC) dethroned Merab Dvalishvili (21-5 MMA, 14-3 UFC) to claim the bantamweight championship this past Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Yan outstruck Dvalishvili and even landed more takedowns than him, showing off his complete mixed martial arts game.
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No had an answer for Dvalishvili’s relentless pace, but Yan managed to crack the code, which heavily impressed Rogan.
“F*ck, what a masterclass,” Rogan said in a recent episode of his “Joe Rogan Experience.” “When you’re going to fight a guy like Merab, that is the master class. He put on a clinic. His training camp must have been hell, had to be hell, and it looked like it. I saw videos of it. He was doing some wild strength and conditioning and plyometrics. He knew what he was in for. That’s the thing, if you’re going to fight a guy like Merab, you know what the mountain is. Are you ready to climb it?
“The first time they fought apparently he had a f*cked up right hand, and he couldn’t grapple with it, and he couldn’t throw punches with it. So I rewatched the fight after he said that. I was like, ‘Oh, he’s barely using it.’ Barely using his right hand. Totally makes sense and also psychologically, if you’ve only got one hand, now you have to think you can’t really throw combinations.”
Yan claimed he was only at 50 percent when he fought Dvalishvili the first time in March 2023 after competing with an injured right hand. He was smothered in a unanimous decision loss in that fight, but won three in a row to climb his way back to a rematch.
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Joe Rogan: Petr Yan’s win over Merab Dvalishvili a ‘masterclass’
