Why This Compounds in Championship Rounds
Five-round title fights are where the math tilts hardest toward wrestlers. Striking output, even for elite strikers, drops in the fourth and fifth rounds as accumulated damage and fatigue set in. Wrestling-based control does not decay the same way, because it relies on positional technique and timing more than repeated high-output movement, and a fighter like Dvalishvili is specifically conditioned to keep the same pace in minute 24 that he had in minute one.
That asymmetry is the actual mechanism behind wrestler-heavy title pictures. It is not that judges favor grappling, and it is not that wrestlers are tougher. It is that a fighter who can both take opponents down at will and prevent being taken down himself controls two separate variables that strikers, by definition, only control one side of. Over five rounds, that compounding advantage is difficult for pure strikers to overcome even when they win individual exchanges on the feet.
