Kamaru Usman spent the first half of 2026 asking for a fight with Islam Makhachev. When someone finally asked Makhachev about Usman, the welterweight champion talked him out of the win.
"To be honest, I think Du Plessis wins. Usman's knees are bad, he can't wrestle constantly," Makhachev told Murad Machaev, per Bloody Elbow, picking Dricus du Plessis in Saturday's UFC Oklahoma City main event at Paycom Center.
That prediction sits at the center of a fight week that has turned into a debate about how much is left of a 39-year-old former champion returning from a year away.
The knees, and the wrestling problem
Makhachev didn't dismiss the move up. He called it a smart one. "Kamaru Usman made a smart move. I was wondering why he moved up, but if he beats Du Plessis he'll become the next title contender because he already has a win over Sean Strickland," he said.
The doubt is physical. Usman's knee trouble has been talked about for years, and Makhachev thinks it caps what Usman can do against a bigger man. "He'll probably try to wrestle," Makhachev said. "Usman's knees are bad, he can't wrestle constantly."
Wrestling is the whole question. Usman (21-4, 16-3 UFC) built a welterweight title reign on it. Whether his body still lets him lean on it for 25 minutes is the thing nobody around the fight seems sure of.
A friend's warning
The warning that carries the most weight comes from inside Usman's corner of the sport. Frankie Edgar, a UFC Hall of Famer and long-time friend under the same management, picked Usman, then spent most of his answer explaining the danger.
"If Kamaru can go out there and implement the same plan, taking him down and constantly holding him down, I think it's gonna be a pretty one-way fight," Edgar told Bloody Elbow ahead of his own RAF 11 bout with Clay Guida. "But I think DDP's rhythm and unorthodox style will throw that off a little, so I do think that Kamaru's gonna get the W but it's gonna take some grappling being involved."
The tape gives Edgar's plan a foundation. Du Plessis's takedown defense gave way in his title loss to Khamzat Chimaev last August, when Chimaev landed 12 of 17 attempts and controlled him for most of five rounds; Du Plessis's career takedown defense now reads 34%. Usman's own recent numbers took a hit too. He went 4 for 13 on takedowns against Joaquin Buckley in June 2025.
The Strickland thread, and what it's worth now
Makhachev's case for Usman as an instant contender rests on one line: he already beat Sean Strickland. That's true, and it was one-sided. At UFC 210 in 2017, Usman dominated Strickland over three rounds, earning 10-8s on two judges' cards and a shutout on the third for a 30-27, 30-26, 30-26 decision. Bloody Elbow revisited the detail that Strickland told his corner he couldn't see out of his left eye, then walked it back to the doctor to keep the fight going.
The problem is arithmetic. That win is nine years old. Strickland went on to win and lose the middleweight title, and Du Plessis has since beaten Strickland twice: a split decision in January 2024 and a unanimous one in February 2025. A 2017 result tells us less about tonight than any film from the last two years.
How much confidence in Usman?
MMA Junkie put the question in a fight-week headline, "How much confidence in Usman against DDP?", and its readers answered by leaning toward Du Plessis at 67%.
Du Plessis's coach was less diplomatic. "I don't think he's got the balls to stand up with Dricus," Morne Visser told Fight Forecast. "We all saw what Dricus did to Khamzat. He clipped him, I think, two or three times and he almost took his head off." Visser expects Usman to shoot rather than trade, the same read Edgar offered from the other side.
The faceoffs did the storyline no favors for Usman. Du Plessis (23-3, 9-1 UFC), 32, cut 45 pounds to make 185.5 and stood visibly larger at Friday's weigh-in. Usman, in only his second middleweight bout and coming off a one-year layoff, says the gap matters less than fans think. "It makes a bigger difference if, let's say, I'm fighting a full-fledged grappler and they're an extra 15 pounds heavier than me," he said on his Pound 4 Pound podcast.
What we're withholding
FightIQ usually closes a fight-week piece with the model's read. Not tonight. Our prediction output for this card is under a data-quality hold, and we won't put a number in front of you that we can't stand behind. When the pipeline clears, the grade goes in the ledger like every other pick, win or lose.
What the corpus makes plain is the shape of the fight. Usman's route runs through his wrestling, and it's the doubt Makhachev, Edgar and Du Plessis's coach all landed on: whether the knees and the year off let him hold a bigger man down long enough to matter.