Sean O’Malley has a lot to reflect on after a lackluster outing cost him the bantamweight title at UFC 306.
Despite promises of a first-round knockout and going into the fight as the incumbent champion, O’Malley struggled to deal with Merab Dvalishvili’s pace and pressure, which led to six takedowns and over 10 minutes of control time from the Georgian bantamweight.
In the end, O’Malley lost a unanimous decision on the scorecards with Dvalishvili crowned as the new champion.
“He looked flat,” UFC CEO Dana White said about O’Malley’s performance at the UFC 306 post-fight press conference. “He didn’t look sharp.”
As much as O’Malley struggled throughout the fight, he almost made a stunning comeback after snapping off a front kick to the body that hurt Dvalishvili badly in the final round. Realizing his opponent was hurt, O’Malley rushed forward to try and inflict more damage but Dvalishvili was able to circle away and stay out of trouble until the final horn sounded.
Outside of that moment, O’Malley never had Dvalishvili in any real trouble during the entire fire.
In fact, White believes O’Malley’s inactivity is really what cost him after he looked at the statistics from the fight and realized that the always colorful bantamweight just wasn’t throwing many punches during the five-round fight.
“He didn’t look crisp until the last round,” White said. “He hurt him with that body shot and he knew he hurt him with the body shot, and he kept going in trying to finish. But I looked at the punch stats, it was like six in a couple of the rounds.”
According to the official UFC stats, O’Malley landed just 5 out 10 significant strikes in round two and then 6 out of 9 significant strikes in round four. For the entire fight, O’Malley connected with 47 significant strikes compared to 82 for Dvalishvili.
Obviously nobody was more upset about the loss than O’Malley but White didn’t have any easy answers about why he performed the way he did on Saturday.
Perhaps the most credit goes to Dvalishvili, who just never allowed O’Malley to settle into any kind of rhythm during the fight. With Dvalishvili in constant pursuit, O’Malley was forced to react off his backfoot and he just couldn’t find the timing for his punches before he was stuck fending off takedowns round after round.
Ultimately, O’Malley lost the decision and his UFC title so now he’ll have to get back to the drawing board to see if he can earn another shot at the belt in the future.
