Poatan for sure
I personally don't buy it, I don't think Khamzat is that far ahead of the pack, I said before the DDP fight that DDP was going to get embarrassed. Anytime Khamzat has fought someone with good TDD or really good BJJ he has struggled, aside from the Whittaker fight which was a freak injury and the 17 second KO against GM3 which didn't show us much.
The issue for Khamzat will be finishing fights. His ability to finish fights doesn't seem great against the elite. So until proven otherwise it's hard to side with him. He has a lot of flaws that will make championship fights hard to win. He dominated DDP as I expected, but his actual performance was not that impressive to me. If he had true top 10 skill, he would've finished that fight in the first two rounds, that told us a lot about him even if most viewers don't yet understand it.
It's very hard to win at the elite level with Khamzat's style. Every now and then you'll get a Merab or GSP who break the rules, but winning strictly through control time & takedowns is not a valid strategy against most elite fighters. Khamzat doesn't have the discipline or cardio of those guys, and he's not as good a striker as GSP.
When GSP had to fight the Shields, Hendricks, and Koschecks of the world the fights looked VERY different, Koscheck even took down GSP. The difference was GSP could rely on his striking to win even when the grappling wasn't going to be very effective. Khamzat has not shown anything like that against the elite imo. We also have to factor in that Khamzat would need many years to put together a top 10 resume, with his age now he's already at the near expiration date of his quick & explosive grappling style. So even if you believe that Khamzat could theoretically beat most guys in the top 10, he likely won't even fight them. Other fighters will catch up quickly with the time he takes between fights.
So basically, Khamzat has no chance of becoming an all-time top 10 fighter, you have to give the nod to Poatan just off more achievements and possibly some great potential wins in his future if things go his way. Khamzat is playing catchup to Poatan now, yet he likely won't age anywhere near as well or fight as often. Poatan could stop fighting today and he would likely still have a greater case when all things were said and done. Khabib retired young, GSP retired young, Merab is a freak who is historically active. Khamzat lost a lot of prime years that may have placed him among the top 20 fighters, but it seems like that ship has sailed. If he can defend the MW title a few times he can still become a top 3-5 MW.
Khamzat: 0%
Poatan: 5-10% (would likely need to defend once more, defeat Jones, then win the HW title to have an undisputed spot in the top 10).
Even if Poatan could do all of those things, he still would get shit because Jones is old, the HW division is historically bad, and Ulberg isn't that great of a fighter. When you understand this you realize Khamzat has ZERO chance of getting into the top 10.
