This Saturday Nurmagomedov vs Song · Oriental Sports Center Pudong District China See this week's picks →
Events · Du Plessis vs Usman · Dricus Du Plessis vs Kamaru Usman
Red corner Dricus DuPlessis“Stillknocks”Team CIT · Pretoria, Gauteng
VSSettled
Blue corner KamaruUsman“The Nigerian Nightmare”Kill Cliff FC · Auchi, Edo
Middleweight3 rounds18 Jul 2026
The story going in
  • Has finished 6 of 9 UFC wins.
  • Has finished 5 of 16 UFC wins.
  • Lands 1.0 more significant strikes a minute than Usman.
  • 19 UFC bouts deep — 9 more than Plessis.
24-3
Record
21-5
−7 yr32
Age
39
+1″6' 1"
Height
6' 0"
76″
Reach
76″
Switch
Stance
Switch
10
UFC bouts
+919
+35%6/967% of wins
Finishes
5/1631% of wins
Team CIT
Gym
Kill Cliff FC
Pretoria, Gauteng
From
Auchi, Edo
Vitals, record, nickname and camp come from the public UFC fighter register and are current, not a snapshot of fight night. UFC bouts, finish rate and every storyline line are counted off the official UFC fight record. A tick marks the side holding the raw edge in that row — longer reach, taller, younger, more bouts, a higher finish rate. It is a fact about the tape, not a prediction, and rows with no clean comparison (record, stance, gym, hometown) carry no tick at all. Any row we cannot fill on both sides is left out rather than half-drawn. Streaks, bout counts and finish rates are as they stood going into this fight — this bout and everything after it is excluded from the count.

The call vs the fight

What we published before the card, next to what happened in the cage.

Our call
Dricus Du Plessis
54.3% confidentTOSS-UP
Method calledDEC 63%
Vs the market+4.3pp
Market had our pick at50%
The fight
Dricus Du Plessis
WIN✓
How it endedU-DEC
Round5 of 3
Clock5:00
Called it We called Dricus Du Plessis at 54.3% and Dricus Du Plessis won. The method call landed too.
Graded against the official UFC result, from the same record every other page on this site is graded from. The tick beside the verdict is the method call — a correct winner with a wrong method is a partial hit and reads as one. See the full public record →

Round by round

Every round the fight went, shaded by where the significant strikes actually landed — and the takedowns, control time and knockdowns beside them.

UFCStats · per round

5 rounds of tape

Round 15:00 of action
Dricus Du Plessis29 sig landed
HEAD76%22 of 50BODY7%2 of 5LEGS17%5 of 7
Kamaru Usman17 sig landed
HEAD47%8 of 28BODY41%7 of 11LEGS12%2 of 2
29 of 62
Sig.
strikes
17 of 41
0 of 0
Take-
downs
0 of 1
0:00
Control
0:00
Distance 28Clinch 1Ground 0
Where it
happened
Distance 17Clinch 0Ground 0
Round 25:00 of action
Dricus Du Plessis36 sig landed
HEAD89%32 of 66BODY6%2 of 2LEGS6%2 of 2
Kamaru Usman14 sig landed
HEAD57%8 of 32BODY43%6 of 7LEGS0%0 landed
36 of 70
Sig.
strikes
14 of 39
0 of 0
Take-
downs
0 of 1
0:06
Control
0:15
Distance 34Clinch 2Ground 0
Where it
happened
Distance 11Clinch 3Ground 0
Round 35:00 of action
Dricus Du Plessis25 sig landed
HEAD68%17 of 33BODY24%6 of 8LEGS8%2 of 2
Kamaru Usman17 sig landed
HEAD47%8 of 23BODY53%9 of 15LEGS0%0 landed
25 of 43
Sig.
strikes
17 of 38
0 of 0
Take-
downs
0 of 1
0:00
Control
0:02
Distance 25Clinch 0Ground 0
Where it
happened
Distance 17Clinch 0Ground 0
Round 45:00 of action
Dricus Du Plessis24 sig landed
HEAD75%18 of 43BODY25%6 of 7LEGS0%0 of 1
Kamaru Usman21 sig landed
HEAD52%11 of 35BODY38%8 of 12LEGS10%2 of 2
24 of 51
Sig.
strikes
21 of 49
0 of 0
Take-
downs
0 of 3
0:00
Control
0:00
Distance 23Clinch 1Ground 0
Where it
happened
Distance 21Clinch 0Ground 0
Round 55:00 of actionEnded 5:00
Dricus Du Plessis22 sig landed
HEAD59%13 of 38BODY36%8 of 8LEGS5%1 of 1
Kamaru Usman23 sig landed
HEAD61%14 of 52BODY30%7 of 13LEGS9%2 of 2
22 of 47
Sig.
strikes
23 of 67
0 of 2
Take-
downs
0 of 1
0:00
Control
0:07
Distance 22Clinch 0Ground 0
Where it
happened
Distance 22Clinch 1Ground 0

Significant strikes, takedowns, control time, knockdowns and submission attempts exactly as UFCStats recorded them for this bout, round by round. Zone percentages are that round’s landed head, body and leg counts over their own total — raw arithmetic, nothing modelled or smoothed. A round in which a fighter landed nothing shades empty and reads zero; it is never filled in from the round before.

Judges’ scorecards

Every judge’s round, the media’s cards beside them, and how these judges usually score.

Official card

Decision - Unanimous

Referee · Kerry Hatley
Official totals — Dricus Du Plessis first
JudgeTotal
Sal D'amato2.1 avg spread · 46% wide50–45
David Sutherland49–46
Mike Bell1.9 avg spread · 37% wide49–46
⚠

Full round-by-round cards are pending a source refresh. The decisions corpus we read currently ends at 2026-05-16, so this bout has the judges’ totals but not their individual rounds yet. Nothing here is estimated to fill the gap — when the scrape is re-run, the grid appears.

Official cards come from the UFCStats fight record and MMA Decisions. Media cards and the fan vote are MMA Decisions’ own collection and are not official. Judge tendency figures are that judge’s whole recorded history, not this bout — they are context for how a card was scored, never a claim that it was scored wrongly.

Still to come on this page

Named rather than hidden. It is built from data already on disk and lands in the next pass of this build-out.

The market story coming in this build-out

What the price did in the week before the cage door shut, with the moment our pick was frozen marked on it. Where we captured no price history for a bout, this panel will say so rather than draw a line that was never there.

← Back to the public record