The first meeting needs no reintroduction for anyone who watched it. At UFC 273 in April 2022, Chimaev arrived 10-0 with every win by knockout or submission and an aura the sport had spent two years inflating; Burns dragged him into fifteen minutes of open water, hurt him, survived the early wave, and lost a unanimous decision in a Fight of the Night war that both men wore home. Chimaev won the fight. Burns won the discovery: the unbeaten phenomenon was human, tired like everyone else, and could be made to trade his wrestling for a brawl. Every assessment of Chimaev since has carried that night’s footnote.
The rematch strips away everything that made the first fight chaos. No striking, no cage, no finish threat, just grip, position, and pace under freestyle rules, where points come from takedowns and exposure and matches are decided in short, violent bursts. That framing cuts in both directions, and it is what makes the booking clever rather than nostalgic. Chimaev has spent the intervening years leaning ever harder on wrestling as his primary weapon, smothering elite middleweights with top control, and freestyle is the closest thing to his native language the combat market sells. But the 2022 blueprint against him was cardio and durability, and in a format with no finishing mechanism, those qualities stop being survival tools and become the entire toolkit. Burns cannot be knocked out on a wrestling mat. Whether he can be out-pointed for six minutes by the best MMA wrestler of his generation is the actual question, and it is a better question than most rematches get to ask.
The two men arrive from opposite ends of the sport’s lifecycle. Chimaev, who lost the middleweight title to Sean Strickland by split decision in May, his first professional defeat, remains an active contender openly campaigning for the rematch while Strickland is expected to meet Nassourdine Imavov first. In the meantime, the Chechen has become something close to RAF’s house athlete: he submitted Dillon Danis at RAF 10 in June, wrestles former UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley in the main event of RAF Moscow this Saturday, September 5, and then meets Burns thirteen days later. Two matches, two continents, inside a fortnight, for a man theoretically preparing for a UFC title push. The workload says everything about how the modern star treats rulesets as venues, and how promotions treat him as inventory worth booking anywhere.
Burns is the other direction entirely, and his arc since April is quietly one of the sport’s better second acts. The Brazilian retired from MMA earlier this year after five consecutive losses, three by knockout, the last against Mike Malott at UFC Winnipeg, the kind of ending that usually closes a story. Instead he pivoted to the grappling economy: in June he submitted Horlando Monteiro in 82 seconds at UFC BJJ 9, and RAF 13 marks his freestyle debut. Wrestling was never his base, but the pedigree underneath is real, a jiu-jitsu black belt with multiple IBJJF world titles, and the freestyle exam, no submissions, no control clock, everything scored in exposure, is precisely the kind the sport’s new crossover calendar keeps offering retired names: a way to compete at world class in the part of the game their bodies still own.
The card above and below them explains what RAF is building. Covington against Muhammad is a genuine grudge match, the two nearly brawled at a press conference earlier this year, with Covington’s Oregon State pedigree defending the crossover belt he took from Arman Tsarukyan against a challenger who has been public about training specifically for the format. Beneath the MMA names runs the promotion’s legitimate freestyle spine: NCAA champion Wyatt Hendrickson against Penn State’s Greg Kerkvliet, three-time NCAA champion Jason Nolf, Olympic medalist Kennedy Blades against Bellator’s Diana Avsaragova, three-time world champion Haji Aliyev against Jacori Teemer, and, for the crossover completists, Luke Rockhold against Joe Pyfer on the mat. Ten bouts, split almost evenly between elite wrestlers the casual audience is learning and MMA names the wrestling audience already knows, which is the two-track identity the Hogan-and-Bischoff-backed venture has been refining since launch.
The Watsco Center date is the promotion’s scale statement, roughly 8,000 seats in a marquee college venue, and the calendar placement is either brave or reckless: RAF 13 runs the night before UFC 331 in Los Angeles, a Friday-Saturday combat doubleheader the crossover economy could not have imagined two years ago. Worth noting in the same breath: the promotion’s other marquee booking, Tsarukyan against Danis at RAF 14, has been pushed to a later date in the wake of Danis’s arm injury, exactly the fragility this calendar’s glamour has always priced in. Chimaev, by contrast, keeps showing up. Two singlets, two continents, thirteen days. The Wolf’s answer to the sport’s new map is to be everywhere on it.
September 18, Coral Gables, on FOX Nation. The first fight proved Chimaev was mortal. The second one asks what is left when mortality is the only weapon allowed.
