Go through the UFC title picture right now. Ask how each champion got there.

Tom Aspinall's average fight time is 2:18. That's not a typo. The heavyweight champion of the world has the shortest average fight time in UFC history, and he got there by punching people until they stopped moving. Carlos Ulberg KO'd Jiří Procházka in round one at UFC 327 to win the light heavyweight title. Ilia Topuria knocked out Charles Oliveira to take featherweight. Joshua Van finished Alexandre Pantoja in round one at UFC 323 to become flyweight champion. Justin Gaethje, your interim lightweight champion, is a human car crash whose calling card is exchanges that end with someone unconscious.

Then there's Islam Makhachev.

At UFC 322 in November, Makhachev spent twenty-five minutes dismantling Jack Della Maddalena through positional control, top pressure, and constant submission threats. All three judges scored it 50-45. Nobody's face looked like they'd been hit. Della Maddalena was trapped for five rounds with nowhere to go. Makhachev walked out as welterweight champion and the 11th double champion in UFC history, extending his win streak to 16 — tying Anderson Silva's all-time UFC record.

That's what a grappling championship win looks like in 2026. And it's the only one.

Scan the rest of the roster. Sean Strickland won his second middleweight title by boxing Khamzat Chimaev for twenty-five minutes at UFC 328 until the judges gave him a split decision. Petr Yan took bantamweight over Merab Dvalishvili with five rounds of sharp combinations and a unanimous decision at UFC 323. Even Mackenzie Dern — a BJJ world champion who has submitted training partners with techniques the average practitioner has never seen live — won the strawweight title with a unanimous decision over Virna Jandiroba at UFC 321. She out-pointed her way to a belt. She did not tap anyone out.

This is not a complaint. Winning a UFC title by any method is an achievement most fighters never reach, and decisions are legitimate wins. But the pattern is hard to ignore: at the championship level, the fighters who finish tend to do it with strikes. The grapplers grind out points.

There's one exception, and he holds two belts.

The argument about grappling in MMA runs in cycles. Someone dismisses modern BJJ on a podcast. Someone else pulls off a leg lock system against a Division I wrestler and the counter-take lands. Demian Maia controls a guy for four rounds, can't finish, loses on points, and three coaches give three different post-mortems about why grappling does or doesn't translate. The debate resets. Repeat every six months.

What the champion roster offers right now is more concrete than the debate: results from the highest-stakes filter in the sport.

When champions finish, they're doing it with strikes. When grapplers reach title level, they win decisions. And even that path increasingly requires the kind of grappling Makhachev represents — not sport BJJ, not leg locks from 50/50, but wrestling-based pressure that controls where the fight goes and makes everything available from the top.

Makhachev's record is 28-1 with 13 career submission wins. Read that list: two triangles, three rear naked chokes, three armbars, two arm triangles, a kimura, a brabo choke, a D'Arce. He has five KO/TKOs. Nobody trained Makhachev to be a striker who uses grappling for position. They trained a grappler who added what he needed.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most MMA fighters use grappling the way most people use their emergency fund — only when the striking exchange isn't going their way. Take it down, restart standing, survive until you can punch again. Defensive grappling in service of a striking game.

Makhachev doesn't do that. The ground is his preferred location. The submission threats are the offense, not the fallback. When he takes you down and slides to mount, he's not surviving — he's hunting. The two approaches are not the same discipline wearing the same clothes.

What makes it increasingly rare is that the general direction of MMA development has moved toward the other model. Elite striking defense has made it harder to take people down against their will. The best wrestlers in the sport often use that wrestling to stay standing. The most valuable grappling skill at most MMA gyms right now is not how to submit someone from mount — it's how to not get taken down in the first place.

Dern winning a title with BJJ-based footwork and decision-making is actually useful information here. She is as close to a pure grappling identity as the women's divisions have, and her path to the title ran through five rounds of cage control and distance management that doesn't look like a gi roll. She wins. She just doesn't finish the way she used to. The sport adapts everyone toward its center.

Everyone except Makhachev, who is so far from the center that he's pulling it toward him instead. Four consecutive lightweight title defenses, the most in the division's history. A second belt at welterweight. Sixteen wins in a row. Thirteen career submissions including the threats that make his opponents nervous about their limb health from the opening minute.

The list of grappling-first UFC champions per generation gets shorter each time you count. Maia, Mir, Gracie, Khabib — each generation thins the category. The current version also happens to be the most dominant, holding titles in two weight classes while the rest of the roster punches its way to gold.

The last grappling champion is running out of divisions to conquer. When he eventually stops fighting, look at the roster and try to count the submission wins among the people holding belts.

Good luck.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

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Islam Makhachev UFC MMA grappling BJJ in MMA Tom Aspinall Ilia Topuria