Preview: UFC Vegas 104 ‘Vettori vs. Dolidze 2’

The Ultimate Fighting Championship on Saturday will make a one-week stop at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas. The UFC Fight Night 254 main event ranks as one of the more baffling booking decisions in recent memory, as middleweights Marvin Vettori and Roman Dolidze run back a 2023 encounter that did not seem to leave many unanswered questions. However, there are at least some more compelling clashes beyond that rematch, most notably the co-headliner between veteran welterweights Chidi Njokuani and Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos. Meanwhile, hyped featherweight prospect Kevin Vallejos gets an all-action Octagon debut opposite Seung Woo Choi, and a bantamweight tilt pitting Su Young You against A.J. Cunningham provides some intrigue in terms of how their respective games will work.

Now to the UFC Fight Night 254 “Vettori vs. Dolidze” preview:

Middleweights

Marvin Vettori (19-7-1, 9-5-1 UFC) vs. Roman Dolidze (14-3, 8-3 UFC)

ODDS: Vettori (-166), Dolidze (+140)

The UFC has been more open to rematches in recent years, and at the very least, most of them have had some sort of reason for taking place. The first fight might have been exciting, or one or both of the fighters might have evolved—or fallen off—to the point that the dynamic could be different. Then there’s this fight, a rematch of Vettori’s fairly clear decision win over Dolidze two years ago where there’s little to suggest either man has changed. If anything, there might be some intrigue as to how Vettori looks after two years on the shelf, but if his near decade on the major stage has been notable for anything, it’s for the Italian’s consistency. It took a year or two in the UFC, but “The Italian Dream” settled on a fairly straightforward pressure-heavy approach that leaned on his cardio and durability. There’s a surprising lack of knockout power given Vettori’s well-built frame, but that speaks to the consistent but uncreative nature of his game, as he plugs out volume with the often-correct assumption that he will outlast his opponent. That has run him into a ceiling but only against the last generation of elite middleweights in Israel Adesanya, Robert Whittaker and Jared Cannonier. The first two were able to outmaneuver Vettori’s pressure, while Cannonier simply had enough horsepower to separate himself with a head-on approach. That loss to Cannonier, which came in June 2023 and serves as his most recent fight, was a disappointment beyond the result, if only because Vettori had shown some new wrinkles in his first fight against Dolidze a few months prior. Vettori got off to a slow start but actually showed some willingness to try and stay elusive rather than play bully in the rare fight where he was able to out-adjust his opponent.

As for Dolidze, he has mostly remained the same fighter during his half a decade in the UFC and maybe going back even further. Dolidze’s regional tape showed him to be a standout athlete who got by with an inefficient grab bag of skills, and that scouting report still holds, with the Georgian just proving to be much more effective than expected. Much of Dolidze’s run up the middleweight ladder saw him accomplish little up until the point that he scored a power submission or hit his opponents hard enough to greatly injure them. Vettori and Nassourdine Imavov proved to have enough physicality and durability to weather the storm against Dolidze, but he’s back to his old tricks on his current two-fight winning streak, most recently beating Kevin Holland when “Trailblazer” suffered a rib injury. There might be a bit of worry for Vettori coming off a long layoff and after absorbing a beating in his last bout, but he has already solved this test once and there’s not much to suggest things will go much different here if he’s in somewhere close to peak form. The pick is Vettori via decision.

Jump To »
Vettori vs. Dolidze
Zaleski dos Santos vs. Njokuani
Vallejos vs. Choi
Hernandez vs. Holobaugh
Blackshear vs. Gibson
You vs. Cunningham
The Prelims