A new year is here, and that means it’s time for Combat Press to take a look back at the best of MMA in 2024. In the coming days, Combat Press will announce its award winners in multiple categories, covering everything from the action in the cage to the biggest stories surrounding the sport.
Several things can make a submission memorable, it could be the time in the fight when it occurs, the stakes of the fight in which it takes place, or how it comes seemingly out of nowhere. In 2024, there were several memorable submissions but one stands out above them all for the utter dominance displayed against a truly elite opponent. At UFC 308, we finally saw former middleweight champion Robert Whittaker take on Chechnya’s Khamzat Chimaev. The fight was billed as a real test for Chimaev to see if he was as good as advertised up a weight class at middleweight after no longer being safely able to make the welterweight limit.
It didn’t take long for Chimaev to silence any doubters. He faced hardly any adversity or resistance in the fight and quickly got the fight to the canvas where he dominated the former champion. Working his way to the back mount position, Chimaev showed everyone watching that he was a next level squeeze. He didn’t even need to secure a rear-naked choke to get the finish, Chimaev would latch onto a face crank and apply so much pressure that Whittaker’s teeth would become dislodged and he was forced to tap. There is not a bigger, more emphatic statement of arrival to the elite of the middleweight division that the thoroughly dominant performance from Chimaev back in October. For that performance against that opponent, Khamzat Chimaev’s face crank submission win over Robert Whittaker earns the 2024 Combat Press MMA Award for Submission of the Year.