Well first of all it's Dagestan that is by far the biggest talent pool in wrestling, without competition. Chechnya is decent but meh...
Yes, you caught the typo that I corrected above, it was caucases.
Second Khabib, Islam + cousins are 100% Abdulmanap products. Do them just being recruiters is wrong.
I think you lost sight of my argument.
Yeah of course he taught his son and his cousins. But he actually had a big gym in dagestan and many top fighters come out of the gym, not just his son and cousins. But basically kids grow up competing in wrestling in the area and they would recruit many of the top prospects to their gym, so many people come in with some pedigree. And of course many other top athletes arise out of other gyms in dagestan and other caucasian regions as well. And the big thing that he proceeded to do was to recruit these gym members to MMA. And that's why you know and care about Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov. That's the innovative thing that he did. He did run a successful sambo gym, very much so actually. His gym is like the Alabama of Dagestan or even Russian sambo at large, and he was like Nick Saban for that program. But his legacy internationally comes from the recruiting pipeline that he established to transition Russian sambists to MMA.
Did he invent brand new techniques that no one had thought of before and coach them to his students? No. Did he invent an entirely new martial art? No. All the things that his students do, other people thought of before. The region, his province in particular has one of the strongest grappling traditions of anywhere in the world, arguably the strongest. What he pioneered wasn't a technique or a training method, it was an application. He wasn't even the first to realize that sambists could be really good at MMA, that's been obvious for a while, I mean many still consider Fedor the greatest MMA fighter of all time. As tradition would tell, the Gracie story is that they created these techniques, and they coached it to students along lineages, and those students passed on those techniques. Abdulmanap didn't create a new martial art and teach it to his students, he created a team which served as a conduit for fighters in the region to transition into MMA. .
Sambo being spin off of wrestling is just ridiculous. Because Sambo base was old-school judo. Sambo maintained a lot of old school judo techniques that are now prohibited in modern judo.
I'm not talking about the history, I'm talking about the present. The history is long and complicated, and the fact is that the sport itself of Sambo has changed a lot and obviously not stayed the same over time. But right now, the application to MMA that sambo has far more resembles modern wrestling than modern judo. And Russia, Dagestan in particular, is very good at that, and that is of course not solely due to Eagles MMA. That's all you need to know.