SATURDAY, APRIL 11 FROM THE KASEYA CENTER IN MIAMI, FLORIDA
EARLY PRELIMS 2:30 PM PDT / 5:30 PM EDT | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

As of Saturday morning I had planned to write a blurb about the draw of multiple title matches on a single card and the inherent weirdness of size inequality, as despite Joshua Van being an undisputed champion fighting one of the best fighters from Japan, his Flyweight title defense against Tatsuro Taira was scheduled to play second fiddle to a match for a vacant belt featuring no less than Carlos Ulberg himself. Then, in the middle of the star-studded extravaganza that was Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan, the UFC announced Van was out and the fight was being delayed to May, where it will now play second fiddle to Sean Strickland.

So, instead, let me say:

What the fuck do you mean Tatiana Suarez and Loopy Godinez are curtain-jerking the prelims.

MAIN EVENT: THE RICE-PAPER TITLE
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Jiří Procházka (32-5-1, #2) vs Carlos Ulberg (13-1, #3)

When the UFC finally broke into the mainstream back in 2005, it did so on the strength and majesty of the Light Heavyweight division. The first season of The Ultimate Fighter (jesus christ) was half-Light Heavyweight, it featured Light Heavyweight coaches in Chuck Liddell and Randy Couture, and it chose its Light Heavyweight final between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar for its conclusion. Even the mostly-forgotten actual main event of that very first finale was Rich Franklin, who typically fought at Middleweight, and Ken Shamrock, a career Heavyweight, meeting in the middle at 205 pounds.

Light Heavyweight used to mean something. Pride’s Middleweight tournaments inspired thousands. Chuck Liddell embodied an entire era of mixed martial arts. We are still stuck with Jon Jones thanks to the things he accomplished in the Light Heavyweight division.

And the division is still cursed by the memory of his presence.

Two and a half years ago I wrote a longform, worldwide history of the division named The Sins of the Snowball King, but being as it’s been a minute and no one wants to go read 21,000 words about it again, let’s just recap the current era of Light Heavyweight in the UFC:

• Daniel Cormier chucked the 205-pound belt to go be a Heavyweight instead

• Jon Jones, having previously been stripped of the belt three times over conduct and drug offenses, relinquished it voluntarily midway through 2020 because he didn’t want to fight Dominick Reyes again and also intended to move to Heavyweight

• Jan Błachowicz won the vacant belt, but the UFC chose to use his reign to try to make Israel Adesanya a double champion instead, which failed when Jan beat him, much to their displeasure

• Glover Teixeira won the belt despite being in his mid-forties and close to retirement, then lost the belt in his first defense against Jiří Procházka in what was one of the best championship fights of all time and set both men up for the UFC’s most anticipated rematch in years

• Jiří promptly destroyed his shoulder in training and had to vacate the title instead

• Glover offered to rematch Jan on short notice, the UFC demanded it be Magomed Ankalaev instead, so Glover walked

• Jan and Ankalaev fought, Ankalaev was almost unanimously agreed to have won on media scorecards; the judges instead rendered a draw, leaving the title vacant

• Rather than a rematch or reusing either man, the UFC booked Glover Teixeira vs the #7-ranked Contender Series veteran Jamahal Hill, in what was also Glover’s retirement fight; Hill won and the UFC celebrated the DWCS era of champions and Hill’s long reign to come

• Hill promptly destroyed his ankle playing basketball and had to vacate the title instead

• Middleweight marketing darling Alex Pereira, who had just lost the 185-pound title, got pushed to the championship after one close split decision victory over Jan

• Pereira won and proceeded to have the first successful Light Heavyweight title defenses against actual Light Heavyweights in more than four years

• ...except Magomed Ankalaev, the #1 contender, was continually pushed down the card while Pereira fought Jamahal Hill, rematched Jiří Procházka, and was matched up against the barely-ranked Khalil Rountree Jr. instead

• After making him wait a year and a half, Magomed Ankalaev got his title shot and beat Pereira

• Instead of booking him against any of his top contenders, the UFC iced Ankalaev until Pereira was ready for a rematch, whereupon he knocked Ankalaev out

• Alex Pereira, like Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones before him, promptly threw the belt in the garbage to go up to Heavyweight

There have been six title vacations across its last eight reigns. If you count the draw between Ankalaev and Jan, we’ve made it all the way to 7 for 8. We’ve almost reached numerical parity between meaning and the void, and in 2026, that feels entirely appropriate. Combat sports likes to throw terms like “paper champion” around whenever the gold goes on someone they don’t like, but what do you do when all the gold gets melted out of the belt itself? At what point does a championship absorb the essence of the trash can it’s been chucked into a half-dozen times?

When you lose credibility, how hard and how long do you have to work to get it back?

And does it matter when the promoter doesn’t care?

Because, boy, they really don’t care. Jiří Procházka got knocked out by Alex Pereira--twice--easily--and he’s still here, right at the doorstep of the title. Carlos Ulberg earned this shot by squeezing just the barest sliver of a decision out against Jan Błachowicz. Magomed Ankalaev? The only Light Heavyweight to beat Alex Pereira?

He is not in this fight. He is not currently booked for any fight. For almost two years, now, his only bookings have been centered around what was convenient for Alex Pereira, and with Pereira gone, they have no need for him. Jiří has striking wars and kills people with spinning elbows. Carlos knocks people out and only rarely tries to wrestle.

All Magomed Ankalaev does is continue to be the best Light Heavyweight in the UFC.

And what kind of company would care about something like that?

No one can hate Jiří Procházka. It is impossible. He’s a Czech kickboxer whose passion for combat marches to a tune that’s 50% The Book of Five Rings and 50% button-mashing in Tekken. Just to be clear: That’s not me making a silly culture joke. Jiří has multiple interviews about being inspired by Tekken and Mortal Kombat. He runs around in the woods with a katana and he spent years of his career sporting one of its weirdest hairstyles as part of his attempt to pay tribute to the chonmage topknots samurai would wear. There are hundreds of fighters across the annals of combat sports that proudly declare mixed martial arts saved them from a lifestyle of following their passions that would have landed them in jail: Jiří is the only man in the UFC* who can say it probably saved him from just being a cosplayer.
_{*Outside the UFC, Yuichiro Nagashima still has this wrapped up.}

But Jiří was boxed out of contendership with Alex on top. Hell, he only barely survived Glover Teixeira. Jiří’s entire style is predicated on ignoring his strengths and engaging in brawls, to the point that his best knockouts have tended to come not from technical mastery or careful planning, but from outlasting his opponents and using all of that carefully-honed martial knowledge to capitalize on chaos. Glover was beating him until he wasn’t. Aleksandar Rakić was lighting Jiří up before getting slugged out in the second round. Jamahal Hill was battering Jiří’s body before he caught a left upside the head. Khalil Rountree Jr. was two minutes away from winning a unanimous decision when Jiří walked him down and stopped him in the third. As much as he may not deserve top contendership the way Magomed does, Jiří’s heart, grit and madness made him inarguably the biggest fan favorite in the division, and he richly deserves it.

Despite several half-hearted attempts at marketing by the UFC, Carlos Ulberg just hasn’t caught on the same way. It’s not for lack of success or insufficient highlights--he’s punched his way across the division, he hasn’t lost a fight since his UFC debut back in 2021, and he’s stopped most of his opponents along the way. He gets the knockouts. He looks like one of those really expensive G.I. Joe Hall of Famer dolls from the early 90s with the overly detailed abs was brought to life and forced to fight people to maintain its grasp on sentience. By all rights, he should be a star.

And maybe he is--for the definition of how the UFC makes stars now. Light Heavyweight has never been a bounty of talents, but his road up the rankings was carefully curated. He avoided the gatekeeping Dustin Jacobies of the world, he was carefully maneuvered away from the Nikita Krylovs, but they found space for him to fight Alonzo Menifield. At one point he beat a genuine prospect in Nicolae Negumereanu, and the UFC followed it up by giving him Ihor Potieria, the man Nicolae had just knocked out in his previous fight. Even in his run-up to the belt, after Carlos notched that aforementioned win over Jan, the UFC followed it up not with a Rountree or a Murzakanov, but with Dominick Reyes--a man ranked halfway down the division who’d only just gotten back on the winning track after a four-year-long losing streak.

It’s the top-competition comparison that really makes the difference clear. If there’s a martial aspect to why people love Jiří, it’s his unwillingness to change his style in the face of danger. Whether he’s fighting C.B. Dollaway or Alex Pereira, he is essentially the same man and he performs the same way. Carlos is a dangerous knockout artist--when he’s fighting the outmatched. He’ll happily knock out a Reyes or a Menifield, but he couldn’t get Volkan Oezdemir out of there, and he beat Jan by the barest of calls.

I would love to tell you that I am picking Jiří because I think he’s the better fighter. I think he’s the gutsier fighter. I think history has proven if you do not have enough gun to put him flat on his back he will rise from whatever grave you temporarily lower him into and viciously murder you with a series of elbows. He responds to adversity by kicking that adversity in the abdomen. Ulberg’s approach towards adversity has been to double down on trying to stay smart and defensively sound, even if that means halving his offensive output and hoping in vain that his enemy will wander into one of his (very good!) counterpunches. That approach working on Jiří is extremely feasible. Jiří has never met a punch he would not march willingly into if he thought it would give him an opening to spin several times while throwing two to four consecutive backfists.

There’s a very good chance Carlos and his focus on minimalism work as a hard counter to Jiří’s tendency to throw caution to the wind. It’s hard not to picture him getting clocked charging in.

But Light Heavyweight needs Jiří. If we’re not going to have a credible division, then by god, we can at least have one that people give a shit about. Do it for the children. JIŘÍ PROCHÁZKA BY KO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE POINTS ARE MADE UP AND THE RANKINGS DON’T MATTER
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Azamat Murzakanov (16-0, #6) vs Paulo Costa (15-4, #14 at Middleweight)

It’s actually really appropriate that this is the co-main event now instead of Van/Taira, because this fight is essentially the second verse of the funeral dirge for the Light Heavyweight division.

When you ask yourself how hard it is for the UFC to cultivate prospects, I want you to consider Azamat Murzakanov. 16-0. Undefeated. Has battered damn near everyone put in front of him. Knockouts in five of his six UFC fights. The only man other than Jiří to ever knock out Aleksandar Rakić, and Murzakanov did it in half the time and only needed three punches. He is doing this while being the shortest fighter in the entire division. He is shorter than most of the Welterweights in the UFC, and yet, he is atomizing men with flying knees and right hooks and, apparently, the scariest jab in the weight class. His Contender Series win was a violent, three-minute knockout over Matheus Scheffel, who would go on to be a championship finalist at Heavyweight in the Professional Fighters League.

They’ve had him for almost five years. He’s a half-dozen fights into his time with the company. His prospects have been clear since the moment he set foot in the cage, and now he’s right at the precipice of title contendership. Azamat Murzakanov has been mulching men for half a decade and he now just needs that last promotional push to justify his place at the top of the division. A title contender, a top five prospect, a former champion--the UFC has them. They have them all. They could have booked any of them.

Azamat Murzakanov is fighting Paulo Costa.

Paulo Costa is not ranked at Light Heavyweight. Paulo Costa has not fought at Light Heavyweight. Paulo Costa had one fight that was technically contested at Light Heavyweight, but that was because he was so drastically unprepared for his cut to Middleweight for a bout with Marvin Vettori that Costa decided he would only accept it if the weight limit was pushed up twenty whole pounds, and he still lost.

In his entire UFC tenure, which dates all the way back to 2017, Paulo has seven victories. Those victories are, in order,

• Garreth McLellan, who was cut immediately after for being 1-4 and retired one fight later

• Oluwale Bamgbose, who was cut one fight later for also being 1-4

• Johny Hendricks, a former Welterweight champion turned 5’9” Middleweight who retired from MMA after losing to Costa because he was 1 for his last 6

• Uriah Hall, who after the Costa fight was 1 for his last 5 and who left the sport in 2022 for the greener pastures of Karate Combat

• Yoel Romero, by far Costa’s best career victory and a genuine feather in the cap, who is also an absurdly frustrating fighter who competes to answer questions like ‘can I win without ever throwing a punch’

Let’s pause for a second. That last win was in the Summer of 2019. That is damn near seven years ago and we’re already at 5 out of 7. Who the hell did Paulo beat in the last seven years to justify being here?

• Luke Rockhold, who had been retired for three years after getting knocked out three times in four fights, returned to retirement after the fight, and then un-retired again to do bareknuckle boxing, where he immediately got his teeth knocked out

• Roman Kopylov, a frustratingly inconsistent, borderline-ranked kickboxer who is 6-5 in the UFC and fighting to avert getting cut

That’s it. Luke Rockhold and Roman Kopylov paved Paulo’s way to a battle for top contendership at the Light Heavyweight division.

If the UFC’s attempt to numb you hasn’t completely worked, you may remember Gregory Rodrigues knocking out Brunno Ferreira last month. That was supposed to be Paulo in there against Brunno. Up until the end of the year, Paulo Costa was scheduled to fight the lowest-ranked Middleweight in the company, a man who’d been repeatedly knocked out and pushed out of contendership and was slowly rebuilding himself on the back of stars of the sport like Jackson “The Moose” McVey.

Instead, Paulo’s fighting the most successful Light Heavyweight prospect in the world for the chance to be one win away from a shot at a world championship. That’s how important contendership is in this division. That’s how much matchmaking matters.

I dunno, man. I don’t know anymore, and I’m convinced they don’t either. We’re just chucking darts, here. AZAMAT MURZAKANOV BY TKO because I want the world to make a semblance of sense again.

MAIN CARD: BLAYDES MUST DIE
HEAVYWEIGHT: Curtis Blaydes (19-5 (1), #5) vs Josh Hokit (8-0, NR)

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think we were done talking about the extent to which nothing matters?

Curtis Blaydes is one of the greatest Heavyweights of this generation. The only people to ever beat him are huge-punching knockout monsters, every single one of whom either won or challenged for the title, and across twenty UFC fights he’s notched wins over five champions. He knocked out Jailton Almeida, he broke Alistair Overeem’s face open with one elbow, and he made Tom Aspinall’s knee explode in fifteen seconds using his secret telekinetic abilities. Given his unfortunate tendency to run facefirst into haymakers every time he gets a shot at the top, he is destined to become one of the canonical answers to the equally generational “Who is the best fighter not to win the title” question right alongside Liz Carmouche, Dan Henderson and Joseph Benavidez. He’s been a staple of the class for ten goddamn years.

The UFC spent all of 2025 trying, across three separate occasions, to book him against the debuting, unranked Rizvan Kuniev. I wrote about the conflict I felt over making one of your best, highest-ranked Heavyweights risk it all against a guy with no cache, but I still understood: Kuniev was one of the best Heavyweights outside of the UFC and the division is so perpetually unfortunate that it’s hard to blame them for not wanting to waste time with someone we already objectively know to be a contender. It was close, Blaydes scraped a decision, and for putting his top ranking up against an unranked guy who posed essentially no benefit to him, the UFC has repaid Blaydes by taking him back off the shelf after nearly a year of inactivity so he can fight another unranked guy, only this time instead of one of the most proven Heavyweights in the world it’s Josh Hokit, a man who’s almost exclusively fought the bottom of the barrel to the point that his two UFC fights thus far came against one Heavyweight that’d never even fought a man with a winning record and one Heavyweight who lost a mixed martial arts bout to Johnny Eblen, who fights at 185 pounds.

But he got a couple knockouts and he cuts reheated 1980s pro-wrestling promos with the cadence and vigor of a first-generation Youtuber that have a tendency to drift into weird bigot fantasies about hurting trans people, and, coincidentally, Curtis Blaydes is on a classically structured contract that has been seeing steady negotiations for years while Josh Hokit is only two fights into a Contender Series deal and offers them the chance to get yet another person into title contention who costs 1/10 as much to book.

Nothing matters anywhere, at this point, but good god, does it matter the least at Heavyweight. Between Kuniev, Teixeira, Fortune and Hokit we’re seeing a full assault on the rankings in the hopes of changing the guard and importing as many cheap competitors as possible, but it’s the big boy division and Blaydes is going on 36, so who knows. CURTIS BLAYDES BY TKO because I want to stand before the flow of entropy and deny it.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Dominick Reyes (15-5, #10) vs Johnny Walker (22-9 (1), #12)

With as much respect as possible for what is an inherently disrespectful statement: This is the battle to crown the jester king of the Light Heavyweight, the true People’s Champion, and I am here for it.

Six years ago, Dominick Reyes was the man who did the impossible, beat Jon Jones, and was denied his rightful victory by the judges. He protested this injustice through a radical act of civil disobedience: Forgetting how to fight and getting knocked out over and over for four straight years. The Dominick Reyes Career Revival Act of 2024 was one of our nation’s last positive achievements, even if, like so much civil infrastructure, it was built on the undue, untreated suffering of others--the streets will not forget Anthony Smith fighting through grief over losing his coach, visibly weeping during his entrance and egging on his own knockout loss by begging Reyes to hit him--and it ended in Dom getting utterly destroyed by a New Zealander, which kills my the-fall-of-America metaphor because lord knows Kiwi politics aren’t doing much better these days.

Johnny Walker has been a 205-pound chaos elemental for so long that his initial wave of hype came from the certitude people felt that as a 6’6” knockout machine he was the man to finally unseat Jon. Then it turned out beating Justin Ledet wasn’t an enormously helpful measuring stick and Johnny spent most of his time up among the division’s elite getting repeatedly knocked into an approximation of the ragdoll physics deaths from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Then, in a twist of fortune, he snapped off a three-fight winning streak that put him right up against Magomed Ankalaev for top contendership! Except his streak, hilariously, was also built on a victory over Anthony goddamn Smith, and it didn’t work for him, either. Our malevolent management matchmakers just tried to dispose of Walker as a big underdog to the streaking Zhang Mingyang, their desired Chinese star, in the UFC’s first event in Shanghai since 2017, and Walker promptly ruined their night by hobbling Zhang with leg kicks and punching him out in two rounds.

You know what the real funny thing about this is, though? I can’t in good conscience say “so, obviously, neither of these men will be a champion,” because look at my fucking division, man. Are you going to tell me Johnny Walker couldn’t knock out Khalil Rountree Jr. again? Do you think Dominick Reyes incapable of beating a Jamahal Hill coming off his seventh ankle/knee surgery?

Anything can happen. We live in a world of wonder and torment. JOHNNY WALKER BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Cub Swanson (30-14) vs Nate Landwehr (18-7)

I’m not sure what to make of how little I feel about Cub Swanson’s retirement.

As an obnoxiously online fan I was aware of the existence of World Extreme Cagefighting, but like the near-entirety of the audience I didn’t actually watch a WEC event until the company was bought out by Zuffa in 2006 and turned into the UFC’s kid brother. Those Versus network cards were lousy with future stars of the sport, with Dominick Cruz, Urijah Faber, Carlos Condit and even Demetrious Johnson getting his start in their waning days, but Cub Swanson was one of the guys the crowd got invested in. His constant attempts at jumping on chokes, his oddly loose punching style, the unorthodox footwork that made him look perpetually at risk of losing his balance; all of them were indicative of a fighter who was just too noticeably different to ignore.

That style carried him through twenty goddamn years of combat sports. It was an exceedingly weird twenty years, too. On his best nights, Cub was one of the most creative strikers in the sport. He outpunched Dustin Poirier. He knocked out Charles goddamn Oliveira. Even right on the verge of retirement in 2024 he could take on legendarily durable guys like Darren Elkins and Billy Quarantillo and spin their heads around. He’s also the only man Jens Pulver beat during the legendary 1-for-9 run that ended his time in the spotlight. José Aldo made his name in the American mainstream by crushing Cub with a flying knee in eight seconds. The same looseness and creatively that made Cub memorable also kept him vulnerable. He never made it to a title shot. He didn’t last in the top ten.

Which makes this appropriate, right? Cub’s retirement has been on the books for months, and of all the dance partners he could have gotten--a whole lot of folks were hoping for a rematch with Choi Doo-ho, in the hopes of getting another crack at one of the most celebrated brawls in UFC history--he’s got Nate Landwehr, a Good But Not Great fighter on a losing streak. He’s exciting, he’s an aggressive kind of striker and it should be a fun fight, but it’s hard not to see it as an anticlimax. Landwehr isn’t a legend, a star or even a contender, he’s just a guy the UFC tried and failed to push over the last few years. It’s tempting to think of this as a cynical attempt to get the new guy over, but not only has Landwehr’s ship already sailed, dude’s turning 38 in June.

There’s no last verse. This is one of those songs that just repeats until it fades out. Thank you for your twenty years of service: Here is your random match-up and an emotional video package about how much more memorable things used to be. CUB SWANSON BY TKO one last time.

PRELIMS: ARE THERE EVEN EARLY PRELIMS ANYMORE
FEATHERWEIGHT: Patrício Pitbull (37-8, #13) vs Aaron Pico (13-5, NR)

I just don’t get it. You spend decades establishing your global hegemony over mixed martial arts and denigrating every part of your competition as second-rate and undeserving of attention and now it’s 2026 and you are putting on a fight that could have headlined a Bellator card seven years ago. The UFC’s use of both of these men has been baffling. Patrício Pitbull walked into the company as both inarguably one of the best fighters who’d never been in the UFC and a man entering his late 30s and operating on a timeframe a huge part of the fanbase thought might already be up, which was not aided by a debut against Yair Rodríguez in which Pitbull looked slow, tired, and outright confused. He rescued himself from the Patchy Mix pits by beating Dan Ige and securing a hold on the outer reaches of the rankings, but now he has to defend it against Aaron Pico, the sport’s least successful and yet most recurring gold rush. Bellator signed him as a teenaged amateur wrestling superprospect a decade ago; he lost his professional debut in twenty-four seconds. They immediately set about rebuilding him in an attempt to take him from an 0-1 rookie to a title contender in the space of two years; the second he fought top competition he got knocked out twice in a row. The third time around he busted his own shoulder; Bellator didn’t live long enough for a fourth. And the UFC looked at this talented but perpetually uneven prospect now going on 30 and declared, “This is preferable to Movsar Evloev or Lerone Murphy,” and when the inexplicable attempt to shove him right into top contendership ended with Pico unconscious on the mat, they decided to match him against the other Bellator Featherweight standout they have on the roster so he had another shot at a ranking.

Daniel Santos is on a four-fight Featherwieght winning streak and they’re matching him up with his fifth straight unranked competitor (and his third straight South Korean, which is getting kind of uncomfortable). William Gomis is 5-1 and has yet to even sniff a ranked fight. Aaron Pico was anointed and he must be allowed chances until either he finally wins a championship or the universe reaches heat death. PATRÍCIO PITBULL BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Kevin Holland (28-15 (1)) vs Randy Brown (20-7)

There’s an alternate reality where both of these guys have been world champions, and we live here, in the timeline where they’re fighting each other as a preliminary footnote. They both have absurd reach advantages over virtually everyone in their division, they both hit like a truck when they land cleanly, and they’re both capable of just enough self-marketing to set themselves aside from the pack. They both also have this problem with losing every time they get a big fight. We’re now so many years and so many cycles deep into the Holland-Brown Alliance faltering at their greatest moments of opportunity that describing it again feels redundant. However: Brown, at least, got beaten fair and square this last time after Gabriel Bonfim knocked him out. Holland got fed to Mike Malott, got punted in the groin repeatedly and would’ve had a draw if referee Dan Miragliotta had correctly taken a point, but then the Canadian marketing darling wouldn’t have won in Canada and we wouldn’t be having Mike Malott vs Gilbert Burns as a main event in Winnipeg next week. Yes, really. Yes, Canada, that is how little they think of you.

At this point I have learned to anticipate both men fighting against their own strengths rather than competing with any kind of sense, so I’m flipping a damn coin, and the coin says RANDY BROWN BY DECISION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Mateusz Gamrot (25-4 (1), #8) vs Esteban Ribovics (15-2, NR)

Fights like this are why we have the ‘who gets opportunities and why’ conversation. Mateusz Gamrot is an extremely good Lightweight who also happens to be a wrestler, and that means the world hates him. When he has close split decisions that probably should have gone his way, they will tip towards the non-wrestler. When he makes himself a fixture of the top ten, he will be repeatedly called upon to fight unranked men rather than given a chance at ascension. And when one of those opportunities does miraculously, serendipitously come up, as when Rafael Fiziev had to abruptly pull out of a main event with Charles Oliveira this past October, he will be given one chance, and if he gets, say, choked out? It’s all the way back down the ladder. Esteban Ribovics has won primarily by close, difficult decisions, and he couldn’t get past the Nasrat Haqparasts of the world, and one fight ago he was having a close-as-hell war with Elves Brener, who in loss hit a three-fight losing streak. But unlike Mateusz, Esteban is a striker. That means he gets to fight to be in the top ten now. Haqparast beat Esteban and his next fight was against the unranked, 2-0 Quillan Salkilld; Esteban got the guy on a skid and now he’s gunning for a spot near the top.

These are the rules and we will defeat them one single-leg takedown at a time. MATEUSZ GAMROT BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Tatiana Suarez (11-1, #2) vs Loopy Godinez (14-5, #6)

Here is a short selection of fights the UFC has deemed main card-worthy in 2026.

• Curtis Blaydes vs Josh Hokit

• Luke Riley vs Michael Aswell Jr.

• Tommy McMillen vs Manolo Zecchini

• Lerryan Douglas vs Julian Erosa

• Marwan Rahiki vs Harry Hardwick

I do not get a lot a feedback on these columns, so when it happens, I tend to fixate. One piece I think about most often related to how I over-focus on card placement and the predicament of women being stuck on the prelims. Their point, in short, was that fight placement now operates on an economy of action, and if women are being pushed down the card, it’s not because of sexism or promotional failure, it’s because their fights are bad.

I said it then, I will say it now: How quickly people have forgotten Colby Covington.

Here’s my real hot take, though: The UFC should push fighters who have bad fights.

It isn’t hard to find brawls in combat sports. They’re actually pretty common. The reason good brawls were such a coveted part of UFC broadcasts wasn’t scarcity, it was placement. When you pride yourself on having the best fighters in the world, the most skilled martial artists, you will, on average, get boring fights, because strong technical skills lead to strategic performances. We’re not seeing more brawls on UFC broadcasts because the sport is getting better, we’re seeing them because we’ve arrived at a point where we’re firing Muhammad Mokaev and Jailton Almeida and replacing them with Tommy McMillen, and that is, ultimately, incredibly unhealthy for the long-term future of the sport. You have always been able to tune into the Legacy Fighting Alliance or Combate to see 5-0 prospects whose martial output is primarily Bart Simpson windmilling. You can find brawls anywhere.

You cannot find Tatiana Suarez anywhere else. You cannot watch Loopy Godinez test herself against the top of the mountain anywhere else. The main feature of the UFC is, and has always been, having the best mixed martial arts stars in the world. Even the astroturfed superstars needed to climb that ladder of credibility for the audience to buy into them. Alex Pereira needed Sean Strickland, Conor McGregor needed Chad Mendes, and Mackenzie Dern needs contenders, and she won’t get any that matter if no one knows they’re here because they’re fighting their top contendership matches on the fucking prelims just above Chris “Taco” Padilla.

You are not improving the product, you are just making it cheaper, and one day it will be indistinguishable from everything else and your brand identity will be dead. TATIANA SUAREZ BY DECISION.

EARLY PRELIMS: THEY DIDN’T DEFINE THIS SECTION UNTIL TUESDAY
LIGHTWEIGHT: MarQuel Mederos (11-1) vs Chris Padilla (17-6)

We here at the Punchsport Report would like to tender our apologies to Chris “Taco” Padilla for using him as a punchline in the previous section, because he, too, is kind of getting boned. They didn’t want Taco. They had no desire to put on the Ritz. They brought Padilla into the fold as a replacement for a replacement, a warm body at +400 odds against the debuting James Llontop, who was widely seen as a star prospect. Chris choked him out in a round. Llontop is no longer in the UFC, but Chris is 4-0, and not only has he won, he has stopped everyone save Jai Herbert. Hell, in his last fight Padilla became the first person to stop Ismael Bonfim on strikes, a thing wildmen like Terrance McKinney and Benoît Saint Denis failed to do and Nazim Sadykhov came legally close to thanks to a doctor’s stoppage. For his efforts in building a winning streak in the UFC’s biggest, most competitive division, Chris Padilla gets to fight MarQuel Mederos. MarQuel Mederos has only fought three times in the last two and a half years, every fight went to a (victorious) decision, and the last time we saw him, he was up against Mark “The Shark” Choinski, who got to the UFC by beating a 9-10 man in the Anthony Pettis Fighting Championship, America’s answer to the Samurai Fight House.

These things are equal now. Every statement about rewarding action is a lie. CHRIS PADILLA BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Kelvin Gastelum (20-10 (1)) vs Vicente Luque (23-12-1)

Honestly? Refreshing. This is refreshing. We spend so much time here discussing how the sport is depressing because of politics and matchmaking and corruption and malfeasance and it’s so terribly refreshing to be reminded that sometimes the sport can just be depressing on its own terms. Kelvin Gastelum could and should have been a world champion at Welterweight, but discipline problems led to him coming in off-weight so often that he got kicked out of the division and forced to fight as a 5’9” Middleweight, and now he can’t even reliably make 185. Vicente Luque was one of the UFC’s most reliable best bout machines, an all-action fighter with an incredible style who is, still, the only man to ever stop Belal Muhammad, and now he’s put so much mileage on his bones that he’s old and broken down at just 34. There was a window of time where both of these men could have held gold, and now it’s just too damn late, and there’s nothing left to do but fight until they can’t anymore. These were main-event fighters and now they get 203 words at the bottom of the write-up.

That’s legitimate depression. That’s home-grown, sourdough-starter depression. KELVIN GASTELUM BY DECISION.

WELTWERWEIGHT: Charles Radtke (11-5) vs Francisco Prado (12-4)

Sometimes you just get stuck in the loop. Both Francisco Prado and ol’ Chuck Buffalo are acceptably solid guys who just can’t get anywhere, and they’d both be gone already if there weren’t even more troubled, forgotten fighters in their way. Do you remember Daniel Frunza or Matthew Semelsberger? Radtke’s win record does. If you’ve been watching the UFC steadily, you’ve seen Francisco Prado fight five times. Do you remember any of them? If you do, it was probably just for knocking out Ottman Azaitar, the only thing that has kept Prado employed. And if you do remember Ottman Azaitar, let me ask you: Why?

FRANCISCO PRADO BY TKO.

SATURDAY, APRIL 4 FROM THE GREAT WASTES OF THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

There are three ranked fighters out of twenty-four on this card, the highest-ranked ones aren’t in the main event, and Tommy McMillen vs Manolo Zecchini is a main card fight.

I could write more, but I don’t know that a better joke exists.

MAIN EVENT: A HEADLINER IN ANY ARENA
LIGHTWEIGHT: Renato Moicano (20-7-1, #10) vs Chris Duncan (15-2, NR)

One of the most interesting parts of following this sport since its inception has been witnessing multiple generations of fans find their points of entry, frustrate themselves to the point of departure, and see their era of the sport wiped away by revisionist history. Fans of the nascent no-rules bloodsport days were bored by MMA’s turn towards regulation and professionalism and saw their era written out of the sport’s origin story because it was barbaric, ugly, and, most importantly, impossible to attribute to the business genius of Dana White, protagonist of the world. The mainstream fan boom from the drama of The Ultimate Fighter led to fans who were widely maligned as uninformed casual viewers (because lord knows everyone who watches sports has to be an expert) and the era of sterile corporate genericizing drove them away and deemed their time with the sport as embarrassing and insufficiently profitable. The McGregor Era brought in a massive new audience and the most money mixed martial arts had ever seen, but the trade-off was having to deal with Conor fucking McGregor, and as the UFC desperately chased more of him rather than building new stars, they lost those eyeballs entirely.

We bid farewell to the ESPN era at the start of this year. It wasn’t a particularly fun time to be a mixed martial arts fan. There were high points--there always are--but the reduction in card quality, the growth in antipathy towards the fanbase and the open embrace of the right wing all sapped a great deal of the joy out of following the UFC. And yet, when we learned that the ESPN era was ending and ushering in the Paramount era, one that would give the UFC its biggest operating budget ever and give them greater connection to the fans by killing the boundaries of pay-per-view, instead of celebrating, I was deeply concerned.

I really hope this leads to something good. There’s no reason it can’t! This could easily lead to increased fighter pay, an emphasis on higher-quality cards and better, less sterile production. After all, they just made seven point seven billion fucking dollars. There’s no reason everything shouldn’t get better!

Except that they already made seven point seven billion fucking dollars.

I hope I am wrong but I think things are on a trajectory to get worse than they have ever been.

We’re only now settling into the Apex era of the sport, and as more and more longtime fans fall away from the sport in its current state, I have noticed a growing sentiment amongst the modern-day faithful that older fans are, in fact, whiny babies. The UFC isn’t worse, we are, and instead of paying attention to what’s actually happening and getting invested in the Contender Series we only care about old, retiring fighters. Our complaints about card quality have nothing to do with the actual quality of said cards, and are, instead, a sole measurement of our own disenchantment with a sport that has outgrown us.

I respect it. I respect standing up for the validity of the era that you, yourself, found a passion for something. When I fell in love with mixed martial arts Keith Hackney was a star, I understand digging your heels into the dirt and defending what you care about, however ugly it might be. “Things were better back in my day” is one of the rustiest axioms there is. Some things will always be better in the past. Some things will always be worse.

But all of those things are collectively irrelevant, because you are defending the era that gives us Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan as a main event.

This wasn’t an accident. This isn’t one of those cases where Derrick Lewis gets sick or Maycee Barber has a seizure and suddenly you’re stuck with Main Event Ion Cuțelaba. They intended to do this. They did this on purpose. We’re only three out of eighty-four months into this bright new no-pay-per-view era of the sport and already, just 3.6% of the way into it, we are at the point where a fight between a man who’s only ever main evented as a B-side against a man who isn’t even close to a ranking is a completely sensible headliner.

That is how little they think of their cards. That is how little they think of you.

Renato Moicano has never been the guy. They’ve given him chances, they’ve tested the waters, and every time he’s been thrown into them he’s drowned. Brian Ortega was choking him out damn near a decade ago. Chan Sung Jung was already in the twilight of his career when he flattened Moicano in a single minute. Rafael Fiziev destroyed him. Rafael dos Anjos destroyed him. Renato Moicano is, canonically, the last person José Aldo ever knocked out in combat sports.

Hell, the single biggest moment of his career was a mistake. He was slated to have an outer-top-ten fight with Beneil Dariush the week Arman Tsarukyan infamously fucked up the main event of UFC 311, and despite Dariush being right there and higher-ranked, the UFC decided to give Moicano the shot. And he talked his shit, and he vowed to shock the world, and then, as one does, he got choked out in a single round. Five months later they gave him his originally-planned shot at Beneil’s ranking anyway, Beneil beat him, and they were going to have The Rematch Of The Guys Who Keep Losing by giving Ortega his long-awaited Lightweight debut against Moicano but Ortega’s body won’t stop imploding so instead, we’re here.

With Chris Duncan.

Chris Duncan is a good fighter. Yes, getting knocked out by Slava Claus is a little unfortunate, but having a funny loss in your background is a prerequisite for greatness in mixed martial arts.* Duncan hits hard, punches straight, and has gotten very, very good at jumping on chokes when the opportunity presents itself. A four-fight winning streak is a great accomplishment at any division, let alone Lightweight.
_{*Khabib, you know as well as I do what happened in the Gleison Tibau fight.}

But the best person Duncan beat during that streak was either Terrance McKinney, who got knocked silly by Ismael Bonfim, or Mateusz Rębecki, who got his lights shut out by a going-on-40 Diego Ferreira. Your other two choices are Bolaji Oki, who stands now at a whopping 2-3, and Jordan Vucenic, whom the UFC valued so highly that they cut him right after Duncan submitted him.

Funny story. Beneil Dariush, the man who beat Renato Moicano? His next fight after that was a match-up with Benoît Saint Denis, whom Moicano had recently destroyed. Chris Duncan’s last loss came at the hands of Manuel Torres back in 2024, and now Duncan is fighting for a spot in the top ten, and the UFC tried to book him into a fight for #12 against--once again--Beneil Dariush.

It’s okay if you like this. It’s great if you like this. Combat sports can be a beautiful thing and they exist to provide joy. But don’t let them convince you they’re not breaking that beauty down into the cheapest possible chunks they can before they sell it to you, nor that your fandom, in the post-pay-per-view age, isn’t being measured in terms of what the absolute minimum value is that they can possibly give you before the joy you derive is no longer worth the time you spend, just as it did for your forefather fans.

Set your own value as a fan of the sport. Don’t let the sport dictate it for you. I may like Duncan but I cannot stop seeing the way Torres wrapped him up in the back of my eyelids when I think about this fight. RENATO MOICANO BY SUBMISSION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: A MAIN EVENT IN A BETTER SPORT
WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Virna Jandiroba (22-4, #3) vs Tabatha Ricci (12-3, #7)

Virna: I’m still mad at you.

I know the deck was stacked against you. I know they picked you to face Mackenzie Dern for the vacant Strawweight belt because you were the only top contender she’d already beaten before. I know your style is 90% grappling by volume and another, better grappler is your kryptonite, but we were relying on you to save us from the marketing future. You could have stopped this from happening. Now it’s 2026 and Mackenzie’s already almost half a year into a title reign the UFC spent years trying to set up and now has no idea what to do with.

You could have saved us and now you are stuck having to save yourself, because Virna: This is it. This is the plan for you now. You’re a grappler who lost a shot at the top but you’re too goddamn dangerous for them to trust with the ascension of anyone they care about. You already fucked up Loopy Godinez and Xiaonan Yan for them, they don’t want it happening again. I don’t know if you’ve looked out the window and glanced past the rest of your division, but Tatiana Suarez, the top contender, is fighting halfway down the rankings against Loopy in the vain hope that they can trade their tarnished wrestler for a slightly more marketable wrestler who hasn’t yet lost a title fight.

So congratulations, Tabatha. Even though you are on a one-fight winning streak, even though your only wins in the last three years came against women of perpetual suffering, even though you have losses to Loopy and Xiaonan younger than the entire UFC careers of multiple title contenders and you really should have lost that decision to Tecia Pennington back in 2024, you’re on deck. In total fairness: Your last fight was pretty fucking brutal. After an entire career spent using her judo background and her grappling strengths to control her opponents and cruise to decisions, Tabatha notched her first knockout victory in almost half a decade by smashing Amanda Ribas in the face with her elbow until she broke the same orbital bone Maycee Barber had already fucked up a couple years prior.

That goes a long way in women’s MMA. Whether I hate it or not, finishes--knockouts, if we’re being really honest--are the biggest currency in the sport. Joselyne Edwards went from toiling away in prelims to fighting for the #3 spot at Women’s Bantamweight not because her competition got better, but because she started knocking them out and dumping them on their heads. Ricci smashed her way into this position and I cannot complain about her commitment to facial violence being rewarded.

But I don’t think it’s gonna pay off for her. Virna’s bigger, stronger, and a fantastic grappler in her own right; Ricci’s best chances might be on the feet and I’m not convinced she can keep Virna off her long enough to make it count. VIRNA JANDIROBA BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: A MAIN CARD NOWHERE
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev (8-0) vs Brendson Ribeiro (17-9 (1))

What did we say when Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev made his UFC debut last November, again?

AbdulRakhman Yakyaev certainly appears to be a legitimately talented fighter. He held gold in France, he’s shown off both decent striking and wrestling, he’s looked altogether impressive if not yet wholly tested. Who does the UFC put in front of him for his contract test? Alik Lorenz, who’s been fighting guys with losing or near-losing records in the LFA for almost his entire career. Shockingly, Lorenz got knocked out in thirty seconds. How do you follow that up in Yakhyaev’s debut?

You feed him Raffael Cerqueira, who’s already 0-3 in the UFC and has gotten knocked insensible in two of those performances. Sorry, Raffi.

The UFC got exactly what it wanted. Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev (sidenote: I wish the UFC had any consistency in how they transliterate names) got his next soft lunch in Abu Dhabi and disposed of him effortlessly. He landed an instant spinning wheel kick, punched Cerqueira across the cage, dropped him with a headkick and choked him out in thirty-three seconds, because when you are a four-figure favorite, that is what you are supposed to do. But, hey: You got it! You got the big highlight. Your new guy got on the show and he crushed a dude and now we can give him a more reasonable test, right?

Right! Right. Silly question. You give him Brendson Ribeiro, who is 2-4 in the UFC and has been knocked out in 3/4 of his losses. How could you do anything else? You need to give him another crazy knockout so you can put contextless clips on Twitter to try to convince the five people who still care that he’s the next big thing, and then, maybe, you can give him a fight with stiffer competition like Austen Lane or, possibly, the ring cap on a can of potted meat.

ABDUL RAKHMAN YAKHYAEV BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Rafael Estevam (14-0) vs Ethyn Ewing (9-2)

This is an extremely rad fight under slightly unfortunate circumstances. Rafael Estevam was one of the UFC’s most promising prospects at Flyweight. Undefeated, well-rounded, a smart defensive fighter who knows how not to overextend himself--in one of the toughest divisions for prospects to break through, Rafael ran up a three-fight winning streak that included no less than Charles Johnson, the man who beat the champ. You may have subtly noticed that Rafael is not in that division anymore. In three fights at Flyweight Rafael only actually made weight once, and that doesn’t even include his originally-scheduled debut getting scratched after he botched the cut so badly he didn’t even make it to the scale. However promising a prospect you may be, if you can’t make the division, you can’t fight in it.

But he’s not giving up any size here, and that’s especially funny, because Estevam is coming up from Flyweight while Ethyn Ewing is coming down from Featherweight. All of his success down on the regional circuit came from the 135-pound division, but last November saw promotional superprospect Malcolm Wellmaker lose two opponents in rapid succession, and the UFC needed a last-minute replacement, and Ethyn was willing to take the risk. I heavily doubted him, and like the rest of the world, I was dead wrong. Ewing went up against one of the scariest knockout artists in the lower weight classes as a massive underdog and just marched right through his offense. He outstruck him, he outwrestled him, he made an immediate name for himself, and, in a sign of genuine smarts, he immediately went back to the weight class he knows best.

Comedy option: Fight never happens because Estevam pulls the Kelvin Gastelum/Bryan Battle tribute act and misses weight even worse at a higher class. Failing that? It’s a genuinely interesting one and given how Estevam’s biggest weakness was his tendency to get tired as fights wore on, moving up to 135 could be great for his gas tank. But I just like Ewing’s moxie too much to rule him out. ETHYN EWING BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Tommy McMillen (9-0) vs Manolo Zecchini (11-4)

There’s a reason I singled this fight out in the introductory blurb as a singular example of how far we’ve fallen. Somehow, impossibly, I have seen hype for this--specifically, for Tommy McMillen. He’s undefeated! He’s stopped almost everyone he’s fought! He’s a Tim Welch student who trains with Sean O’Malley and has styled himself with the same fauxfro-and-bad-tattoos getup! He had a great comeback to win the decision in his Contender Series fight!

All of that is true! It is also true that what got him on DWCS was beating the 21-27 Dumar “El Legendario Samurai” Roa, who fights almost once a month and is currently 1 for his last 15. The man McMillen beat for his UFC contract was David Mgoyan, who got there with a thrilling victory over the 9-17 Luciano “El Aguila” Ramos, who is a far more palatable 1 for his last 12. And Mgoyan dropped McMillen, nearly knocked him out and damn near choked him unconscious, and McMillen only barely escaped a draw.

Who do they have waiting to complete this story, now that he’s in the big show? Why, it’s Manolo “Angelo Veneziano” Zecchini, who has spent nearly his entire career fighting overmatched opponents with more losses than wins. He’s got one fight in the last three and a half years, and that was his UFC debut in 2023 where Morgan Charrière--who is, also, 3-3 in the UFC--folded him in half with body kicks in one round.

Of this, main cards are made. Tommy is a -1000 favorite and he absolutely should be, this entire campaign is an attempt to lay the groundwork for a marketing darling and I’m fully aware TOMMY MCMILLEN BY TKO is the extremely likely result, but Manolo catching him would please the part of me that hates these fucking setups.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Robert Ruchała (11-2) vs José Delano (16-3)

When first we saw Robert Ruchała last September I wrote that he was one of the UFC’s better international pickups, a champion in Poland’s KSW whose only career loss came against Salahdine Parnasse, one of the best fighters in the world, and despite matching him up against France’s William Gomis on his home turf in Paris they were likely hoping Robert could end William’s streak of split decisions. He succeeded, in that he is now the first person to ever lose a unanimous decision to Gomis in the UFC. Robert’s first round was solid, but Gomis was able to adjust to his aggression and Robert didn’t have an answer for his range, and if I am overanalyzing this one fight, it’s because we haven’t seen Robert in the seven months since and his UFC career has a sample size of one.

But that’s one more than José Delano, who is making his promotional debut after winning his Contender Series contract last August, and I’ll tell you, man, if this was the general product DWCS was putting out, I’d complain a lot fucking less. In the land of untested prospects against the trash collectors of the sport, José stands out as the tier of competitor that’s already done the damn thing. He’s experienced, he’s fought some extremely legitimate competition, he held gold at Featherweight out in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, his only loss in almost a decade came against the criminally underrated Gabriel Santos, and his tape is just fucking fun to watch. His takedown defense is on point, his ability to dart in and out of range behind his back hand is stellar, and until the day he gets knocked out doing it, I’m gonna enjoy it.

Hell, I’m gonna enjoy this. When I talk about expecting more from the sport, this is part of it. This is a well-trod LFA champion against an already-accomplished KSW champion. They’re both solid and experienced and fluent in a martial language other than striving for viral knockouts at all cost. They could do this more often instead of giving you Tommy McMillen vs The Spirit of Italy thirty-three times a year. JOSÉ DELANO BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: I GUESS THIS IS ABOUT RIGHT FOR HERE, THOUGH
HEAVYWEIGHT: Thomas Petersen (10-4) vs Guilherme Pat (6-0)

Last week, Tyrell Fortune beat Marcin Tybura to become the #10-ranked Heavyweight in the UFC. It was his first fight in the company. Rizvan Kuniev is #7 despite being just 1-1 in the company, thanks to his victory over the 8-3 Jailton Almeida, who was cut from the UFC immediately after the fight. Tallison Teixeira, who is #12, 2-1, and just got knocked out by Derrick Lewis, has a shot at the #3-ranked Sergei Pavlovich next month. Curtis Blaydes is #5 and has only ever lost to world title contenders, and next week he’s defending his spot against the unranked Josh Hokit, who is going from the absolute outer reaches of the division to top contendership because he can cut lukewarm 1980s professional wrestling promos. The interim title is about to be contested by Ciryl Gane, who has failed to win the world championship in three separate attempts, and Alex Pereira, who has never fought at Heavyweight before in his life, and this will be the second time in the last three years that Heavyweight gold will hang in the balance for a Light Heavyweight fighter.

Guilherme Pat has one fight against a man with a winning record in his entire career, and it was in his UFC debut last December, and the man he beat, Allen Frye Jr., was one fight removed from an MMA event held at the gymnasium of a water park in Arkansas. It was terrible, as was Pat’s victory. Thomas Petersen is 2-3 in the UFC since his debut two years ago, and in those two years, 3/5 of the men he’s fought--including Jamal Pogues, who beat him--have been removed from the roster.

We talk almost weekly about how bad Heavyweight is, but you are not prepared for how bad it has yet to become. THOMAS PETERSEN BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Alessandro Costa (14-5) vs Stewart Nicoll (8-2)

As much as I could very easily play the same ‘hey, look, it’s a preliminary fight between two largely unsuccessful guys the UFC doesn’t know what to do with’ here, I don’t have to, because I am safe under the warm, comfortable blanket of the Flyweight division. Alessandro Costa got to the big show on the back of victory over a career jobber and now has more UFC losses than wins and just got blown out of the water by a debuting Alden Coria, and Stewart Nicoll was brought into the corporate fold as yet another Australian fighter meant to bolster the subsidy benefits the UFC gets from the Australian governmentshowcase the prowess of their regional scene, and he, too, got immediately choked out by Jesus Aguilar and dominated by Lucas Rocha, and there’s a pretty good chance neither guy is ever going to crack the top of the division, and it’s Flyweight, so that’s fine. It’ll be fast and sharp and fun and whoever wins will get to go fight Park Hyun-sung in Baku or something.

ALESSANDRO COSTA BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Lando Vannata (12-7-2) vs Darrius Flowers (12-8-1)

Remember at the top of this write-up, when I excoriated the ‘the old-school fans need to let go’ mindset? This is the one place where it is true. We need to let go of Lando Vannata. We had one beautiful moment where Lando burst onto the scene and nearly stopped Tony Ferguson at the height of his power, and he looked unorthodox and creative and tough as nails, and we all, collectively, lost our shit at the promise held in his strangely gesticulating hands. Everyone wanted the Lando Vannata future, and my friends: This is the Lando Vannata future. We made it. That fight was ten fucking years ago. That fight happened when Barack Obama was still in office. He hasn’t come up with one single back to back victory in the last decade of his life. Every person he’s beaten has at best been out of the UFC for years or at worst has outright retired. He’s pulled out of four fights in the last five years and only made it to the cage twice. Lando’s ship has sailed. We need to be realistic about the dark, terrible times we live in and finally let this one go. We need to embrace reality. The world is cold, the universe is cruel, and your new hero is Darrius Flowers, who has been here for almost four years and has never won a UFC fight and was last seen getting squashed by Evan Elder. And that’s fine! That’s the world and we just need to grow up and accept things the way they are and stop thinking about spinning wheel kicks that are as dated now as slap bracelets and Chrono Trigger.

But I fucking love slap bracelets and Chrono Trigger. LANDO VANNATA BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Hailey Cowan (7-4) vs Alice Pereira (5-1)

We spoke a summoning incantation back in February, and it has come to fruition.

The Contender Series provides virtually all of the UFC’s roster replacements nowadays, they’ve signed somewhere around 400+ contracts off it--not including random late replacement signings--and about 250 of those were in just the last five years. Do you know how many of those 250 contracts went to fighters at Women’s Bantamweight?

One.

They signed Hailey Cowan four years ago and then she lost and they gave up.

You may have missed it at the time, but they wanted Hailey. She didn’t get the kind of full-court press the UFC reserves for its male talents--even Kayla fucking Harrison debuted on the prelims under Calvin Kattar and Bo Nickal--but by the standards of 7-2 Contender Series winners, they were positively aglow. Hell, when Hailey got scratched from her legally obligated Apex debut, they booked her on an honest-to-god road show. And then she missed that. And then when she finally showed up, she missed weight, too. But she sure didn’t miss Jamey-Lyn Horth punching her in the face dozens of times. It took two years for Hailey to come back from that loss, and once again, the UFC put her on a road show--a road show with Alexander Volkanovski and Paddy Pimblett on it, no less--and she got choked out in seven minutes by Nora Cornolle. Now the old must meet the new, as Alice Pereira’s hype also needs rescuing. “Golden Girl” came into the UFC with a bit of intrigue that almost exclusively came from people who thought she was Alex Pereira’s kickboxing sister, which, for the record, is AliNe Pereira, who is fighting on Netflix’s Carano/Rousey card next month. Alice is the regional lady who’d never beaten anyone with a solid record and used her height and reach advantage to throw too many flying knees and get caught with haymakers from way too far out on a regular basis. The UFC tried to give her an at least vaguely gentle landing by booking her to debut against Montserrat Rendon, who has been equally historically unsuccessful, and Pereira couldn’t manage to get past her, either.

Y’know, Hailey won her DWCS fight by a narrow split decision, and the woman she beat, Cláudia Leite, is 3-0 since then. They don’t have space for her, apparently. No problem with Hailey Cowan, though. The odds are dead even on this one, not because it is hotly anticipated, but because no one knows what to make of either of them or if there’s any reason they should still be here. I’m gonna say HAILEY COWAN BY DECISION because I think she’s just a bit more well-rounded.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Azamat Bekoev (20-4) vs Tresean Gore (5-4)

Azamat Bekoev, you are the latest example of just how vicious the pace of this sport can be. One fight ago Bekoev was on a four-year, eight-fight winning streak, had just successfully entered the UFC by punching out Ryan Loder, winner of The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ) in a single round, and was widely heralded as a real Middleweight prospect. Then, this past October, he engaged in a back-and-forth war with a debuting Yousri Belgaroui and got knocked out in the third round. Now? He’s stuck with Tresean Gore, whose career highlight is either choking out Josh Fremd or almost winning the season of The Ultimate Fighter that gave us Bryan Battle and Ricky Turcios. Gore had a lot of promise, man! But then his body broke down and his training plateaued and now he’s missing weight and losing decisions to Rodolfo Vieira, a man famous for having a bad gas tank.

On the plus side, Azamat: They want you to win and they set this up to rehabilitate you, which means they see genuine value in you. On the minus side, if you somehow lose to Tresean Gore you are going in the Bog of Eternal Stench for the duration of your contract. AZAMAT BEKOEV BY TKO.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Dione Barbosa (8-4) vs Melissa Gatto (9-2-2)

It’s real rough to not get ranked in the top fifteen when you’re in one of the least populated divisions in the company. Both Dione and Melissa are essentially 2-2 in the UFC--Gatto’s technically 3-2, but the third win was a short-notice Bantamweight bout against Tamires Vidal, so we can dismiss it as non-canonical--and it’s a bit tough to divine the boundaries of their successes and failures from it, because the ebbs and flows of Flyweight mean you’re talking about going from fighting genuine contenders like Miranda Maverick or Tracy Cortez to, say, Diana Belbiţă or Victoria Leonardo. We also haven’t seen Gatto in almost two years, where we just watched Barbosa run back a six year-old regional bout with Karine Silva and come up short this time, because fighting in the UFC is harder than fighting in Pinhais.

Either way: DIONE BARBOSA BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Dakota Hope (11-1) vs Kai Kamaka III (17-7-1)

This got added to the card on Monday, and unlike most short-notice fights it wasn’t a replacement or a substitution, just one of those cases where the UFC decides their event isn’t quite good enough as booked and what it needs is the Fury Fighting Championships giving up their main event so the Apex can live. Dakota Hope was going to fight Carlos Calderon for FFC’s Featherweight belt in mid-May, but instead, he’s taking his winging punches and lunging haymakers to the UFC so he can welcome Kai Kamaka III back to the company. Sharp memories may recall Kai having a UFC stint back in 2021, which got him cut after a somewhat uninspiring 1-2-1, but he went on to be a mainstay in Bellator’s Featherweight division and even took PFL champion Brendan Loughnane to a split decision in what was probably his career-best performance, even in loss.

It’s good to have him back and hopefully this stint goes better than the first. KAI KAMAKA III BY DECISION.

You have made it to April, so we are 1/4 through this year, and I cannot believe it has only been that much. Christ almighty. This month brings us two UFC title fights, two UFC Apex events and two of the worst main events I have seen in a long time, along with some fun from the PFL, one big ONE event in exchange for one that they quietly cancelled, and, of course, a Danny Sabatello fight.

THIS MONTH’S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS

• UFC Fight Night: Moicano vs Duncan, April 4

• UFC 327: Procházka vs Ulberg, April 11

• UFC Fight Night: Burns vs Malott, April 18

• UFC Fight Night: Sterling vs Zalal, April 25

• PFL Africa 1: Pretoria, April 10

• PFL Chicago: Pettis vs McKee, April 11

• PFL Belfast: Kelly vs Wilson, April 16

• ONE 174: Who knows, April 2 Never mind, it’s cancelled

• ONE Fight Night 42: Eersel vs Rungrawee, April 10

• ONE Samurai 1: Rodtang vs Takeru 2, April 29

• Rizin Landmark 13 in Fukuoka: Sabatello vs Goto, April 12

IS THERE ANY NEWS

ORLANDO WIET - OCTOBER 24, 1965-MARCH 26, 2026

Orlando Wiet, a longtime kickboxing OG who managed to fight in both K-1 and the UFC, passed away last month. There isn’t a lot of information out there about what happened to him save that he’d fallen ill in February and had a friend taking care of him, and Wiet is one of the few people who predates even me as a fan, so for once, I don’t have a personal wellspring to draw from here. Instead I’m gonna turn it over to Sherdog’s Jay Pettry, who already did a fine job with the story.

On a lighter note that’s just irritating rather than depressing: You know that section that’s been all the way near the bottom of the monthly write-ups about ONE’s choice to keep their women’s 125-pound champion Xiong Jingnan under contract while never goddamn doing anything with her? Well, that’s officially over. In the very first substack iteration of the monthly all the way back in July of 2022, Xiong Jingnan was 17-2 with 6 title defenses. In the four years between then and now she rose to an incredible 19-2 with 7, because that’s all they cared to book for her, and on March 26, ONE quietly decided to not only release her, but shutter the entire division.

And, like. Look. Booking MMA is fucking difficult. Everything about it! But when you think about the way that the UFC moved heaven and Earth to try to get Chinese champions, and how much business they managed to get together around Zhang Weili during her time on top of the sport, and then you realize ONE’s hold on the Asian market is their one, singular promotional advantage and they had a Chinese woman holding a title belt a full year before Zhang did, and instead of actually doing anything with her they spent five of the fights in her title reign making her fight rematches, it’s completely fucking bonkers. Xiong was legitimately one of the best women at her weight class in the world, and they had her fighting Tiffany Teo rematches and going through a three-fight series with Angela Lee because they desperately wanted Angela to be a double champion. Even at the end, as ONE’s longest-reigning, most dominant champion of all time, their 0only plans for her involved defending her belt against new promotional darling Stamp Fairtex, and when Stamp busted her knee and pulled out, they didn’t even bother rebooking Xiong.

Now it’s 2026, and Xiong’s 38, and she spent the last few years of her athletic prime essentially motionless save for one failed attempt to make 115 pounds last year just so they’d book her. I originally ended this with an “I wonder if the UFC will give her a shot” note, but the Road to UFC’s web database quietly uploaded its 2026 roster on March 30, and it’s made hay of ONE’s recent cuts, including Kim Tran, Meng Bo, and, apparently, Xiong Jingnan. We’ll see who ultimately gets in by the end of the year.

WHAT HAPPENED IN MARCH

We kicked off the month with Rizin 52 on March 7, and it was, for the most part, horrifyingly violent. Jo Arai got knocked out by Lee Jung-hyun, Takaki Soya’s comeback was halted by a bunch of Tony Laramie punches in the face, Shoko Sato choked out John Sweeney, Kim Kyung-pyo forced a doctor’s stoppage on Yusuke Yachi, Hideo Tokoro’s latest unretirement ended with the rare submission loss at Jinnosuke Kashimura’s hands, Yuki Ito knocked out Carlos Mota, and Saori Oshima decisioned her way back to another potential shot at the Atomweight crown. Up top, Koji Takeda managed a close scrape over Viktor Kolesnik, Ryo Takagi stopped Shuya Kimura between rounds, Luiz Gustavo knocked out Taisei Sakuraba, and in the main event, Patchy Mix made a bit to remind the world just how good he is in the wake of his ruinous run in the UFC by coming back to Rizin and Kyoma Akimoto promptly beat the stuffing out of him, ultimately knocking him out in the second.

UFC 326: Holloway vs Oliveira 2 also flew at us that evening, and it was billed around the violent promises of the BMF belt, and as befits the curse it has placed on the sport, the event was mostly decisions. The prelims saw Alberto Montes submit Ricky Turcios and Rodolfo Bellato knock out Luke Fernandez, but otherwise it was Diyar Nurgozhay, Sumudaerji, Nyamjargal Tumendemberel, Donte Johnson and Cody Garbrandt all getting decisions, the latter of which involved point deductions just to drive the silliness home. On your main card, Gregory Fernandes punched out Brunno Ferreira and Drew Dober flattened Michael Johnson, but then Raul Rosas Jr. outwrestled Rob Font and Caio Borralho outpointed Reinier de Ridder, and in your main event, the long-awaited all-action BMF title rematch between Charles Oliveira and Max Holloway, Charles reminded everyone about the “MMA” part of the sport by both outstriking and outgrappling Max with ease while the internet melted down about how unfair it was.

On the 13th we got ONE Fight night 41: Sinsamut vs Jarvis and it was neat because the little-featured Anastasia Nikolakakos pounded out Victória Souza, but then John Lineker fought a man who was at least eighteen feet taller than him in a kickboxing match and got knocked out by a calf kick in a quarter of a second and I lost my will to live for the remainder of the night. There was a main event that involved some form of kickboxing and I’m sure it was fine.

The 14th brought us UFC Fight Night: Emmett vs Vallejos, which was less fine. Your preliminary highlights included Piera Rodríguez getting the win over Sam Hughes, Beatriz Mosquita dominating and choking out Montserrat Rendon, Brad Tavares once again being denied the Middleweight win record after being taken to a decision by Eryk Anders, Manouel Sousa smashing Bolaji Oki, Elijah Smith choking out You Su-young, Vitor Petrino getting a narrow decision over Steven Asplund, and former Lightweight Myktybek Orolbai dominating former Middleweight Chris Curtis. Up top, Charles Johnson got the duke over Bruno Silva, Ion Cuțelaba tapped Oumar Sy in a round, Marwan Rahiki won a fun, sloppy brawl with Harry Hardwick after breaking his jaw, Jose Delgado got a split against Andre Fili, Gillian Robertson won her contendership bout with Amanda Lemos, and Kevin Vallejos, unsurprisingly, knocked out Josh Emmett in one round.

The PFL had its first event of the month, PFL Madrid: van Steenis vs Edwards 2, came on the 20th. I will not make you read all of the prelims, but know that Gino van Steenis got a rad knockout over Mark Ewen and Luciano Pereira flattened Kevin Coreiro, and both of them were pretty nifty. Linton Vassell had a close first round with José Augusto Azevedo before stopping him in the second after a barrage of elbows, Jacinta Austin took out Benita van Rooij without much trouble, Franco Tenaglia beat Yassin Najid after Yassin messed up his shoulder, A.J. McKee continued his Featherweight return with a solid if unspectacular decision against Ádám Borics, and in the main event, Fabian Edwards made a bid to bring gold back to his family and got knocked out by defending Middleweight champion Costello van Steenis in the third round instead.

The UFC was back to London a day later for UFC Fight Night: Evloev vs Murphy, which was British as hell. Shanelle Dyer made her UFC debut by knocking out Ravena Oliveira, Abdul Kareem Al-Selwady got a unanimous decision over a baffling Shem Rock, Brando Peričić stopped Louie Sutherland fairly quickly, Mantas Kondratavičius notched an exhausted decision over Antonio Trócoli, Mário Pinto won an exhausting decision over late replacement Felipe Franco, Nathaniel Wood spoiled Losene Keita’s debut by beating him with a close split, and Mason Jones took a clearer call against Axel Sola. On your main card, Danny Silva knocked out the debuting Kurtis Campbell 30 seconds into the second, Christian Leroy Duncan won a less flashy decision against Roman Dolidze, Iwo Baraniewski unsurprisingly knocked out Austen Lane in twenty-eight seconds, Michael Page won a predictably low-volume decision against an outmatched Sam Patterson, and Luke Riley shut out Michael Aswell Jr. The main event was the rare matchup between undefeated top contenders in Movsar Evloev and Lerone Murphy, and it was a fantastic fight that saw Lerone shutting Movsar down in the beginning only for Movsar to dominate him down the back stretch, but a point deduction for groin strikes and some controversial judging left Movsar with the win and a still-uncertain future as a title contender.

March 28 closed the month on a double-header, and the first was UFC Fight Night: Adesanya vs Pyfer, which was just weird as hell all the way through. Alexia Thainara beat Bruna Brasil despite almost getting knocked out, Adrian Yanez did virtually knock out Ricky Simón in a fight he was universally agreed to have won and it was somehow a draw, Navajo Stirling destroyed Bruno Lopes in one of the latest stoppages of the year, Casey O’Neill abruptly knocked the shit out of Gabriella Fernandes, Tyrell Fortune debuted in the UFC and became a top ten Heavyweight by beating Marcin Tybura except the scorecards were put together wrong so Tybura won at first and no one knew what was going on, Lance Gibson Jr. knocked out Chase Hooper in a stoppage some people think was early, and Tofiq Musayev beat Ignacio Bahamondes after getting away with blatant headbutts and cage grabs with zero punishment. This was followed by Terrance McKinney crushing Kyle Nelson in twenty-four seconds, Yousri Belgaroui slowly disassembling Mansur Abdul-Malik, Lerryan Douglas barnstorming Julian Erosa and Michael Chiesa tapping Niko Pr3ice in a minute so both could immediately retire. Then the co-main event saw Alexa Grasso basically knock Maycee Barber out twice in three seconds before choking her unconscious body, which was so unnecessary the fight stoppage was ruled a KO despite Maycee being in a choke at the time, and the main event saw Israel Adesanya very successfully kiting Joe Pyfer, stumbling him and destroying his front leg for a round and a half only to suddenly change tactics, engage in a sloppy pocket brawl, gas in seconds and get pounded out on the floor.

The end of the night and thus March belonged to PFL Pittsburgh: Eblen vs Battle. The prelims included specialties like Josh Fremd knocking out Jarrah Al-Silawi, Dakota Bush dropping Robert Watley in half a minute and Jakub Kaszuba outworking Natan Schulte, and the main card included Lazaro Dayron taking a wide call over Jacob Thrall, Alexei Pergande slicing open Julio Arce’s face to Great Muta bloodbath levels and only getting a 29-28 out of it, Sumiko Inaba getting punched in the face several thousand times by Ariane da Silva and still making it to a decision, and Impa Kasanganay stopping Dalton Rosta on punches in one round. The main event was there to address multiple questions--is Johnny Eblen ruined after finally losing his title and his undefeated record to Costello van Steenis, did the UFC err in releasing Bryan Battle--and the answer to both wound up being a resounding no, as Eblen slammed Battle to the floor over and over en route to a rear naked choke in the first round with essentially no traffic coming back his way.

WHAT’S COMING IN APRIL

We’re getting off to an amazing start on the 4th with UFC Fight Night: Moicano vs Duncan in the Apex. Thrill to the matchmaking that brings us Azamat Bekoev vs Tresean Gore. Chill to the potential of Alice Pereira vs Hailey Cowan. Get pumped for the return of Lando Vannata vs Darrius Flowers. I’ve always felt a sense of guilt at my tendency to go through every UFC card in full during these previews while shortchanging B-league previews, and I would justify it under the sense that those cards were full of people no one would have a chance of recognizing at a glance, and now we have UFC main card with fights like Tommy McMillen vs Manolo Zecchini on them, and I guess we’ve solved the problem by making things equally bad everywhere. Virna Jandiroba vs Tabatha Ricci should be neat and Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan is one of the least powerful main events they’ve ever promoted.

But the 10th gets us PFL Africa 1: Pretoria, and if I’m gonna talk shit about Manolo Zecchini I can’t exactly expect you to get excited for Kunle Lawal or Abdelrahman Mohamed, or a Heavyweight co-main between Justin Clarke and Abdoulaye Kane where both men combine for less than 10 wins. Nkosi Ndebele’s in the main event and he’s great, and I know nothing about his opponent Michele Clemente but I hope he loses.

We’re also getting ONE Fight Night: Eersel vs Rungrawee that night, and there are two MMA fights, and one of them is Joshua Pereira, who is 5-0 because the man who knocked him out a year ago failed a drug test, vs Gilbert Nakatani, who is 1-2 in the last two years, and the other is Chase Mann, whose ONE debut last January ended in a victory by knee injury, against Dzhabir Dzhabrailov, who will probably ground and pound him to death. If you want to watch Regian Eersel and Rungrawee Sitsongpeenong have a kickboxing battle for yet another of ONE’s several thousand enormous title belts in the main event, that’s up to you.

One day later, it’s time for UFC 327: Procházka vs Ulberg, which is about as goofy as a UFC card with multiple title and top contendership fights can be. On one hand: Cub Swanson’s retirement bout with Nate Landwehr, Dominick Reyes vs Johnny Walker in a fight of who still has a scrap of hope left, and Patrício Pitbull vs Aaron Pico in a match to avenge the ghost of Bellator. On the other: #1 contender Tatiana Suarez vs #6 contender Loopy Godinez, undefeated #6 Light Heavyweight Azamat Murzakanov vs Paulo Costa, who is 2 for 6 in the last seven years and only made 205 once after missing 185 by twenty pounds, and #4 Heavyweight Curtis Blades vs unranked Josh Hokit. Joshua Van defending the Flyweight title against Tatsuro Taira would be the main event in a better world, but it’s co-main to Jiří Procházka vs Carlos Ulberg for the vacant Light Heavyweight belt because big guys are big.

One day later on the 12th, it’s time for Rizin Landmark 13 in Fukuoka, and I know I have described the Landmark series as Rizin’s B-show, but this one time, they are blowing it the fuck out. Ryuya Fukuda vs Azizbek Temirov, Kyohei Hagiwara vs Kaleo Meheula, Kazumasa Majima against James Gallagher, Ayaka Hamasaki is back to fight the actually decent Natasha Kuziutina, Shinryu Takahashi against King Zulu, Yoshinori Horie against Patricky Pitbull, and a title doubleheader that includes Razhabali Shaydullaev almost assuredly publicly executing Yuta Kubo for a second time at Featherweight and Joji Goto trying to save Japan by ending Danny Sabatello’s reign as Rizin’s Bantamweight champion.

On April 16, we get back to the PFL for PFL Belfast: Kelly vs Wilson, and as much as I want the PFL to succeed, this one’s really rough. In terms of name value and divisional relevance this was really close to a one-fight card, and that fight was the main event between star player Paul Hughes and New Zealand’s Jay Jay Wilson, and Hughes pulled out in mid-March with a knee injury and got replaced by Darragh Kelly and all the air went out of the balloon, because without him you’ve got, like, Ciaran Clarke vs Dean Garnett and Tyson Pedro’s PFL debut against Dovlet Yagshimuradov. It ain’t great.

Speaking of things that aren’t great: On the 18th, we’re off to Winnipeg for UFC Fight Night: Burns vs Malott, and yes, the main event in Canada is, unironically, Gilbert Burns and Mike Malott. Gilbert Burns turns 40 in a couple months and his only victories in almost five years were Jorge Masvidal and Neil Magny, and they already tried to do this with Malott against Magny back in 2024, and in the wake of his loss they’ve had him on buildup duty instead and the crown jewel of that effort was a decision victory over Kevin Holland that would have been a draw if Malott had lost a point for repeatedly punting him in the dick, which led to two rounds of Kevin Holland pausing between strikes to grimace and hold his injured groin. Your other attractions include Kyler Phillips vs Charles Jourdain, Jasmine Jasudavicius and Karine Silva both trying to avert losing streaks, and the promotional return of Tanner fucking Boser against the debuting Gökhan Saricam. Once again: What are we doing.

Rhetorical question! Obviously, we’re going back to the damn Apex for UFC Fight Night: Sterling vs Zalal on the 25th. You know how Raoni Barcelos has built a four-fight winning streak that included toppling promotional marketing darling Payton Talbott? He’s fighting Montel Jackson! In the Apex. Remember how Norma Dumont has the longest streak at Women’s Bantamweight and made it to #3 in the rankings while Joselyne Edwards has been brutally murdering everyone? They have a short-notice top contendership fight! In the Apex. You know how Aljamain Sterling inadvisably went up to Featherweight and somehow made it to #5, and at the same time Youssef Zalal has torn through five fights and made it to #7? They have a top five main event! In the Apex.

And then we’re ending on the 29th with ONE Samurai 1: Rodtang vs Takeru 2, which is just too fucking many numbers. ONE has been cancelling their big, numbered flagship events, and this is a thing they are trying to use to take its place, because launching multiple brands while you’re firing standing champions is a sign of financial health. There’s some MMA, I guess! Itsuki Hirata vs Ritu Phogat, Keito Yamakita vs Ryohei Kurosawa, Ayaka Miura vs CHihiro Sawada and Yuya Wakamatsu defending his Bantamweight title against Avazbek Kholmirzaev are all decent. But your actual top fights are Jonathan Haggery defending the Featherweight kickboxing belt against Yuki Yoza and the rematch between Rodtang Jitmuangnon and Takeru Segawa in the main, which is for a title even though Rodtang isn’t currently under contract and Takeru is 2-2 in the company.

CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Tom Aspinall - 15-3 (1), Either 1, 2 or 0 Defenses Depending On How You Look At It

You know, once upon a time, the UFC would’ve killed for a Tom Aspinall. Entire years of UFC events were spent desperately trying to get a Dan Hardy or Darren Till or Jimi Manuwa into championship pictures so they could cash in on UK superstardom. And somehow, Tom Aspinall just fell into their lap. They didn’t go out of their way to softball him, they didn’t put a ton of effort into marketing him, they just let him mulch everyone in his path. In 2025, Tallison Teixeira has a main event in just his second UFC bout: In 2022 Tom Aspinall had to notch five straight stoppages to get his first crack at the top of the card against Curtis Blaydes, and it ended with his knee imploding fifteen seconds into the fight. When he lost that fight, Francis Ngannou was the reigning UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World. By the time Tom returned in the Summer of 2023, it belonged to Jon fucking Jones. Within one fight Aspinall was a top contender again, and with Jon comically scheduled to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who hadn’t fought in two and a half years, Aspinall was left in a holding pattern--until Jon injured himself in training. With barely two weeks to prepare, Tom Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich for an interim championship. Sergei was the most devastating knockout artist in the Heavyweight division: Tom knocked him out in sixty-nine seconds. Not only did it give him gold, it gave him a golden ticket. The sole purpose of an interim champion is to one day reunify the belts, and that meant Tom had a shot at Jon Jones, one of the biggest fighters in the history of the sport. All he had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Tom waited so fucking long the UFC made him defend his interim title in a rematch with Blaydes--which he won easily, knocking him out in 60 seconds--on July 27, 2024. Four months later, Jon Jones returned and had his fight with Stipe, who by that point had been effectively retired for almost four years. Unsurprisingly, Jon won. Equally unsurprisingly, Jon and the UFC refused to commit to fighting Aspinall. Jones reportedly held the UFC up for a huge payday, and when they shockingly agreed, he changed his mind. In the end, the most obvious pair of conclusions happened: On June 21st, during the press conference after Fight Night Baku, Dana White announced Jon was retiring and Tom was being promoted to Undisputed Champion; an hour later, coincidentally, news broke that Jon was being summoned for arraignment in July on charges of leaving the scene of an accident after drunkenly crashing another car and leaving another heavily-inebriated half-naked woman behind in it and also threatening the police over the phone when they called him. It is the only way the Jon Jones story could possibly have ended. Tom Aspinall was an interim champion for 588 days, and he made his first undisputed one against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 26--and, because this division is fucking cursed, it ended in a No Contest after Gane poked him in both of his eyes at once. The UFC has decided this is mostly Tom’s fault, which has nothing at all to do with Tom’s dad talking about how he shouldn’t sign a new contract. A rematch has been vowed, but Tom had to get eye surgery to regain his sight and the UFC doesn’t want to wait when there’s marketing to be done, so Ciryl Gane and Alex Pereira will fight for an interim title at the godforsaken White House.

Light Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

VACANT - Where we all go when we’re gone

For the last several months, this section has included the phrase “As it turns out, (Alex) Pereira doesn’t seem to have much interest in defending the 205-pound title at all. The second he won the belt he went about trying to manifest his next fight: A Heavyweight clash with Jon Jones at the UFC’s White House card in July.” Hey, y’all: Guess what happened. On February 27 the UFC announced Pereira was dropping the title, the scuttlebutt is they’re going to do either Pereira vs Jones or Ciryl Gane for a Heavyweight belt at the White House, and the new main event of UFC 327 in April will be Jiří Procházka vs Carlos Ulberg for the vacant belt. The UFC Light Heavyweight Championship has been vacated (to be clear: vacated, not stripped or we’d just be talking about Jon Jones again) six times in its almost thirty-year history: Five of those times happened in the last eight years and three of them were in the last three and a half. The new champion will be either a man who got knocked out by Alex Pereira twice or a man who got his title shot by beating 2025 Dominick Reyes. Existing in the Nothing Matters era of the sport sure is fun.

Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Khamzat Chimaev - 15-0, 0 Defenses

Yeah, this was probably inevitable. When Khamzat Chimaev showed up in the UFC in the middle of the Fight Island pandemic era and wrecked two people in ten days at two different weight classes, the world was prepared to believe he was special. When he ended Gerald Meerschaert with one punch less than two months later, all doubt was cast aside. The fighters, the audience, and the UFC itself were all true believers in the championship future that lay ahead for Khamzat Chimaev. Khamzat, in response, retired from mixed martial arts. As it turns out, fighting in the middle of a COVID pandemic makes it more likely you’re going to get COVID. Who’dve thunk? After a year, some prodding from Dana White and reportedly a lot more personal prodding from Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator in charge of Khamzat’s native Chechen Republic, Khamzat returned to the sport a year later. His dominance continued unabated, but his schedule never recovered--in fact, it worsened. After a particularly unfortunate 2022 episode involving Khamzat torpedoing his own pay-per-view main event against Nate Diaz after missing weight by almost ten pounds and very nearly cancelling the event altogether, he instead wound up strangling Kevin Holland, taking another year off, moving permanently to Middleweight, and adopting a new schedule whereby he fought only once every twelve months, and every time he appeared, something bizarre would happen. In the first episode of New Khamzat he showed up in 2023 for what was supposed to be a long-awaited showdown with Paulo Costa, but Costa, as he is wont to do, pulled out and resulted in Welterweight champion Kamaru Usman stepping in with just days to prepare. Even weirder: He gave Khamzat the closest fight he’d ever had. One judge scored the fight a damn draw. Khamzat’s struggle with a career Welterweight gave a lot of folks pause when, one year later, he returned to face Middleweight kingpin Robert Whittaker. Rob was universally respected as one of the best 185-pound fighters in UFC history, and while he’d lost, he’d lost only to the best and never easily. Khamzat steamrolled him in three and a half minutes. He face-cranked him so hard it snapped a previous palate injury and left Rob’s bottom teeth floating in his mouth. By the time Khamzat came back in 2025 for his long-awaited shot at the belt, Dricus du Plessis had etched his spot in the record books as one of just five men to ever defend the Middleweight championship multiple times. He’d beaten everyone the UFC put in front of him, and he was still a betting underdog. The conventional wisdom was Khamzat would choke Dricus out in the first two rounds or Dricus would drag him through a difficult back half of the bout. As it turned out: Everyone was wrong. Khamzat did hand out one of the most one-sided championship victories in UFC history, but rather than destroying Dricus, he just outwrestled him for five straight rounds. He didn’t engage on the feet, he didn’t land much in the way of heavy ground-and-pound, and he isn’t even credited with a single submission attempt. Khamzat landed 529 strikes and only 37 of them were considered significant. But Khamzat won, unquestionably and easily, and now he has the belt everyone long assumed he’d get. Despite the multiple assurances that Nassourdine Imavov was the #1 contender, the UFC unsurprisingly, booked Sean Strickland. They’ll meet at UFC 328 on May 9.

Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Islam Makhachev - 28-1, 0 Defenses

The prophecy has been fulfilled. Khabib Nurmagomedov was considered by many to be the greatest Lightweight of all time, but in the later stages of his career he began to repeatedly reference his lifetime friend and training partner Islam Makhachev as not just his successor, but the man who would break the mold he’d left behind. And the fanbase was more than willing to buy another Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov protege coming in and wrecking shop--until he got knocked out by Adriano Martins. Khabib’s aura of invulnerability came from the simple, so-obvious-more-people-should-try-it factor of simply never losing a damn fight. When Islam got torched in under two minutes by a man that couldn’t beat Donald Cerrone, that aura vanished. A lot of folks still thought he could be a champion, but most felt the greatest-of-all-time lane was closed to him. It turns out there’s another way to regain that sense of unbeatable awe, though: Just don’t lose for so goddamn long people forget it ever happened. In the ten full years since that Martins bout, Islam has not lost a single fight. Most of the time, he hasn’t even lost a round. He worked his way up the Lightweight ladder and began to rack up incredible achievements. He tore through top prospects with virtually no effort, he choked out one of the best MMA grapplers ever in Charles Oliveira, he outlasted and later knocked out one of the two men with a claim to the all-time Featherweight crown in Alexander Volkanovski, he choked out Dustin Poirier and he broke the Lightweight title defense record after stomping Renato Moicano. And then he traded in his record-breaking reign to challenge for Welterweight gold. Jumping divisions is always difficult, but the 15-pound leap from Lightweight to Welterweight is a mountain, and no Lightweight champion had ever managed it. Even BJ Penn, the canonical first man to hold gold at both, had to do it in reverse: He failed at both of his attempts to win Lightweight gold and shocked the world by abruptly taking it at Welterweight instead, and it would be five more years before he finally got his shit together and won a title in the division that made him famous. His subsequent attempts all ended in defeat, half because Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre were both great and half because BJ was just a Lightweight. Even though Islam was Islam and widely agreed to be a monster in the cage, Jack Della Maddalena had won the Welterweight title with some of the cleanest boxing the UFC had seen, and his championship victory over wrestler Belal Muhammad had people convinced that Islam, at best, would struggle. They met in the main event of UFC 322 on November 15, 2025, and there was absolutely no struggle. Islam kicked Jack’s leg to pieces, landed some surprisingly big punches, and took the fight to the ground almost at will, and by the time the fight ended, it felt like Jack never had a chance. The shadow has been stepped out of. Islam Makhachev is a two-division champion. And now he has a brand new horde of contenders beating down his door.

Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Ilia Topuria - 17-0, 0 Defenses

One of the most exciting things about following mixed martial arts is picking which prospects you really, truly believe in. There are hundreds of fighters across history that you will enjoy watching, and you may have some hopes for their future, but you don’t necessarily expect the world from them. When Ilia Topuria showed up in the UFC in 2020, if you were paying attention, you knew he was going to be special. The combination of wrestling, grappling and absolutely murderous striking was almost immediately visible, but what really set him apart was the unshakable confidence with which he used it. Even when he went up to 155 pounds on short notice and almost got knocked out by Jai Herbert he survived the onslaught, recovered, came right back at him as though he was utterly unfazed and destroyed Herbert seconds later. That was the truly exceptional danger of Ilia Topuria: His belief in his technique was so absurdly complete that it came across as absurdly silly arrogance and it made huge swaths of the audience disdain him and then he’d somehow always find a way to just go do the damn thing anyway. He outgrappled Ryan Hall. He submitted Bryce Mitchell. He beat Josh Emmett so badly he got a 50-42 scorecard out of it. And on February 17, 2024, he ended Alexander Volkanovski’s historic, nearly-four-year reign as the king of Featherweight by knocking him out in two rounds. When Ilia followed that up by saying he was going to become the first man to ever knock out Max Holloway--a thing Volkanovski, Dustin Poirier, José Aldo and Conor McGregor failed to do--even with his title victory, the audience was still particularly skeptical. He did it anyway. Once again, Ilia walked into a fight with supreme confidence, and once again, it ended with his opponent on the floor, this time in three rounds. Ilia Topuria had knocked out the two greatest Featherweights of the generation and seemed poised for a longer title reign than either of them. And then he quit the division. One of those first overconfident boasts of his had been the desire to move up to Lightweight and knock out Islam Makhachev to become a double champion. The MMA world thought he was talking about a far-away future, but he wanted it and he wanted it now. Unfortunately, so did Islam. Right as Ilia vacated the Featherweight title to move up to Lightweight, Islam vacated the Lightweight title to move up to Welterweight. So Ilia was left to fight for his destiny against Charles Oliveira instead. Oliveira’s always been incredibly tough and dangerous, and he hadn’t been knocked out in almost eight years, and even then it wasn’t unconsciousness but rather because a Paul Felder elbow had broken part of his face. That streak ended on June 28, 2025 when Ilia Topuria punched him limp in two and a half minutes. The UFC may not do double-champions anymore out of sheer promotional frustration, but in any rational sense, Ilia is the king of Featherweight and Lightweight, which gives him a horde of contenders like Arman Tsarukyan, Justin Gaethje, Dan Hooker and Mateusz Gamrot. So he appears to be fighting Paddy Pimblett next. If you ask Ilia, he’s just killing time until Islam wins the Welterweight title, because his destiny is to take his 5’7” frame all the way up to Welterweight so he can kill the king and be the first ever three-division champion in UFC history. Does it sound aggressively silly and arrogant? Of course it does. Do you feel comfortable ruling it out? Then you haven’t been paying attention. Ilia is, however, dealing with some personal issues related to his divorce, so he’s going to be out of action until the Spring, which means the UFC made an interim title bout between Justin Gaethje and Paddy Pimblett for UFC 324 on January 24. Yes, really. How’d that one wind up going, you ask?

Interim Lightweight Champion

Justin Gaethje - 27-5, 0 Defenses

One of the foundational subjective mixed martial arts questions, right alongside ‘who’s the pound-for-pound best’ and ‘what if Cro-Cop ducked that kick,’ is ‘Who’s the best fighter to never win a championship?’ There are different answers for every generation, and one of the complicating factors is the inevitable debate over whether interim titles count. Was Carlos Condit a UFC champion? What about Colby Covington or Yair Rodríguez? It’s still an incredible achievement, but it’s just not quite real the way an undisputed title is. And I cannot imagine what sort of a backhanded career accomplishment it is to be the only person in UFC history to win their division’s interim title twice. Justin Gaethje has been right on the edge of the top for so long he’s got two half-championships in his closet. Back in 2020 he fought Tony Ferguson, then arguably the scariest Lightweight in the world, and beat him so horrifically that his career never recovered, and that netted Gaethje his first interim belt, which he promptly lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov in the latter’s retirement bout. Two years later, Gaethje got his second shot at the undisputed title against Charles Oliveira and he wound up strangled in three and a half minutes. Three and a half years after that, Gaethje was still right there at the precipice of the top, Ilia Topuria needed a break from the sport, and the UFC needed an aging veteran to propel their marketing star Paddy Pimblett to the top, and at UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, they threw Paddy’s big party and Justin crashed it. The UFC will tell you the fight was close, and it was in the sense that it went the whole way and one judge only gave Justin three rounds, but Paddy got brutally beaten and dropped repeatedly. Once again, Justin Gaethje is the interim champion, and because everything sucks, he’ll try to unify the belt against Topuria at the White House.

Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Alexander Volkanovski - 28-4, 1 Defense

And just like that, 2024 never happened. For eleven years Alexander Volkanovski was the best Featherweight on the planet, and most of that time was simply waiting for everyone else to notice. He was short and he won by decisions a lot and the world was entirely into Max Holloway so he skated under the radar right up until the moment he finally beat Max. And that wasn’t enough to convince people, so Volkanovski beat him again. And that somehow made the world doubt him even more, so he beat Max a third time. By 2023 Volk was second only to all-time great José Aldo in Featherweight title defenses--and he’d beaten Aldo in a fight, and his only actual loss was an all-timer of an effort against Islam Makhachev that still stands as the closest Islam has come to losing his title as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so it was very, very easy to accept Alexander Volkanovski as the greatest Featherweight on the planet. And then he took a rematch with Islam with only one week to prepare and got knocked out in three minutes, and then he came back less than four months later and got flattened by Ilia Topuria, and in the space of two fights the audience went from celebrating him as the best around to calling for his retirement. Volkanovski took an entire year off to heal and rebuild, which was enough time for Ilia to get bored and vacate the belt to go chase Lightweight greatness, and the Topuria/Volkanovski rematch became Volkanovski vs Diego Lopes at UFC 314 on April 12 to fill the vacant throne instead. It was somehow both close and clear. Lopes gained steam in the middle stanza of the bout and at one point dropped Volk, but Volk got right back up and resumed punching him in the face, and by the end of the bout he’d outlanded him more than two to one. The judges sided with him, the audience sided with him, and Alexander Volkanovski became not just one of the rare few to win back a UFC title, but the first man over 35 to ever win a UFC belt in the sub-170 weight classes typically reserved for young lions. His logical next contender should’ve been Movsar Evloev, but the UFC was busy trying to get him to fight an unranked, debuting Aaron Pico, thus clearing the way for a rematch with Yair Rodríguez in Guadalajara for Noche UFC 3 in September. Except the Arena Guadalajara wasn’t done yet, so Noche UFC 3 got moved to the most Mexican of places, Las Vegas, in October, and Alex’s manager said he had an eye injury that needs time to heal, so he took the rest of 2025 off. Good news, though: That left time for the UFC to get new contenders going. Lerone Murphy wound up fighting and knocking out Pico! Aljamain Sterling beat Brian Ortega! Hell, Movsar Evloev is still right there! The UFC looked at all of them and gave them all the finger. At UFC 325 on January 31, fresh off his title victory over Diego Lopes, Alexander Volkanovski had his first title defense against Diego Lopes. Unsurprisingly, the guy who beat Diego Lopes beat Diego Lopes again. The UFC had Evloev and Murphy fight in March and Evloev won a contentious decision, and now Jean Silva is lobbying as hard as possible for the fight, so we’ll see who gets it.

Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Petr Yan - 20-5, 0 Defenses

Petr Yan’s road to the top has been incredibly circuitous. When Yan initially won the Bantamweight title back in 2020, no one was particularly surprised. He’d been one of the best in the world for years, he’d put together a six-fight winning streak on his road to the title shot, and the UFC had fed aging legend Urijah Faber to him in an attempt to make him a known quantity. Felling an even greater legend in José Aldo and taking the belt felt like an entirely expected passing of the torch, and a long reign as the division’s standardbearer seemed all but assured. And then, as they so often do, things went wrong. In quite possibly the most infamous title change in UFC history, Yan became the first champion to ever lose his title by disqualification after drilling Aljamain Sterling in the face with an illegal knee. Yan’s team cried foul and the world turned on Sterling, but when they had their rematch a year later, Sterling beat him by decision and that was that. But it was a split decision, and it was close, so the UFC gave Yan another theoretical title eliminator with Sean O’Malley, and this time the world was almost unanimously convinced Yan won--except for two of the three judges, who split in O’Malley’s favor. To top it off, Yan’s attempt to stay in the contendership conversation ran into the brick wall that was the rising Merab Dvalishvili, who handed him the most one-sided loss of his entire life. In the space of two years, Petr Yan went from being perceived as a generational champion to 1 for his last 5 and seemingly eliminated from contendership. After a year off to cope with injuries, reassess his career and figure out how to turn things around, Yan proceeded to take the path that most commonly leads to success: Just fucking beating everyone. He battered Song Yadong, he outpunched Deiveson Figueiredo, he won an exceedingly weirdly-booked matchup with Marcus McGhee, and suddenly, he was on a winning streak and right back in contendership. It might have taken him longer to get an actual title fight were it not for Merab Dvalishvili being a crazy person. Merab was on the greatest championship run the division had ever seen, and after clearing out most of his to contenders and recording a blistering three defenses in a single year, he announced his intention to break a UFC record and cement himself as the greatest 135-pounder of all time by recording a fourth--just two months after the last one--and Petr Yan was available and ready. The world saw the fight as a foregone conclusion, given how one-sided their first match had been, and the world was wrong. Yan put on the best performance of his career, not just battering Merab but outwrestling him, and in one of the best career comebacks we’ve seen, almost five years after he’d given it away, Petr Yan got his title back. He’s on top of the world again, and in all likelihood, the rubber match with Merab will be next. But it’s gonna have to wait until the second half of the year, because Yan’s having back surgery.

Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Van - 16-2, 0 Defenses

It would be disrespectful as hell to Joshua Van to say that no one saw this coming, as many people perceived it as a possibility, but I don’t think anyone saw it coming like this. Van was the Flyweight champion of the Fury Fighting Championships when the UFC came calling, as a 21 year-old regional titleholder with a penchant for collecting knockouts despite fighting at 125 pounds so thoroughly ticks all of their boxes that Van couldn’t have been a more perfect fit without also having a history of racist tweets, and his Contender Series debut was set for August of 2023. But the UFC needed someone to fill in against Zhalgas Zhumagulov, so Van got called up to the big show early and proceeded to justify their faith by beating Zhalgas, and then beating the man he was originally slated to Contend against, and then facing off with Legacy Fighting Alliance champ Felipe Bunes and handing him the first TKO loss of his entire career. In the space of six months, Van went from a little-known regional fighter to a borderline-ranked Flyweight in the UFC. And then he got atomized by Charles Johnson. It was the second loss of Van’s career, the first time he’d ever been knocked out, and the snapping of an eight-fight winning streak, and in many cases, that would’ve permanently ended his momentum. But Van was smart enough to learn from his mistakes, and the UFC was invested enough in him to bring him back up to speed with a gentle hand, and eleven months later he was on a four-fight winning streak again and had successfully made his way to the top ten after knocking out Bruno Silva, which left him in the perfect position to take advantage of an abrupt opportunity. Top contender Brandon Royval had just lost his opponent and needed a replacement, and Van was game to fight for the second time in three weeks if it meant a shot at the belt. It was a close bout, and if Van hadn’t knocked Royval down at the end of the third round he may well have lost, but he did, so he didn’t, and suddenly the prospect was next in line for the title. All but one month of Joshua Van’s UFC career took place during Alexandre Pantoja’s reign as the Flyweight king. His streak was monstrous and he was a sizable favorite coming into his defense against Van, but many were waiting to see if Van’s boxing could defuse Pantoja’s aggression. As it turns out: We’re gonna have to wait a bit longer. Twenty-six seconds into the bout Pantoja busted his own arm on the mat after a head kick gone awry. So Van’s the champion, but it’s under some real weird circumstances, and it means a number of people are immediately gunning for him. Alexandre Pantoja presumably has a rematch as soon as he’s back, but in the meantime, Tatsuro Taira just pounded Brandon Moreno out to make himself a top contender and he’s going to get his crack at Van at UFC 327 on April 11.

Women’s Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Kayla Harrison - 19-1, 0 Defenses

Every once in awhile the inevitable turns out to actually be inevitable. Ronda Rousey parlayed a 2008 bronze medal in Judo into mixed martial arts stardom; Kayla Harrison took the gold medal in 2012 and 2016. The world was already asking her about MMA before the second. The UFC made a play for her, but there was a problem: By the standards of female fighters Kayla was huge. Ronda had competed at 70 kg in the Olympics, which translated to about 154 pounds, well within the range of weight cutting for the insane standards of combat sports and Women’s Bantamweight. Kayla competed at 78 kg, which was almost 172 pounds. Even at a twenty-pound weight cut, her division simply did not exist in major mixed martial arts organizations. So she had to find one that would build it. The Professional Fighters League needed star power, and Kayla was their gal. They founded the first Women’s Lightweight division in a major American organization, and it was populated mostly by Bantamweights and Featherweights who were trying the best they could. For four straight years, Kayla was their recurring, undefeated champion. She won the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, and in 2022 she made it to the finals and looked poised to take it for a third time, as her only competition was Larissa Pacheco, whom she’d already beaten twice. In a massive upset, Larissa took a decision off of her. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it was also more or less fine, because Kayla was more or less done with the PFL. She took one more fight against Aspen Ladd as a one-off, but her future was with the UFC. Even with her loss to Pacheco, the world was sure she was a future UFC champion--as long as she could stomach the weight cut. And it did, visibly, kill her! But she made it. She choked out Holly Holm in her debut, she took a decision over Ketlen Vieira in a title eliminator, and all she had to do after that was wait. Julianna Peña was a +500 underdog in her own title defense against Kayla, and that turned out to be just about right. On June 7, 2025, at UFC 316, Kayla achieved the inevitable, ragdolled Peña and tapped her out in just two rounds. She’s the best in the world and she’s going to get her shot at the superfight everyone wanted in the first place, as Amanda Nunes is coming out of retirement to face her later this year--actually, this got delayed so much it’s only now finally booked for UFC 324 on January 24, 2026--maybe never? A couple weeks before the superfight Kayla had to pull out for apparently fairly major neck surgery. No word on when she’ll be back or what on Earth happens now.

Women’s Flyweight, 125 lbs

Valentina Shevchenko - 26-4-1, 2 Defenses

After almost two years of suffering, we have gone back to the start. At the end of 2022 Valentina Shevchenko was so thoroughly ensconced as The Greatest Women’s Flyweight that a sizable segment of the fanbase had built an honest-to-god antipathy for her over it. Sure, she won, all the time, and sure, her only losses in almost a decade and a half came to the greatest of all time in Amanda Nunes, and sure, Shevchenko arguably won their second fight, but familiarity breeds contempt, and after watching the purported greatest struggle with a split decision to Taila Santos that could easily have gone the other way, too, a big chunk of the mixed martial world was ready to move on from Val. And then, unexpectedly, it did. Valentina was a -900 favorite when Alexa Grasso shocked the world, choked her out, and took her title away on March 4, 2023. An instant rematch was obligatory, given Val’s long history on top, so half a year later they ran it back at Noche UFC in 2023, and, awkwardly, it ended in a draw. If the rematch had been obligatory, the threematch was mandatory, but a hand injury on Val’s part and the UFC’s desire to put an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter behind their promotion meant a full twelve months passed before they got back in the cage. That’s a long goddamn time, and it left a lot of air, and that air was filled by doubt. Alexa won the first fight, after all--but she was on her way to losing a decision before Valentina made a costly mistake, threw one of her trademark nowhere-close-to-landing spinning back kicks, and got immediately jumped on and choked out for her troubles. Alexa didn’t lose the second fight--but based on the scorecards, she should have, and would have, were it not for one judge handing her a completely indefensible 10-8 in the final round. When the third fight came on September 14, 2024, it was seen as Alexa’s chance to cement her legacy: Either she was the superior fighter and the herald of a new generation for Women’s Flyweight, or the whole thing was just a weird episode. Unfortunately for Alexa, it was the latter. Valentina dominated her. She outstruck her and outwrestled her with almost comical ease, the fight was a complete shutout, and despite their series being now tied at 1-1-1, no one has any doubts about the winner, nor any desire to see them fight again. Once again, much to the internet’s chagrin, Valentina Shevchenko is a champion. And--only two years late--she defended her title against Manon Fiorot at UFC 315. It was close, it was contentious, and it was also a fight the audience does not want to see again. Her next fight was a long-awaited champion vs champion affair against Zhang Weili at UFC 322 on November 15, 2025. After years of watching Zhang dominate her competition, the world felt she had genuine double-champ potential and could be the woman to unseat Valentina. As it turned out: Not even close. Val dominated her in every aspect of the game, Zhang got completely shut out, and her Flyweight hopes are dead in the water. Valentina has multiple title defenses again and is now tied with Amanda Nunes and Anderson Silva for the fourth-most wins in title fights in UFC history. We’ll have to see who they give to her next, but Natália Silva feels like a safe bet.

Women’s Strawweight, 115 lbs

Mackenzie Dern - 16-5, 0 Defenses

On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Mackenzie Dern signed with the UFC as a 5-0 fighter all the way back in 2018 and they’ve been trying to get a belt on her ever since. She came into mixed martial arts with a pre-existing pedigree as one of the more decorated women in the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Gi championships, no-gi championships, pan-Am championships, Asian open championships, world championships, ADCC championships, she took them all. And the UFC marketed her as a grappling champion who was bringing some of the best submission offense in the sport to the Strawweight division! But they also marketed her as an extremely conventionally attractive woman who frequently wore bathing suits. It was one of the touchiest things to comment on with her career: Where other women would have to struggle for their matchmaking and featured spots, Mackenzie’s opportunities kept coming, and they were almost always on the main broadcast and, on multiple occasions, in the main event slots women almost never received. And she needed them, because despite being legitimately quite good, she just wasn’t great. She could make it into the top fifteen, and sometimes even brush the top ten, but every time they tried to get Mackenzie into title contention, she’d falter. It was Amanda Ribas in 2019, it was Marina Rodriguez in 2021, and between 2022 and 2024, Mackenzie had the worst run of her life, winning only one out of four bouts, getting shut down by Yan Xiaonan and Amanda Lemos, and taking the first stoppage loss of her career after being knocked out by Jéssica Andrade. She managed to get her way back up the ladder again by outgrappling Loopy Godinez and submitting a struggling Amanda Ribas in a six-years-belated rematch, but with so many losses to top contenders, her path to the title still seemed closed. Then a funny thing happened: Zhang Weili gave up the Strawweight belt to move up to Flyweight and challenge Valentina Shevchenko. Suddenly, the door was wide open. And conveniently, the UFC had booked all the women who beat Mackenzie into other matches, leaving Mackenzie with just one contender left--and it was Virna Jandiroba, a career grappler whom Mackenzie had already beaten back in 2020. The two met at UFC 321 on October 25, and after seven years of effort, the UFC finally got its way. Mackenzie beat Virna again, fair and square, in a close and hard-fought but ultimately clear decision. She is, at last, the Strawweight Champion of the World. And she’s in the exceptionally weird position of being a newly-minted champion that has very recently lost to several of her own top contenders. If Zhang Weili fails to beat Valentina Shevchenko, it’s very likely the UFC will try to pressure her back down to 115 for a money match with Mackenzie, in which case Dern would almost certainly be a big underdog in her own first defense. If not, at this point, it’s either a rematch with Yan Xiaonan, a grappling match with Tatiana Suarez, or the UFC stops pretending entirely and has Mackenzie beat Contender Series women until she turns a profit.

NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs

Ilkhom Nazimov - 13-3, 0 Defenses

After four and a half years we finally have the second-ever Rizin Lightweight Champion, and it feels a little bit like he came out of nowhere. Up until the 2025 New Year’s event, most folks had only seen one Ilkhom Nazimov fight. He’d been operating out in the Russian regional scene, which has the unfortunate crossover of being a) low-visibility and b) notoriously tough, and no matter how good you are, there just isn’t going to be a lot of international broadcast attention on the Tyumen Extreme Sports Expo. Nazimov didn’t get his first real taste of the spotlight until he made it to UAE Warriors, one of the biggest leagues in the middle east; unfortunately, that spotlight included him getting knocked out in eight seconds. Despite the loss, Rizin was in need of locally-appealing talent for their 2023 foray into Azerbaijan--for the folks who aren’t into flags out there, Nazimov’s representing Uzbekistan--and Nazimov was present, ready, and more than capable of beating “The Crazy Cameroonian” Jaures Dea. It was a good win, but it was also on Rizin’s Landmark series, the lesser-advertised prospect showcases. He’d get pulled up to the main show long enough to pound out Sora Yamamoto, but demoted back down to Landmark duty for a win over Sugaru Nii. Those three wins were enough to get him booked for 2025’s New Year’s special--but against the man they call Blackpanther Beynoah, a 5-3 Lightweight. It wasn’t until DEEP champion and Japanese prospect Shunta Nomura had to pull out of his championship bout with Roberto de Souza that Nazimov got his shot at the belt. Given Souza’s years of dominance as the only man to hold the belt in Rizin’s history, Nazimov’s status as a relative unknown and the short-notice nature of his move up the card, the odds were both figuratively and literally against him. He intercepted a de Souza takedown with a knee and knocked him cold in thirteen seconds. However unknown he was last week, he’s one of the most visible Lightweights in the world now.

Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Razhabali Shaydullaev - 17-0, 2 Defenses

I asked how long the second reign of Kleber Koike Erbst would last, and as it turns out, the answer was sixty-two seconds. Razhabali Shaydullaev’s rise through the sport has been impressively meteoric. Four years ago he was a rookie fighting on Batyr Bashy cards in Kyrgyzstan as a predominantly grappling-based fighter. Three years ago he was disposing of journeymen in the developmental leagues of Russia’s Absolute Championship Akhmat. Two years ago he was choking out top contenders in South Korea’s Road FC. One year ago he got signed to Rizin. In just six months he choked out a DEEP champion, submitted a Bellator champion and smashed through a K-1 Kickboxing champion with virtually no resistance. He was the favorite against Erbst, but few thought it would be an easy night, with Erbst having been finished only once in his entire career, and even that was an armbar all the way back in 2009 when he was still a rookie. Shaydullaev, as he has been doing for the entirety of his run thus far, destroyed Erbst. He walked through him and flattened him in just barely over a minute. Rizin’s got another gaijin champion, and given how good he’s looked, they may be stuck with him for awhile--or, worse, they might lose him to the UFC sooner than later. With Mikuru Asakura’s victory over Chihiro Suzuki on the same night he’s the logical next contender, but that would just be stupid, so instead it was Shaydullaev making his first defense against Viktor Kolesnik at Rizin 51 on September 28: He knocked Kolesnik out in just thirty-three seconds. His successful murders got him the main event of 2025’s Japanese New Year’s MMA special, where Rizin secretly hoped their big national star Mikuru Asakura would get the job done; Shaydullaev chain-suplexed him, grounded him, and laid an unconscionable amount of ground and pound on him in one of those Japan-likes-to-let-its-heroes-die moments before the ref finally called the fight in just shy of three minutes. Shaydullaev’s the best guy in the company, and now there’s a question of what’s left for him to do. For now, inexplicably, the answer is carry the murder of the 5-2 Yuta Kubo at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, which is wild because they already fought at the end of 2024 and Shaydullaev destroyed him in seven and a half minutes.

Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Danny Sabatello - 17-4-1, 0 Defenses

When Naoki Inoue won Rizin’s Bantamweight title I wrote that Rizin was one step closer to its dream of an all-Japanese championship roster, and it’s fitting that as gaijin once again take over the majority of the championship belts in the biggest organization in Japan, Danny goddamn Sabatello is one of the men to do it. Sabatello has been dogged by a reputation as a grinding wrestler without a ton to offer since 2020, when he got the call to compete on Dana White’s Contender Series, won, and was notably not offered a contract on the grounds of Boring Grappler. He made the move to late-stage Bellator instead, where he attempted to establish himself as their own personal Chael Sonnen: An indefatigable wrestling machine whose mouth ran just as hard as his double-legs. But it never quite caught on. The talk seemed a bit forced, the wrestling wasn’t that fun to watch, and all his 1980s wrestling promos about the bums in Bellator’s Bantamweight Grand Prix ended with an elimination at the hands of Raufeon Stots. Sabatello swore he’d won and that he’d get revenge; instead he ended his Bellator tenure getting choked out by Magomed Magomedov, decisioned again by Stots, and losing out on a shot at the PFL after going to a draw with Lazaro Dayron, who would’ve won the decision were it not for a point deduction. It was a bit of a shock when Sabatello signed with Rizin in 2025, but it seemed to have paid off when he scored his first knockout in six years during his debut against Shinobu Ota and swore he’d reinvent himself as Japan’s new American superstar. Then he went back to wrestling. It was still enough to get him his shot at Inoue’s belt at 2025’s New Year’s special, and despite the common wisdom of judging favoritism, a very close split decision went Danny’s way. It took three years longer than he intended, but Danny Sabatello is holding gold. Now we see if he can, in fact, become Big In Japan. His first title defense will be against Joji Goto at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11.

Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Hiromasa Ougikubo - 30-8-2, 0 Defenses

It’s been an incredibly long road to gold for Hiromasa Ougikubo. He was a teenager when he made his professional debut all the way back in 2006, and even at 19, he was notable for the tough, gritty way he handled his grappling. Within a year he was a Shooto rookie tournament winner, within a dozen fights he was a regional champion, and a year later, he was Shooto’s Bantamweight World Champion. And then he immediately lost it after getting choked out by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Having faced a level of force he didn’t feel he could contend with, he dropped down to Flyweight, where he was an immediate success, winning the Vale Tudo Japan tournament and, ultimately, the 125-pound Shooto title. That win got him called over to America for the most talent-rich season of The Ultimate Fighter ever, 2016’s Tournament of Champions, where he distinguished himself as one of the best fighters in the house and even beat a young Alexandre Pantoja on his way to the finals. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get past Tim Elliott. He returned to Japan, where, in his absence, Rizin had been reborn in the ashes of Pride FC, and as one of Japan’s best fighters, he got immediately called to the show--where he was immediately defeated by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Ougikubo went back up to Bantamweight and fought his way to a title shot at company star Kai Asakura, but Asakura lanced him with a knee and ended his title hopes again. Undeterred, Hiromasa entered Rizin’s 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix and stormed the bracket, winning four fights in a year and two in the same night, including the sweet revenge of a championship final where he defeated Asakura and staked his claim as the best Bantamweight in Japan. And then South Korean Kim Soo-chul beat him. So Ougikubo dropped back down to Flyweight for 2022’s massive Bellator vs Rizin supercard--where he was, for the third time, beaten by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Someone should find out if that dude’s any good at fighting. Ougikubo still got his shot at Rizin’s Bantamweight title, but Juan Archuleta beat him, and for the first time in seventeen years of fighting, Ougikubo found himself on a three-fight losing streak. But Horiguchi, Rizin’s Flyweight champion, left the company to return to the UFC, and with the throne empty, Ougikubo wanted one more shot. He went back down to 125 pounds, he entered the 2025 Flyweight Grand Prix, he ran the table one more time, and at the 2025 New Year’s Special he faced and defeated Yuki Motoya to win the tournament and, with it, the vacant belt. It took several tries and almost twenty years, but by god, Hiromasa Ougikubo is the world champion.

Rizin Women’s Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs

Seika Izawa - 18-0, 3 Defenses

All hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan’s best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don’t care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP’s strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women’s fighters in history on Rizin’s New Year’s Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin’s atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin’s talent is open to her--but that also means she’s got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin’s Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out, shockingly. It took more than an entire year, but Izawa finally had a title defense against the 8-4 grappler Claire Lopez, and Izawa scored the fastest championship victory in Rizin history, choking her out in just barely one minute. Seika scored one more win on New Year’s Eve, choking out Miyuu Yamamoto in her retirement bout, and while it was an honor, it does sort of emphasize the problem with Seika’s position. She’s unquestionably the best Atomweight in the world, but the last real top fighter she faced was more than a year ago. Will Rizin bring her real competition, or are they trying to simply build a star? And what IS real competition at Atomweight? She choked out Si Yoon Park at DEEP JEWELS 44 to add yet another win and belt to her credit, but the Rizin title wasn’t on the line, so she’s still only got the one defense. She was booked for Rizin 48 on September 29th, and once again instead of a top contender it was Kanna Asakura, and once again, it was a non-title match. Three months later, Rizin booked her for their New Year’s Eve supershow--against Lucia Apdelgarim, a 2-3 kickboxer who’d never beaten an MMA fighter with a single win. Seika submitted her easily and requested international competition, and in their eternal mockery of me, Rizin instead booked her to defend her title against the 3-0 Yu-jin Shin, who fights a weight class and a half up. Shockingly Shin did not make the Atomweight limit, so when Seika beat her easily it was a non-title affair. She had her first actual title defense in two years on November 2, where she beat DEEP’s Saori Oshima, and she shot for a third in very short order, by defending against striking star RENA on the 2025 New Year’s Eve special. It was by far Seika’s toughest fight, with RENA flooring her on a left hook and very nearly knocking her out in the first round, but Seika fought her way back, got RENA down, mauled and ultimately choked her out in the second.

ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Oumar Kane - 7-1, 0 Defenses

The triple championship days are over, and we can go back to appreciating ONE’s Heavyweight division for just how silly it really is. Oumar Kane’s origins are very serious: He grew up near Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and established himself as an undefeated star of Laamb, better known as Senegalese wrestling, a particularly harsh form of the sport that takes place on sand or turf and is fought in tiny shorts. As a giant 6’4” muscle monster with a wrestling background, Kane was an internationally visible talent, and ONE picked him up just one fight into his MMA career and promoted him as an undefeated monster of African wrestling. And it was true! For two fights. In his third bout with ONE, “Reug Reug” lost his undefeated streak in 2021 after gassing just two rounds in against Kirill Grishenko, but the actual ending of the fight was a bizarre sequence involving Grishenko throwing a punch right at the bell that appeared to graze Kane’s chin, only for Oumar to motion that he had been illegally punched in the throat after the bell and collapse onto the mat. After replays showed the punch barely connecting, the fight was ruled a TKO, and Oumar was accused of pulling a soccer dive. He spent three years building a three-fight winning streak--including a kickboxing match with “Boucher Ketchup” Mamadou Kamara, who is not a fighter but an influencer, and who fought exactly the way that sounds--and eventually that led him to a November 9, 2024 showdown with triple champ Anatoly Malykhin. The resulting fight was, to be gentle, pretty dreadful. Malykhin didn’t know how to get in on Kane, Kane repeatedly backed himself into a corner to focus on countering, and outside of the first round and a bit of the fifth, very little actually happened. But a takedown in the first round, a yellow card on Malykhin’s part for grabbing the ropes and a flash knockdown in the fifth were enough for Kane to win the title by split decision. “Reug Reug” is the champion. ONE was trying to position Marcus “Buchecha” Almeida as the top contender, but given that Kane beat him to get his title shot in the first place--and, uh, Buchecha left the company after the fight--and they don’t have any other fucking Heavyweights except, like, Kirill Grishenko--unsurprisingly, ONE decided to just book a rematch an entire year later. Kane vs Malykhin 2 was scheduled for ONE 173 on November 16, 2025, but Reug Reug managed to get concussed in a car accident and the fight had to be postponed until an indefinite future date.

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

For the second time in as many title reigns, ONE has managed to put a ton of hype behind a champion only to squash them prematurely. Anatoly Malykhin is one of the most successful marketing campaigns ONE ever ran: An undefeated, heavy-punching Russian Heavyweight with a 100% finishing rate. He knocked out everyone he faced, he carried ONE’s Heavyweight division as an interim champion while standing champion Arjan Bhullar was having contract issues, and when Bhullar finally re-entered the fold, Malykhin destroyed him with ease. But ONE had greater hopes for Malykhin as their spearhead for real international notoriety: They would make him the first three-division champion in the history of mixed martial arts. And it’d be real easy, because the other two belts were held by one guy. Reinier de Ridder had been their superstar double-champion, but his relationship with ONE had soured, and they cashed in by having de Ridder face Malykhin, twice, at both his weight classes. Malykhin destroyed him and became the first-ever 265, 225 and 205-pound champion the sport has ever seen--admittedly easier when you consider 225 is not a division that exists in almost any other federation on Earth. But he did it! And then they organized his first-ever title defense by having him put the Heavyweight belt on the line against Oumar “Reug Reug” Kane, and he lost a split decision, and now he is a lowly two-belt schmuck. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Malykhin now, given that the last 205-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s bout against de Ridder, and the last 225-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s 2022 bout with de Ridder. He was hoping to get the Heavyweight title back at ONE 173, but with Reug Reug injured, Malykhin’s playing the waiting game.

ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 0 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 1 Defense

It took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE’S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE’s repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y’know, that clearly did not happen. ONE held an interim title fight between Alibeg Rasulov and Ok Rae Yoon to welcome him back--but that didn’t exactly happen either, as Rasulov failed hydration tests, became ineligible to win the title, then won the fight anyway. Lee vs Rasulov was scheduled for October. And then November. It finally happened on December 7, 2024--and it ended in a No Contest after two rounds thanks to Christian unintentionally gouging Rasulov’s eye. They ran it back almost a full year later at ONE 173 on November 16, and this time Lee knocked him out in the second round, marking Lee’s first win in three years.

ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs

Tang Kai - 19-4, 1 Defense

Tang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China’s WBK (after investigating, we THINK it’s World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz “Ong Bak” Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai’s weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai’s Dragon Gym and Phuket’s legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It’s worked out quite well: He hasn’t lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China’s Rebel FC got ONE’s attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he’s held for two years. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. His position hasn’t improved much, either. He was supposed to defend his title against Akbar Abdullaev on January 10, and Abdullaev pounded him out in the fifth round, but he also missed weight by a pound and a half and thus was ineligible for the championship. So, hey: Still a world champion! You just got knocked out a little bit. It’s fine. After almost another year and a half of inactivity Tang Kai will get another shot at defending his title on May 15, this time against Shamil Gasanov.

ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs

Engh-Orgil Baatarkhuu - 14-3, 0 Defenses

By god, ONE had an MMA title change hands in 2025. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is one of the precious few success stories for ONE’s feeder system. He was a 5-2 champion in the small (but competitive!) regional scene in his native Mongolia, which put him on ONE’s talent-scouting radar for their Warriors of the Steppe tournament in 2022. Enkh won two fights in six days to earn his contract with ONE, where he quickly discovered that no matter where you go in the wide world of sports, being a grappler-type Pokemon makes companies less invested in promoting you. Enkh went 6-1 across two years--8-1, if you count those aforementioned tournament wins--and finished most of his opponents, but title contention eluded him in no small part thanks to ONE’s turn away from mixed martial arts as a whole. It wasn’t until December 6 that Enkh finally got his long-belated shot at Fabricio Andrade’s Bantamweight title, and the first round and a half looked pretty thoroughly one-sided in Andrade’s favor, as most had figured it would be given the gap in Enkh’s striking game, and Andrade battered him to a near-stoppage on a couple occasions. But Enkh, as it turns out, is tough as shit. He weathered the storm and used his grit, his power and his wrestling to turn the tables, and towards the end of the fourth round, an exhausted Andrade gave up the ghost and got himself strangled. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is ONE’s Bantamweight champion, and his very first act as a champion was to call for a cross-class title match with Tang Kai, because weight classes aren’t real.

ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs

Yuya Wakamatsu - 20-6, 1 Defense

After two years of solitude, ONE’s Flyweight title has a home again, and it is to one of the men most denied it. Yuya Wakamatsu was a Pancrase standout in Japan for years before the rest of the world knew his name, but even there, he couldn’t get over the hump, winning their Flyweight Neo-Blood Tournament in 2016 only to get knocked out by standing champion Senzo Ikeda when he challenged for the title itself. But ONE’s aggressive expansion in the late 2010s brought in a lot of Japanese talent, including both Wakamatsu and Ikeda, and fittingly, both lost their first two fights and were promptly forgotten by most of the audience. But where his nemesis retired in fairly short order, Wakamatsu kept grinding and ultimately built up a five-fight winning streak, which was more than enough to justify a shot at then-champion Adriano Moraes--which he lost. And then he missed weight and got knocked out. And then he won, but missed weight again. ONE was decidedly unhappy with him, but he got his weight cut under control and returned to his winning ways, and when Demetrious Johnson retired and abdicated the belt, ONE needed an answer. On March 23, 2025, Wakamatsu and Moraes had a rematch three years in the making, and this time, Wakamatsu made it count by pounding Moraes out in a single round. After a decade in the sport and three at-bats, Yuya Wakamatsu finally has his championship belt. His first defense was a champion vs champion match against Joshua Pacio at ONE 173 on November 16, because ONE needs to fire their bullets as soon as they have them. Yuya punched him out in six minutes. He’ll try to notch his second defense against Avazbek Kholmirzaev on April 29.

ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Pacio - 23-5, 1 Defense

It’s been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. “The Passion” stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they’d become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE’s lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE’s ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE’s tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and was out for an entire year. On February 20th, 2025, Pacio and Brooks finally fought again and it was weird, but definitive. Jarred Brooks seemingly exhausted himself after a round and Pacio pounded him for the entire second round, which eventually elicited a mercy stoppage from the ref. ONE has only one 125-pound champion again. So he, of course, challenged for the 135-pound title next. Pacio vs Wakamatsu happened at ONE 173 on November 16 and ended in Pacio getting smashed in six minutes.

ONE Women’s Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs

Denice Zamboanga - 12-2, 0 Defenses

Denice Zamboanga, to be clear, is not the problem with ONE’s women’s divisions. She’s a good fighter. She’s been trucking along in ONE since 2009, she’s proven herself repeatedly as a solid all-around competitor. She’s tough, she’s talented, she’s never been finished. She’s also never beaten a top fighter. She’s fought 0-0 rookies, she’s beaten journeywomen on losing streaks--in a dozen fights with ONE, she’s only beaten someone coming off a victory at all twice. She was also notably defeated by Seo Hee Ham, the top Atomweight contender and former Rizin champion, twice in a row. It was consequently a bit of a surprise to Ham when ONE announced an interim title fight to make up for Stamp’s injury absence and she wasn’t in it. Instead of her, the #1 contender whose only loss in ONE was to Stamp herself, it would be Denice Zamboanga, the woman she beat, against Alyona Rassohyna, a woman she also beat and who, as a bonus, had not fought in ONE since September of 2021--when she lost to Stamp Fairtex. This was all supposed to end in a unification match with Stamp at ONE 173 on August 1, but in early May, ONE announced that Stamp had reinjured her knee and was going to miss at least the rest of 2025. With the awareness that it would have been close to two and a half years between title fights, Stamp ‘voluntarily relinquished’ her title. This wound up being even more infuriating when ONE failed to rebook Denice for so long that upon finally scheduling her again, they chose ONE 173 on November 16, where Stamp Fairtex, who is now healthy, will be fighting a completely unrelated kickboxing match. Denice will face Ayaka Miura. Rather: Denice was going to face Ayaka Miura, but at the end of August she announced medical issues will prevent her from fighting. So they made an interim title fight for Stamp’s return against a non-#1 contender, and then they stripped Stamp for being unable to compete, and then they didn’t schedule the next championship fight until the card where Stamp was making her return anyway, and now Stamp is healthy and fighting but the Atomweight champion isn’t. Stamp lost and Denice has yet to be rebooked. Just fucking stop already.

Invicta Bantamweight Championship, 135 lbs

Jennifer Maia - 23-10-1, 0 Defenses

It did not take Jennifer Maia long to find her way back home to Invicta after the UFC cut her in 2023, and it only took a year for her to reclaim gold in the company she left behind. This is, in fact, Maia’s third stint with Invicta: The first time around was back in 2013, when Invicta was barely a year old and Maia was only a couple years and nine fights into her career, and it saw Maia distinguishing herself as a hot prospect but failing to get past the top ranks. She came back in 2016 as a more seasoned fighter and captured its Flyweight championship, but, as is the fate of all regional champions, she traded the belt for a ticket to the UFC. Her half-decade in the big show was by no means bad--she even fought Valentina Shevchenko for the UFC’s 125-pound title--but she still couldn’t crack the top of the mountain, and eventually, the UFC got tired of her derailing prospects and let her go. It only took two fights for Maia to dethrone Talita Bernardo and gain her second Invicta gold. Hopefully she sticks around this time.

Invicta Atomweight Championship, 105 lbs

Elisandra Ferreira - 9-2, 1 Defense

The only major Atomweight division in America is back, and as happens so often, it belongs to Brazil. Elisandra “Lili” Ferreira started competing as an amateur at 19, lost all of her amateur fights, and proceeded to turn pro anyway, because giving up sucks. She spent the first third of her professional career fighting at Strawweight simply because Atomweight opportunities are few and farbetween, but she made the turn to the lower weight class in 2021 and never looked back, and boy, it’s worked out for her. With one exception--a loss to Anastasia Nikolakakos, maybe the best Atomweight on this side of the globe--Ferreira’s cleaned house on the division. She made the jump to Invicta in 2023, and a year and a half later she’s 4-0 and the new bannerwoman for its most unique weight class, thanks to a hard-fought decision over Andressa Romero on September 20, 2024. Invicta’s 2024 comeback has reclaimed its first lost title; now we just have to see who they line up to test Ferreira over the next year of its renaissance. Her first at-bat came against Ana Palacios at Invicta FC 61 on April 4, and Ferreira earned a near-shutout on the scorecards.

PFL Heavyweight Championship, 265 lbs

Vadim Nemkov - 19-2 (1), 0 Defenses

When the PFL announced that it was going to crown a standing Heavyweight champion, they had a raft of interesting options. Oleg Popov, their 2025 tournament champion, had a strong argument. Denis Goltsov, 2024 champion and the only man in almost ten years to beat Popov, could’ve called dibs. Hell, the PFL still technically has Francis Ngannou, the best Heavyweight on the planet, under contract. They, of course, did not choose any of those men. They chose Renan Ferreira, the 2023 tournament champion whose only fight in almost two years was a TKO loss to Ngannou, and Vadim Nemkov, Bellator’s best Light Heavyweight. Nemkov, a Fedor protégé, hadn’t lost since 2016, when he got himself punched out by Jiří Procházka and narrowly edged out by Karl Albrektsson, and it’s a testament to both his skills and the world’s dim view of the Heavyweight division that when the PFL acquired Bellator and Nemkov announced he was leaving 205 for the 265-pound world, instead of the expected fretting about how a 6’1” man would contend in the world of the big boys, more or less everyone said “Yeah, that’s fine.” And lo: It was. Nemkov choked out 2021 PFL champ Bruno Cappelozza, and then he choked out the ever-pained Timothy Johnson, and when he fought Renan Ferreira at PFL Champions Series 4 on December 13, 2025, shockingly, he choked him out, too. Nemkov’s now the only major Heavyweight champion in American MMA outside of the UFC. Hopefully it pays off.

PFL Light Heavyweight Championship, 205 lbs

Corey Anderson - 20-6 (1), 0 Defenses

One of the best Light Heavyweights in the world isn’t in the UFC, and they have only themselves to blame. Corey Anderson was the precise kind of fighter the UFC wanted when they first got ahold of him in 2014: Big, young, athletic, talented, undefeated. He had all the makings of a future champion, and his victory on The Ultimate Fighter 19 (jesus christ) cemented him as a prospect to watch. Unfortunately, he had also barely been in the sport for a year and only had four professional fights to his name. In short order he’d suffered his first loss, and a couple years later, a pair of back-to-back knockouts in 2017 sent him to the realm of afterthoughts. But a recommitment to his wrestling style, an extremely well-aged victory over Glover Teixeira, and a devastating knockout over Johnny Walker got Anderson back in the title picture, and in 2020, he fought Jan Błachowicz to determine the #1 contender to the soon-to-be-vacated belt. They’d done battle once, five years prior, and Corey had won a clear decision. This time, Jan flattened him in three minutes. Despite his top-ten ranking and the four consecutive fights he’d just won, the UFC decided to dump Corey, sending him from main event to unemployment in a week. Corey went straight to Bellator and proceeded to become one of its best stars, and he would have become the first man in America to beat Vadim Nemkov had they not banged their heads together and ended the fight prematurely. Corey lost the rematch, but he became the last man to hold Bellator’s Light Heavyweight title after beating Karl Moore, and on October 3, Corey had a champion vs champion match against the PFL’s 205-pound tournament champion, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov. Corey had pounded him out in Bellator four years prior, and while he didn’t get the stoppage in the present, he did get the win, and in so doing he became the inaugural PFL Light Heavyweight Champion. What that actually means going forward, we’ll have to see.

PFL Middleweight Championship, 185 lbs

Costello van Steenis - 18-3, 1 Defense

For years, the Professional Fighters League has threatened to crown standing champions. Did they carry through any of their major tournament winners? Nope. Did they bring out their holdout Bellator champions? Not exactly! Did they at least make a big hubbub about finally going through with it? Of course not. Instead, just five days before PFL Champions Series 2, their promotional debut in South Africa, they abruptly announced that Bellator champ Johnny Eblen was suddenly the first-ever PFL Middleweight Champion, and his match with Costello van Steenis was the first-ever defense of the title. Costello, himself, was a Bellator veteran who’d been absorbed in the PFL buyout, but he’d always played second fiddle in the organization, unable to get through the John Salters and Douglas Limas of the world, and thus said world was mostly overlooking him as a challenger. The first three rounds of Eblen gradually grinding him into dust bore out that expectation, but then a funny thing happened: The inexhaustible wrestler got tired. Eblen found himself punched up by van Steenis in the fourth round, and he seemed to be pulling it together again in the fifth, but right before the bell could ring van Steenis managed to take his back and sink in a choke, and with just seven seconds separating him from an almost-certain decision victory, Eblen passed out. Costello van Steenis is the first man to truly hold a standing PFL Championship, and he became the second man to defend one after knocking out Fabian Edwards on March 20.

THE PFL WELTERWEIGHT CONUNDRUM

Yeah, I don’t quite know what to do here. On February 7, the (technically) final Welterweight champion of Bellator, Ramazan Kuramagomedov, beat 2024 PFL tournament champion and undefeated favorite Shamil Musaev and became the first official PFL Welterweight Champion. In his post-fight interview he immediately retired. On one hand, the PFL still lists him as their officially reigning champion. On the other, the PFL’s Youtube channel has a video on it named RAMAZAN KURAMAGOMEDOV ANNOUNCES THIS WAS HIS LAST FIGHT and in their own description phrase it as “announcing his retirement.” Does the PFL have a Welterweight champion? I don’t think even they know. So, as of March 1, 2026, I’m leaving ol’ Matthew Lesko here until the PFL clarifies its own title situation and I am on pins and needles to see how long it’ll take before I remove this section.

PFL Lightweight Championship, 155 lbs

Usman Nurmagomedov - 21-0 (1), 1 Defense

The Nurmagomedov family is trying to run the sport, and Usman is their B-league beachhead, but that assault has proven to be an awful lot rockier than the rest. As the kid brother of Umar and the cousin of Khabib, Usman had great expectations thrust upon him very early in his career, and he dealt with them the way regional talents with great camps traditionally do: Squashing severely overmatched competition until you get a contract from one of the big companies. Bellator won the Usman bidding war and brought him over in 2021, and he proved to be one of the breakout stars of their final days, blitzing his way up the Lightweight ranks, knocking off several contenders and ultimately beating Patricky Pitbull to win the 155-pound championship and securing his reign by retiring former star and UFC champ Benson Henderson. It was 2023, and even though Bellator’s upcoming death was clear, Usman was a name and widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world. Unfortunately, then, things got weird. He was a massive, -2200 favorite to beat Brent Primus in the waning days of Bellator, and he did--and it became the first non-win of his career after failing a drug test for something that was never disclosed. He carried Bellator’s title over into its new life as a colony of the PFL, and he immediately ran into controversy after barely scraping a majority decision off of Irish superprospect Paul Hughes. The world wanted a rematch for the inaugural PFL Lightweight Championship fight, and on October 3, at the PFL’s big Dubai show, they got it--and this time, it waws even closer, with media scorecards split right down the middle. This, by itself, is not that unusual, nor is one fighter winning a controversial decision unusual. It is unusual when the decision is not only unanimous, but one judge scores the entire fight as a 50-45 shut-out. So Usman’s last two wins were dubious, and his future as part of the PFL depends on how they treat their own championship, but for now, he is the damn champion. He notched his first title defense by choking out Alfie Davis on February 7.

PFL Women’s Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Cris Cyborg - 29-2 (1), 1 Defense

Are you noticing how all of the inaugural PFL champions are just Bellator’s champions? Funny, that. Cris Cyborg is the greatest Women’s Featherweight of all time, and we all just kind of have to deal with that, because Women’s Featherweight has only barely ever existed. Strikeforce set the standard back in 2006 because Gina Carano was one of their biggest stars, and that star lasted right up until 2009, when they attempted to put a belt on her and failed because Cris Cyborg punched the shit out of her. In the following sixteen years Cyborg’s only lost one mixed martial arts fight, and it took Amanda Nunes, the greatest Women’s mixed martial artist of all time, to do it. Aside from that one loss, she’s run the table. She was the Strikeforce Featherweight Champion until it closed, and then she was Invicta’s Featherweight Champion until they let the UFC have her, and then she was the UFC’s Featherweight Champion until Amanda dropped her, and Cyborg promptly went to Bellator and won their title, too. When the PFL brought her over in the Bellator buyout, they set her up for an interpromotional superfight against Larissa Pacheco, a two-time PFL tournament winner and the only woman who’d ever beaten Kayla Harrison. On one hand, Pacheco’s one of just six women to ever make it to the final bell with Cyborg. On the other, she lost 4-1. In the ultimate act of promotional cowardice, the PFL promoted Cyborg to champion status three days before her appearance at the PFL Champions Series on December 13, 2025, meaning her fight with Sara Collins was, technically, a title defense. It was as one-sided as you’d expect. In theory, this is great! The biggest female fighter outside the UFC has a belt and the PFL is bringing back a division the UFC threw in the garbage. In practice, Cyborg didn’t even get out of her post-fight interview without noting that after her next fight she’s going to retire from MMA in favor of focusing on her boxing career. So welcome back, Women’s Featherweight. I hope you still exist by 2027.

SATURDAY, MARCH 28 FROM THE CLIMATE PLEDGE ARENA IN SEATTLE
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

This has nothing to do with mixed martial arts, but upon reading the phrase “The Climate Pledge Arena” I immediately had to go a-searching to learn which horrifying multi-billion dollar conglomerate had originated the name. It’s from the Global Optimism group that helped sign the Paris Agreement! No one bad could have chosen to support that, right?

It was paid for by Amazon in 2020, and if you search, one of the first results you’ll get is Amazon using the arena’s name to advertise their new, AI-driven approach to Amazon Web Services.

Amazing how much worse things can get in just a handful of years.

Speaking of which,

MAIN EVENT: JACK’S LAMENT
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Israel Adesanya (24-5, #4) vs Joe Pyfer (15-3, #14)

I feel like I don’t even need to say anything about this fight. I feel like you can peer through your glowing rectangle of choice and see the look of resignation on my face and, really, that’s enough.

Hell, we don’t even have to go through the whole story to get to the favoritism at work here. You can see the #4 and #14 up top. You know the deal already. You know what they are doing, intuitively, before I say a goddamn thing, because matchmaking has degenerated to the point that it’s the expected course of action now. Remember five months ago when Brendan Allen, a solid Middleweight whose only losses in the last five years have been against top contenders, took a short-notice fight with Reinier de Ridder, who at the time was ranked #4 and one fight away from the world title? Remember how Allen surprisingly trounced him and presumably usurped his spot at the top of the division?

They only lifted him to #6, and as the #6 Middleweight in the world, Allen’s next fight is an Apex co-main event where he’ll be defending his spot against the unranked Edmen Shahbazyan.

Joe Pyfer, at #14 and coming off victories over no less than Marc-André Barriault, the 2025 edition of Kelvin Gastelum, and Abus Magomedov, is fighting the biggest mixed martial arts star of the last generation.

But that star has fallen an awful long way. Over the first ten years of his MMA career, Israel Adesanya managed a staggering 22-1 record that took him through champions, contenders and outright legends of the sport, and the only blemish on any of it came from an ill-advised, ill-prepared strike at Light Heavyweight gold, and even then, he went the distance with a newly-crowned Jan Błachowicz that had been stopping most of his opponents. It was a wild run, particularly given that he took virtually no time off. In the modern age of champions parking their belts for 8-12 months on a regular basis, Izzy’s time at the top of the sport saw him in a title fight, on average, every 145 days for four and a half consecutive years.

That’s an absurd schedule to maintain at any level of combat sports, let alone one that keeps you perpetually engaged with the best of the best.

It also probably has something to do with why the first ten years of his career were nearly flawless and the last four have seen him go 1 for 5 and get stopped repeatedly.

The competition’s still up there, obviously. Getting torched by Alex Pereira is nothing to be ashamed of, particularly when you knock him out right back a few months later. But getting dropped by Sean Strickland, choked out by Dricus du Plessis and punched limp by Nassourdine Imavov all in a row is the kind of thing that indicates your time as the sport’s top Middleweight is well and truly over. When so much of your success comes from your ability to control range and speed, and you wake up one day on the south side of your thirties and find you’ve burnt yourself to cinders fighting two to four times a year for as long as the sport’s short memory can recall, the future starts to get dim.

And that’s when they send in whoever their Joe Pyfer of the moment happens to be. Unfortunately for those of us who live in this moment, right now, the Joe Pyfer is, in fact, Joe Pyfer.

They’ve wanted this for years. Pyfer got on the Contender Series all the way back in 2020 and got his arm busted by a Dustin Stoltzfus takedown, and they had him back on the show one fight later. By Pyfer’s own admission the UFC started offering him ranked fights almost immediately, and he turned them down half because he didn’t feel he had the experience to hang with the best and half because he didn’t want to be on a minimum-wage, no-leverage DWCS contract while doing battle with the best fighters the company had to offer. Which turned out to be wise, as a year and a half into his tenure they tried to coronate him as a new contender with a main-event showcase against perpetual gatekeeper Jack Hermansson and it ended with a rattled, exhausted Pyfer getting outstruck 52 to 6 in the final round en route to a unanimous decision loss.

By the time Hermansson fought again Pyfer had already notched two wins, but the latter wasn’t great. In the highest-profile fight of his career Pyfer fought Kelvin Gastelum all the way below the co-main event of a double-title-fight Sean O’Malley-headlined pay-per-view. Once upon a time, Kelvin was a huge prospect with championship potential; in mid-2025 he was an inconsistent Welterweight wash-out known more for his constant inability to make weight than his fighting. The last time he’d recorded a memorable victory was eight years prior, and that involved knocking out a one-eyed Michael Bisping who’d just lost a fight three weeks beforehand and retired immediately afterward.

Kelvin had long passed into the annals of the great What Ifs of the sport. In the modern age he was a sizable underdog to the promotional favorite.

And he still almost beat Pyfer.

Kelvin, who was two fights removed from getting destroyed by a Welterweight, survived multiple knockdowns in the first round, took over the back half of the fight and repeatedly stumbled Pyfer in the final round. It was the biggest win of Pyfer’s career, but it left a lot of questions, to the point that when Pyfer fought Abus Magomedov this past October my conlcuding thoughts were that however good his chances were, I had very little faith in either man to make it past the top ten.

I cannot help thinking after watching Pyfer’s path through the division the UFC secretly agrees with me, because they’re not taking the chance. They know his strengths are his overhand punches and what of his top game exists while he has the energy to use it. They know the likelihood that he gets outlasted by an Anthony Hernandez or a Gregory Rodrigues, or that what remains of Jared Cannonier could still knock him through the cage.

This is the end run. This is Paddy Pimblett getting an interim title match. Either Izzy proves he still has life left in his bones or Pyfer is able to do as Imavov did, harness the combined powers of youth, grit, and marketing favoritism, and march down the man who used to be the best striker in the sport because now he’s just too damned tired to avoid the big right hand.

As much as I hate to say it: It’s a solid bet. If you’ve watched MMA for any length of time, this story isn’t new to you--you saw it in Lyoto Machida, you saw it in Anderson Silva. When your greatest strengths come from your ability to capitalize on small spaces and land counters, the second your capacity for moving or thinking fast enough to navigate those spaces starts to go, your career goes with it. Seven years ago Izzy could time out Robert Whittaker, one of the best darters in the sport, and floor him in the pocket while only barely taking a punch in response. Three years ago Izzy put his back to the fence and absorbed a half-dozen strikes from Alex Pereira, but still found the slip and counter that won back his world title.

Two and a half years ago Izzy only barely survived Sean Strickland. One year ago Nassourdine Imavov took him out because he just couldn’t run anymore.

It’d be easy to say ISRAEL ADESANYA BY TKO is based solely on my disdain for Joe Pyfer as both a career and a personality, but while those do play into it, I am, in truth, not quite ready for Izzy’s story to be over. I hope he’s got the spark left. I hope finally taking a full year off for the first time in his MMA career helped him find it. I hope he survives long enough for Pyfer’s Pac-man power pill to wear off and spends two and a half rounds just kicking him while he looks progressively sadder.

But mostly, I just hope he doesn’t die.

CO-MAIN EVENT: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Alexa Grasso (16-5-1, #3) vs Maycee Barber (15-2, #5)

November.

Half a year ago Erin Blanchfield was supposed to have a main event against Maycee Barber--in the Apex, naturally--and it was infamously cancelled just as Erin was about to walk out to the cage after Maycee had medical issues at the last possible second. Erin noted what utter bullshit this is, particularly as it marked the second time Maycee cancelled a fight with her on short notice, and the UFC, as always, assured everyone she would get treated well. So now she’s fighting halfway down the rankings against a dangerous opponent in the middle of the prelims. Maycee is, of course, headlining next month’s prelims. This is the game, and you cannot beat it.

December.

The last time we saw Maycee, we didn’t. She very visibly and infamously pulled out of a main event with Erin Blanchfield seconds before it was set to begin back in May, a fight the UFC was not-so-subtly hoping would get her into title contention after their multiple attempts to previously do so were derailed by either poorly-timed injuries or terribly underestimating Roxanne motherfuckin’ Modafferi. Apparently someone got a little mad at her, though, because just a few weeks ago this was headlining the prelims and now it’s busted down to the midway. Still, for someone who hasn’t fought in almost two years and torpedoed a main event, which they still have yet to forgive multiple other fighters for, sticking around for a top ten fight against Karine Silva is a pretty solid deal.

So, funny story: Maycee Barber is fighting former world champion Alexa Grasso for a top three spot in the co-main event of a road show headlined by Israel Adesanya and Erin Blanchfield is not currently booked.

Alexa being the underdog here is indicative of just how far her star has fallen. Three fights ago she was the world champion, the woman that slew Valentina Shevchenko; today Maycee Barber is favored against her. This is one of those cases where looking at something on paper belies how it really went.

On paper, Alexa not only beat but stopped Val, wrested away her title, and embarked on a year-and-a-half-long trilogy of fights that saw them going tooth and nail until Val finally got her belt back. In reality? Alexa was five and a half minutes away from losing a wide decision in their first fight and Shevchenko gave her a gift by more or less falling into position to get choked out, their second fight was a draw only because judge Michael Bell rendered an impossible scorecard that saved Alexa’s title reign, and the third was such a one-sided fight that even though Valentina’s win technically brought their series to a perfectly balanced 1-1-1 that the UFC could have wrung a tiebreaker out of, they had seen more than enough.

What little hope Alexa had left as a contender was dashed last May when the UFC used her as a measuring stick. Natália Silva had risen to prominence as the new dark horse contender at Flyweight while the terrible trilogy played out, and given her preference for striking over grappling, management was eager to get her in the mix. Alexa was, in theory, a solid counter for Natália, an equally agile boxer with some quick takedowns in her pocket. In practice, she had no answer for Silva’s kicks or her range and got completely shut out.

Which did not free her from her bondage. The UFC had planned on Alexa fighting Rose Namajunas this past January in their neverending quest to get Rose back into a title fight, but Grasso couldn’t make it.

Instead: It’s Maycee Barber. That’s a plethora of fights and a rollercoaster of a journey for Alexa to have embarked on over the last couple years. How about Maycee?

Well, since 2024, Maycee has:

• Failed to make it to a fight with Rose Namajunas

• Failed to make weight for her main event with Erin Blanchfield

• Pulled out of said main event at the literal last minute thanks to unspecified medical issues

• Never really clarified what said medical issues were

• Fought the #9-ranked Karine Silva, winner of 1 straight fight, and won a competitive decision

So, obviously, it’s time for her to be nose-close to a title eliminator.

Maycee is not a bad fighter. Hell, she deeply surprised me with her absolute shellacking of Amanda Ribas, which stands as one of the better ground-and-pound maulings in memory. But I can’t say recent memory, because that was already almost three years ago. Her only other victory before her hiatus was a competitive decision with Katlyn Cerminara, who had been virtually retired for almost two years and went right back to the shelf afterward, never to return.

Other than that? It’s been two straight years of medical no-shows, none of which were ever explained past a ‘trust us, it’s totally fine that someone we told you was having seizures in the locker room can fight without any issues now,’ followed by a clear if slightly lackluster victory over a borderline-ranked woman whose last victory was against the 2-2 Dione Barbosa. This is how you get a fight with former champion and multiple-time main eventer Alexa Grasso.

And maybe it only grates on me so much because Alexa, uh, already beat Maycee. They did this already! They fought in 2021, Maycee outwrestled her but Grasso outgrappled and outstruck her, and Alexa won a completely uncontroversial 29-28. Nothing about their skillsets has really changed all that much, this rematch simply hinges on the idea that Maycee is now the ascendant contender and Alexa is the waning light ready to be extinguished by a salivating marketing department.

And I’m going to be the idiot that says ALEXA GRASSO BY DECISION. Maycee’s best weapons are her hand speed and her ability to bully people with her wrestling, and unlike Shevchenko and Silva, those play into Alexa’s strengths just like they did five years ago. Maycee may have tightened up her striking, but Alexa’s also gotten better at evading and counter-grappling, and she was already good enough at it the first time to give Maycee fits. I’m banking on it happening again.

MAIN CARD: OTHER VARIOUS STORIES OF VARYING SUCCESS
WELTERWEIGHT: Michael Chiesa (19-7) vs Niko Price (16-10)

These fights take place in an alternate universe and, honestly, that’s fine. Having a separate subcontinuity within the UFC for its aging, near-retirement veterans where they can fight each other for funsies is a lot better than pretending it means something when Paddy Pimblett beats a Tony Ferguson who’s seven fights into a losing streak. Coincidentally: You know who beat Tony next? That’s right: Michael Chiesa. Over the last three years Chiesa has taken part in and won three fights, and they were Tony, Max Griffin and Court McGee, which is about as specific a path through the UFC’s stock of Welterweight 40somethings as you can possibly take. And that’s fine! He’s made it clear he’s been just sort of fucking around on his way out the door, this is explicitly his retirement fight, and if the UFC treated all their retirees as respectfully it’d be a much more pleasant sport to follow.

His swan song came with a little luck, though. He was originally scheduled to bid his farewells against Carlston Harris, who is also pushing 39 and hasn’t won a fight in a couple years, but visa problems kept Harris from getting here, so instead we’ve got Niko Price. Is Niko also in the 40ish club? Not quite! Despite being a decade deep into his UFC tenure he’s a spry young 36. He’s also 2-7 (1) in his last ten fights and he just got knocked out by Nikolay Veretennikov in February. Like, 49 days ago. Niko Price got knocked out 49 days ago. 49 days ago Niko took part in a professional mixed martial arts bout that ended with him slumped and weightless against a cage while an angry man repeatedly struck him in his motionless skull, and now he’s fighting again, 49 days later, because we live in Hell.

The good news is Chiesa has literally never knocked anyone out. The bad news is there’s always time to start. MICHAEL CHIESA BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Julian Erosa (31-12) vs Lerryan Douglas (13-5)

Gotta say: It’s hard not to stick Julian Erosa into that vaguely disrespectful alternate-reality UFC conversation these days. We’re on the fourth iteration and eighth year of the ‘Julian Erosa beats a bunch of guys before getting the door of relevance slammed in his face’ story arc, and ordinarily that’s when you begin discussing fighters as gatekeepers, but the trouble is for every top ten fighter Erosa lets through the velvet rope, he also fails to bounce a Fernando Padilla or a Choi Seung-woo. Losing a fight to Alex “Bruce Leeroy” Caceres? Not that big a deal! Being the only person in 30 UFC fights Caceres knocked out? That’s the stuff. That’s the kind of inconsistency that keeps Erosa out of the gatekeeping conversation and firmly stuck in the ‘I dunno, throw someone at him and see what happens’ conversation.

Like, say, taking an Erosa who just got beat by Melquizael Costa, a man about to fight for a spot in the top ten, and placing him up against Lerryan Douglas. Lerryan is coming off a brief but pleasant moment as the Featherweight champion out in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, and having watched a bunch of his tape, I am surprisingly devoid of things to say. I don’t have any of my ‘he’s a wild-eyed brawler who throws caution to the wind’ criticisms nor any ‘he’s quietly really good’ praise. He seems perfectly fine. He seems like the exact caliber of fighter that should, rightfully, make it to the UFC, but that you expect little to nothing from outside a standing appointment to wave every 4-5 months as he walks out for his regularly scheduled spot on the prelims until the day he stops showing up and you realize his last win was two and a half years ago.

He’s got solid fundamentals and he’s got good composure when he gets cracked and I still think JULIAN EROSA BY TKO is more likely.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Mansur Abdul-Malik (9-0-1) vs Yousri Belgaroui (9-3)

They’re still a little mad at you, Mansur. You were supposed to be their big new star, with the long reach and the scary muscles and the undefeated record and the 100% finishing rate, and that’s why they were trying so hard to book you to debut against Antonio Trócoli, who, even a year ago, was clearly not The Guy. They wanted so badly for you to get those wins that when Antonio couldn’t make it they made it up to you a fight later with Cody Brundage, the company’s favorite enhancement talent, and you fucked it up by headbutting him into a faux-stoppage that got overturned to a draw, which means now you have failed to beat Cody Brundage, which is actually the less embarrassing narrative for the UFC than the part where you lost rounds to Cody Brundage. They still got you in there with Trócoli this past December for that easy victory, but they’re still just not sure.

Which is why Yousri Belgaroui is here. Yousri is another guy they’re not sure about, and they need your help figuring out which of you to choose. Yousri got his first shot at the big show on the Contender Series three years ago, and nothing is as clarifying about the UFC’s relationship with its contract mill as the fact that three years ago Yousri lost a DWCS decision to Marcio Tulio that was so ultimately uneventful that management passed on both men, and a year later they were both back on DWCS fighting much worse competition and were both promptly welcomed into the company. Yousri had his big-show debut this past October against the perpetually confusing Azamat Bekoev, whom he carved up and ultimately stopped in the third round. He was tall and he had okay takedown defense and he took out an extremely solid prospect, and you can’t really ask for more.

Personally, as someone who still thinks Mr. Bean is funny, I appreciate it every time there’s a matchup like this where one man (Yousri) is considerably taller (4”) but the other (Mansur) has longer arms (80”!). Biology is weird and so is knowing how to use your punching distance. MANSUR ABDUL-MALIK BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Terrance McKinney (17-8) vs Kyle Nelson (17-6-1)

We were just discussing the dangers of inconsistency in a fighting career, and Terrance McKinney is the one and only man who stands in both worlds at once. On one hand, he is the most inconsistent wrecking machine in the division, a man capable of atomizing Matt Frevola in seconds or choking out the nearly-ranked Fares Ziam, yet somehow, also more than willing to go get crunched by Drew Dober and Nazim Sadykhov. On the other: He is such a highlight machine, win or lose, that he’s about to hit a baker’s dozen of fights in the UFC and you can watch that entire run in twenty-four minutes. He will kill a man or he will be killed by a man, and that is why he will be employed, no matter what, until the day he dares reach a final bell.

Kyle Nelson would just like his momentum back. Nelson was 1 for 5 and a wholly forgotten Featherweight quantity when the UFC booked him as the fall guy for Choi Doo-ho’s grand return to the sport in 2023, and thanks to a gutsy performance, a point deduction and some controversial judging, Nelson got a draw and ruined the party. The company passive-aggressively punished him with a recurring prospect-testing duty, and Nelson had the unmitigated gall to get a three-fight winning streak instead. Eventually they shrugged and booked a genuinely fascinating fight between Nelson and the equally surging Steve Garcia, and it was, finally, Kyle’s chance to show everyone what he was made of. Which is why he missed weight and got knocked out in four minutes. Now he’s a Lightweight and he’s coming off a win over the distressingly roadworn Matt Frevola and he wants another chance.

And, honestly? Probably gonna get it. Terrance is so goddamn strong and fast that there’s always a chance he simply busts through Kyle in the first three minutes, but what Terrance has in power he lacks in composure, and the only man to ever get Nelson out of there early is the most consistently on-target knockout artist we’ve seen in years. I think we’re gonna get a wild set of exchanges and then KYLE NELSON BY TKO will surface in the second or third round.

PRELIMS: HACK THE GIBSON
LIGHTWEIGHT: Ignacio Bahamondes (17-6) vs Tofiq Musayev (22-6)

Embers of hype have fallen dark, and only blood can renew them. We’ve been right on the cusp of Ignacio Bahamondes: Lightweight Contender a couple times, now, but every time he’s reached his entrance exam, he’s failed. Back in 2023 it was Ľudovít Klein proving Bahamondes wasn’t quite ready for the top ten; this past June, it was Rafael Fiziev proving more than half a foot in size just isn’t enough to overcome getting repeatedly kicked in the legs and body. Tofiq Musayev was one of the precious few international prospects left in the sport when the UFC picked him up last year, a former Lightweight champion out in Rizin with a penchant for knocking out almost everyone he beat, and even though the implosion of Bellator left him in the lurch for a year and a half, the UFC still values punchmen who punch. They gleefully signed him and had him debut on that same aforementioned card where Ignacio got Fizieved, being as it was their big debut in Baku and Musayev is one of the precious few Azerbaijani fighters of note out there, and it made it real awkward when Myktybek Orolbai--who had also badly missed weight--ran right through him and ripped his shoulder apart in one round.

I’d love to see Musayev turn it around here and remind everyone why he mattered despite lacking the promotional engine of the UFC. I’m entirely unconvinced he’s going to be able to bully Ignacio the way he needs to for his gameplan to work. IGNACIO BAHAMONDES BY DECISION, but I’ll be rooting for Tofiq.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Chase Hooper (16-4-1) vs Lance Gibson Jr. (9-2)

If there is an ongoing theme of the failed hype machines threading through tonight’s event, never forget that men like Sage Northcutt and Chase Hooper crawled through the primordial ooze of getting signed to the UFC too young and badly astroturfed into prominence so Raul Rosas Jr. could run. Hooper was a proud child soldier in the combat sports wars, but after getting smashed repeatedly by his tougher peers the UFC decided to give him a two-year rebuilding program that saw him facing either grapplers with unthreatening striking, strikers who didn’t know how to grapple, or retirement circuit competitors like Clay Guida and Jim Miller. After five straight UFC victories they deemed Hooper ready to return to active duty against an actual peer again, and Alex Hernandez punched his face through his skull in one round. So now it’s Lance Gibson Jr.’s turn, because I don’t think the UFC knows why they hired him, either. Gibson was only 2 for his last 3 when the UFC hired him last year, and those two victories came over the 5-7 “Scrappy” RJ Hoyt and the truly impressive, 22-51 Charon “The Dreamcatcher” Spain, both of which happened at our beloved and somehow regularly-referenced MUCKLESHOOT FIGHT NIGHT, and that was enough for the UFC to not just sign him directly to the promotion, but give him a fight with the recently-ranked King Green. Shockingly, Gibson lost and accomplished almost nothing in the process, and now we get at least two more contractually obligated fights with him.

Generally-speaking, I really don’t have a lot of faith in Chase. He’s an extremely tricky, creative grappler and he has improved given how loose his striking used to be, but now as much as you’d want him to after nearly a decade. Chase dragging out another decision here is extremely likely. But I feel one of those almost-always-incorrect feelings about this fight, and I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul. LANCE GIBSON JR. BY DECISION.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Marcin Tybura (27-10, #8) vs Tyrell Fortune (17-3, NR)

Every week I say something about the ongoing humiliation ritual that is the fall of the Heavyweight division, and every week they find a way to make it either funnier, worse, or both, and this is definitively both. Marcin Tybura hits ten years in the UFC next month, and in the whole of that decade he’s never gotten close enough to sniff a shot at the title, but he’s been a perpetually reliable gatekeeper and he’s won far more than he’s lost. That, of course, means he is a liability, as he keeps beating people like Jhonata Diniz and Mick Parkin and Greg Hardy that they’d much rather make money off of. So despite being the #8-ranked man in the division, despite being one of their most reliable fighters, when Valter Walker pulled out of this fight with a leg injury, they decided to just put in Tyrell Fortune. Tyrell Fortune’s last year and a half of competition includes stellar victories over the 21-13 Myron “Lightskin Dynamite” Dennis, the 9-7 “Super” Demoreo Dennis, and journeyman of journeymen Tony “Kryptonite” Lopez, who is 65-34. The last time Tyrell scored a solid win was three years ago, and it was back when Bellator was still an independent organization, and it was a disqualification after Sergey Bilostenniy rabbit-punched him a dozen times, and they had a rematch a year later and Sergey tapped him out in two minutes.

Sergey Bilostenniy is in the PFL. Tyrell Fortune is here, and debuting directly into a top ten fight in the UFC. If Fortune wins, it will mean 30% of the top ten Heavyweights in the UFC have one victory in the company. There is no stupid joke I can make that is worse than our current reality. MARCIN TYBURA BY SUBMISSION.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Casey O’Neill (10-2, #12) vs Gabriella Fernandes (11-3, #14)

Your reward for paying attention enough to recognize Gabriella Fernandes is your regularly scheduled reminder that all of the rankings and matchmaking are made up. Macau hosted the UFC a year and a half ago and booked as many of their Chinese stars for the occasion as they could manage, and one of the foremost among them was Flyweight sensation Wang Cong, who was set up as almost a -1000 favorite to get coronated as the next big thing. Gabriella kicked her in the head, punched her to the floor and submitted her in two rounds. In the time since Cong has been booked three times, has never fought higher than #13, and is now ranked #11 on the back of her winning streak, and Gabi, the woman who choked her unconscious, has been booked once and is ranked beneath her. Casey O’Neill is 1 for her last 3, has only won one fight since 2022 and hasn’t won a ranked fight since, and is somehow still above Gabi.

There is no justice but the justice we make. GABRIELLA FERNANDES BY DECISION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Navajo Stirling (8-0) vs Bruno Lopes (14-2)

Every week the UFC reminds its audience that winning is no longer sufficient to succeed at sports and you must instead be an exciting knockout machine _{(unless management likes you)}, and Navajo Stirling is feeling this pinch. Navajo was brought into the the company just 15 months ago as a big new undefeated Light Heavyweight knockout artist, and they had enough faith in him to throw him straight onto main cards on road shows, and now, three fights later, he is all the way down at the bottom of the prelims. He has won all of those fights! But all of them went to a decision, and in the modern meta, that’s simply unacceptable. Sure, he’s good at fighting, and sure, Light Heavyweight is such a clusterfuck that Paulo Costa is about to debut in the division with a shot at the top ten, but going to a decision is a sin. Bruno Lopes is 1-1 and coming off getting knocked stupid by Dustin Jacoby in a hair under two minutes and these two fighters are, in the modern world, roughly equivalent.

NAVAJO STIRLING BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Ricky Simón (22-7) vs Adrian Yanez (17-6)

Ricky Simón, you, too, are forsaken. You knocked Javid Basharat the fuck out in a single round and they didn’t even let you off the prelims for it. You were sacrificed to Raoni Barcelos, who is now, himself, an avatar of the wronged, and now you’re almost curtain-jerking the prelims on a Joe Pyfer card against an Adrian Yanez that’s gone 1 for 3 in the last three and a half years. At one point, Yanez was one of the brightest prospects the Bantamweight division had to offer, thanks in no small part to his utter destruction of Tony Kelley, one of the sport’s more gladly forgotten racists. But Adrian’s appointment with the gatekeeper ended with Rob Font planting him in three minutes, and then Jonathan Martinez kicked his legs to pieces and Daniel Marcos nabbed a decision from him and Yanez’s only win in the modern age comes from a Vinicius Salvador who got cut immediately afterward for going 0-3.

RICKY SIMÓN BY TKO. Grow the mullet back out and you’ll be top ten again in no time.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Alexia Thainara (13-1, #13) vs Bruna Brasil (11-6-1, NR)

Sometimes I’m not sure what these write-ups should be anymore. The idea, four years ago, was to subvert the samey ‘here are some dudes and here’s who’s gonna win’ thing everyone else did by talking about the full story of a fight--the competitors, the promotion, the bias, all of the details both positive and negative. I’m not sure if any of that is useful now, because so much of it is just the same goddamn story over and over. One year ago nearly to the day, Molly McCann, for better or worse the most prominent British fighter in any of the women’s divisions in the UFC, retired in front of her hometown crowd. The UFC chose to have DWCS winner and promotional newcomer Alexia Thainara fill in on short notice, and, as happens so often in retirement fights, she choked McCann out with relative ease. To capitalize on Thainara’s defeat of a genuinely popular fighter on a big stage, the UFC booked her to curtain-jerk the prelims a few months later against Loma Lookboonmee, who was, herself, a ranked fighter on a four-fight winning streak inexplicably demoted to the bottom of the card. And now we’re here, again. How did we get here?

Well, you see, Nicole Caliari, who is on a two-fight losing streak, was supposed to be kicking off these prelims against promotional newcomer Carol Foro. But Caliari couldn’t make it, so she was replaced by Stephanie Luciano, who got a contract despite going to a draw on the Contender Series and has since gone 1-1. Then Foro tested positive for illegal diuretics, so they pulled her from the fight and replaced her with Alexia Thainara, at which point Stephanie Luciano pulled out citing previously unstated injuries, so they replaced Luciano with Bruna Brasil, who is unranked and coming off a loss but choked Thainara out almost six and a half years ago down in the Brazilian regionals.

And this is why so many of these write-ups turn into the literary equivalent of fart noises. Alexia Thainara is a good fighter. She’s outperformed ranked fighters and top contenders, and, hell, the last woman she beat was herself still riding high off beating Bruna. We talk about them not caring, but it’s not enough anymore to just say that they don’t care. It’s obvious that they don’t care. But Alexia Thainara is a ranked fighter on an eleven-fight winning streak and instead of saying ‘hey, maybe we should bump her up from the curtain-jerking prelim slot we’ve had her stuck in all year,’ they are treating her as so interchangeable that she serves the same purpose as a replacement for a replacement for a replacement who’s never fought in the UFC, and the best justification anyone can give for it is its nature as the rematch of a fight so dated it happened while Game of Thrones was still on television.

That’s what working your way through the UFC means now. It means listening to the company speak through one side of its mouth about meritocracy while the other books Joe Pyfer into the top five. It means watching the fanbase put the onus of promotion entirely on the roster while the professional promoters who run the company look at the woman they intentionally chose for a prominent competitor’s retirement bout, shrug, and do nothing with her, and that nothingness is the shared point of origin for most of these stories now, and we’re only a couple years of retirements away from that “most” becoming “all,” and after that I don’t know that we’ll have anything left to talk about.

ALEXIA THAINARA BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, MARCH 21 FROM THE 02 ARENA IN LONDON
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 10 AM PDT / 1 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 1 PM / 4 PM | EARLY START TIME WARNING

Is it me or can you feel the UFC caring progressively less about their trips to London? It wasn’t that long ago we had Leon Edwards defending the title at the O2, and then we had Sean Brady, and now we’re here, with a Michael Aswell Jr. co-main event.

Maybe it’d be different if they had some kind of popular British champion on their roster. That sure would be great.

MAIN EVENT: WITH THE UTMOST HESITANCE
FEATHERWEIGHT: Movsar Evloev (19-0, #1) vs Lerone Murphy (17-0-1, #3)

I’m not sure I have ever felt such unpleasantly divisive things about a fight as I do for this.

We’re crossing multiple years now that I’ve been calling for one or both of these men to get a shot at the Featherweight title. For once, I am resisting the urge to do a bunch of masturbatory self-quoting half because it feels unnecessary and half because there are so goddamn many options that I wouldn’t know where to start. The UFC misbooking Movsar Evloev is the story of his career. Khamzat Chimaev earned his way to a nine-fight winning streak by taking the Middleweight title from Dricus du Plessis. Ilia Topuria was already a champion after seven wins, and he’s riding his ninth into the main event at the White House against Justin Gaethje. Carlos Ulberg just notched his ninth straight win and he’s fighting Jiří Procházka for the undisputed title next month.

Last Summer, the UFC tried to celebrate Movsar Evloev’s nine-fight winning streak by matching him up against the debuting, unranked Aaron Pico.

Evloev is maybe the purest wrestler in the company. He can strike, and he’s even landed a nifty flying knee here and there, but his grappling is his strength and he does not try to hide it. He hasn’t notched a single finish in those nine UFC wins, and that is the sin that kills his prospects. That is why his ninth straight win ultimately came against one-fight Featherweight Aljamain Sterling midway through the prelims under Vicente Luque and Anthony Smith. That is why Diego Lopes, whom Movsar defeated, has had two Featherweight title shots in the time since Movsar’s last fight.

That is why the UFC wanted him to fight and preferably lose to Aaron Pico.

And when Evloev decided against it, fortunately, they had another undefeated guy on an enormous winning streak they didn’t particularly care for.

For fans who were around for the post-Conor McGregor era of the UFC, the treatment of folks like Leon Edwards and Lerone Murphy has been wild to watch. The United Kingdom was the market for the company, and in the wake of all of that fuck-you McGregor money the executive staff fell all over itself trying to ordain their next big British/Irish star. But somehow, despite Leon Edwards tearing his way through his division and proving himself a top-class fighter more than worthy of a title shot, he had to bite and scrape and struggle for the marketing that was happily devoted to a less-successful Darren Till. At a certain point Paul “The Irish Dragon” Felder was getting marketed harder as a star for the UK market than most of their UK talent, and Felder was born in fucking Philly.

The money vacuum needed filling, but guys like Edwards, for whatever reason, weren’t deemed acceptable enough for filling it.

Lerone Murphy, the undefeated top contender from Manchester, was one step behind Evloev at eight straight wins when the UFC told him, seeing as Movsar couldn’t make it, it would be great for is career if he fought Aaron Pico.

He’d already proven himself as a top contender. Those first few UFC fights were a touch shaky, and Murphy still got away with one by not losing his undefeated streak against Gabriel Santos, but he won, and he won consistently, and he won consistently against consistently better competition. When he beat Josh Emmett he cemented himself as a contender, particularly in a division with top ranks as troubled as Featherweight’s. It’s easy to forget now, but at the time things were in serious flux. Max Holloway was leaving for 155 pounds with Ilia Topuria and Brian Ortega hot on his heels. Yair Rodríguez was missing in action again thanks to the UFC bait-and-switching the idea of a title shot for him. Arnold Allen was out of contention and Diego Lopes had his shot and blew it.

Half of the top five was either failing or leaving altogether. The title picture was wide open and the UFC was blessed with two incredibly talented, undefeated fighters who had already justified their claims on contention.

But what if they fought Aaron Pico. If my repeated harping on this point is getting grating, I want to assure you that it is not half as grating as the UFC looking at their two most promising Featherweight contenders and deciding that they should try to get both of them to fight Aaron Pico. Aaron Pico was a good-but-not-great fighter from Bellator who never even brushed a title shot in Bellator. Even the greatest days of his hype as a prospect were five years behind him when the UFC signed him in 2025 and decided that he deserved a title eliminator.

That’s right! Aaron Pico vs Lerone Murphy was billed as a title eliminator. Like so many fighters before him, Lerone excitedly discussed how the UFC had promised him a title shot with a victory over Pico, and that motivation helped propel him to his first stoppage in years, as he clocked Pico in one round with a picture-perfect spinning elbow.

And like so many fighters before him, Lerone is now celebrating his title eliminator victory by fighting in another fight that has been promoted as a title eliminator while the championship opportunity he’d been promised went to a guy the UFC liked more.

I want to simply love this match-up. Combat sports are at their best when top fighters compete, and this is, unquestionably, the two best Featherweights outside of the title putting their cards on the table. But both of these guys should have already had their moment in the sun. Alexander Volkanovski himself asked to fight either of them and the UFC itself turned the idea down. They want as little of them in the title picture as possible. No matter how much I love the idea of the two best Featherweights competing in a truly well-rounded mixed martial arts contest at the top of the division, it’s impossible to not have a sour taste in the back of my mouth when I think about how this is being done not to elevate one man, but to remove one, as they’ve been trying so very hard to do for years.

Given the choice, though, they’d much, much rather it be Evloev taking the fall. Murphy may not be the trash-talking killing machine of their UK-marketing dreams, but he does throw strikes and he does, occasionally, finish a fight. Movsar has absolutely no qualms about grappling nor has he given any indication of changing his ways. He’ll wrestle until TKO’s entire c-suite finally gives up and lobbies congress to pass the Mark Coleman Act that despite its misleading name actually makes shooting takedowns illegal.

They might need to do it before Saturday, though. Lerone gets taken down a lot. Emmett and Pico both gave him fits with their wrestling en route to losing, and Movsar just outwrestled one of the best grapplers in the sport. MOVSAR EVLOEV BY DECISION while London drowns in boos.

CO-MAIN EVENT: JUMPING THE GUN
FEATHERWEIGHT: Luke Riley (12-0) vs Michael Aswell Jr. (11-3)

As a tribute to our British hosts, here’s an approximation of my reaction when this co-main event got announced.

Not to spoil the surprise for anyone, but Michael “Venom” Page is one fight down from here. Roman Dolidze vs Christian Leroy Duncan, a ranked fight, is down near the start of the main card. Mario Pinto, an undefeated Heavyweight on a two-fight knockout streak who lives in London, is on the prelims!

Remember what I was saying about how the company picks and chooses which UK talents it wants to emphasize? Well, here’s Luke Riley. He got to skip the Contender Series process every single other person has to go through these days and proceed directly to the major marketing machine because he ticks all of the boxes the company actually wants in its British prospects: Young, undefeated, knocks people out, doesn’t shoot takedowns, is noticeably whiter than all of the British people they for some reason choose to slow-rolltrains with Paddy Pimblett. For this, he got to debut right into a preliminary headliner against no less than the 1-1, coming-off-a-loss Bogdan Grad, whom he proceeded to get outwrestled by for an entire round before Grad chose to open the second round trading wild hooks, for which a grateful Riley flattened him in thirty seconds.

But, whatever, man. Bogdan Grad’s tough and Riley justified his place in the big show by knocking him out. So what’re we doing now? Who do we trust to give Riley his next step up in competition?

Michael Aswell Jr. That’s funny. I know that name. Why do I know that name?

Oh, right.

He’s the guy that lost to Bogdan Grad on the Contender Series.

But he lost so impressively that he got the call up to the UFC as a short-notice replacement guy a year later, where he promptly lost again against Bolaji Oki, who has, himself, mostly lost, and then Michael managed to finally score a win this past October against no less than Lucas Almeida who, at 2-4 in the UFC, has, himself, been primarily losing fights.

This is the other side of why it’s so hard to enjoy the main event. For every Movsar or Murphy that’s struggling to get noticed or even booked off the prelims there’s a Luke Riley who’s getting the full on-ramp. The act of experiencing unvarnished joy over the best of the best fighting one another is tainted by the awareness that most of the time the UFC has already picked a favorite, and when that favorite loses a round because of the demon that is wrestling, the answer is not to challenge him and see if he can grow as a fighter, but rather to find a guy who’s demonstrably worse than the guy he already beat, particularly if said guy is credited with 706 strikes and 0 takedown attempts in three fights.

I’m sure this will be fun. I’m sure it will be a great showpiece for their new British star. I’m sure I will complain about all of this again four months from now when they get Riley into the top fifteen by having him fight Josh Emmett on a four-fight losing streak. LUKE RILEY BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: GARBLED ENGLISH
WELTERWEIGHT: Michael Page (24-3, #13) vs Sam Patterson (14-2-1, NR)

What a bizarre choice this is, and what a bizarre run Michael “Venom” Page’s has had in the UFC. They brought him in as a big, hyped signing in 2024, making him one of the few people to escape the Bellator/PFL void with any hype remaining on their name, and proceeded to throw him right into the Welterweight mix. No gimme fights, just Kevin Holland and Ian Machado Garry. Page went 1-1 and earned a spot in the top fifteen; the UFC replied by deciding he was a Middleweight now, which meant it was time to fight the unranked Shara Magomedov, who exists only in an alternate reality where athletic commissions fear to tread, and Jared Cannonier, a top-ten contender. So you’re two years into the MVP-in-the-UFC arc, he can be credibly ranked in two weight classes at once, and both divisions are now bustling with new blood and exciting movement. Is it time to have Page challenge the tops of the rankings? Do you use him to try to reinvigorate an Anthony Hernandez? Do you have a battle of the fancy kicks against the inexplicably inactive Stephen Thompson?

Nope! Sam Patterson. Sam Patterson, who had to get knocked out in his debut before he could admit cutting weight enough to compete as a 6’3” Lightweight was a terrible idea. Sam Patterson, who is on a four-fight winning streak against guys whose UFC records combine to a truly incredible 5-10. Sam Patterson, who going into his half-dozenth fight in the company has yet to distinguish himself beyond a couple mostly-British people who upon hearing his name might scratch their heads and reply “Is he the tall guy?” You went to all of the trouble to pick up MVP, one of the few names with a Name, and you made him a credible two-division contender, and then you just plain ran the fuck out of ideas and stopped having fun with him because he wasn’t knocking people out anymore even though anyone who’s watched more than a Youtube highlight reel could tell you the MVP story is less about spinkicks and flying knees than it is a 20:1 feint-to-strike ratio and a lifetime of frustration.

You bought a boat and expected it to fly and now you have buyer’s remorse and you’re trying to take it out on the sport, and that might well be the closest you, the UFC executive wing, ever come to actually understanding the MMA fan experience. MICHAEL PAGE BY TKO.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Iwo Baraniewski (7-0) vs Austen Lane (13-7 (1))

I hope you didn’t think we were done complaining about the matchmaking this week, because that’s 80% of this card by volume. Iwo Baraniewski is a man who rode a record of victory over guys with 2-4 fights all the way to the UFC, and my friends, this is it. The future is here. We’ve arrived. They had a DWCS guy who’d fallen on hard times they wanted to get rid of named Ibo Aslan, they put him in the cage with Baraniewski, they had the kind of ninety-second punch-out that sprang fully-formed from the dreams of everyone who watched Toughman Contest boxing on their local sports affiliate at 1 in the morning back in the day, and now we have a new Light Heavyweight prospect who only barely beat a guy who mostly loses and no one will learn anything from any of these experiences.

The fact that Austen Lane is only a +300 underdog is a remarkable disrespect to ol’ Iwo. Lane is here to lose. Lane has been here to lose. This is not intended as a disrespect to the man, but is, instead, a sober look at his career and how they have chosen to use it. They had The Battle of the Guys Who Played Football back in 2018 and Lane came up second to Greg Hardy, but he nobly pressed on, returned to the contract mill and won his way into the UFC proper, at last, in 2023. Subsequently, he is 1-4 (1). He has been finished in every single loss. Mario Pinto knocked him completely dead two fights ago, and Pinto is on the prelims, but one fight later Lane was still on the main card so he could get crushed by Vitor Petrino as a newly-minted Light Heavyweight, and now, after two straight crushing losses, Lane is still on the main card against an undefeated guy who knocks everyone out.

They did this once before, and the big prospect’s name was Robelis Despaigne, and Lane ruined his life by suddenly turning into a one-night-only wrestler. I am begging him to do it again. Take this apple cart and chuck it in the fucking river. AUSTEN LANE BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Roman Dolidze (15-4, #11) vs Christian Leroy Duncan (13-2, NR)

Getting boxed out of contendership sure does suck, and this is not Roman Dolidze’s first time dealing with it. Roman’s always had a rough go of things as a sort of Paul Craig 2.0--kind of slow and unbalanced to the point of sometimes looking clumsy, but so god damned tough and unexpectedly creative in how he uses his grappling that you can’t ever really underestimate him--but he’s been perpetually iced out of the top ranks. He went on a tear in the early 2020s, but ran into Marvin Vettori and Nassourdine Imavov and ended up stuck on the outside of the Adesanya/Pereira era. He rattled off three wins in a single year, including a revenge victory over Vettori, only to get dominated and choked out by Anthony Hernandez, which, itself, has aged pretty unfortunately given how Hernandez had absolutely nothing for Sean Strickland. Once again, Dolidze is on the outside looking in, and that means he’s stuck playing gatekeeper.

Christian Leroy Duncan has made a couple runs at the gate, at this point. He stormed into the UFC as an undefeated Cage Warriors champion with a fair amount of hype, got matched up with the borderline-ranked Armen Petrosyan a few months later, and promptly lost. Management fed him a couple rehabilitative fights before tossing him in with the recently-knocked-out Gregory Rodrigues in the hopes of building a prospect out of the challenge, and they succeeded, but unfortunately for CLD it was Rodrigues who got the rub. So once again, Duncan is on a winning streak, and once again, the competition hasn’t exactly been the best, but he’s tightened up his striking and he’s gotten better at getting out of the clinch and he once knocked out Eryk Anders so I have to give him at least a little credit.

But once upon a time Roman did an STF in a real fight, and that’s enough to earn my loyalty for life. ROMAN DOLIDZE BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Kurtis Campbell (8-0) vs Danny Silva (10-2)

A lot of smart people have put a lot of smart money on Kurtis Campbell as a future force in the Featherweight division, and I’ll admit: I’m not sure if I’m sold yet. He’s had some impressive performances and solid finishes out in England, but they’re the kind of performances that come from the wonderful world of not really having to worry about defense. He’s good at catching people with kicks to keep them from settling, he’s good at hurling people to the ground, but he has a tendency to fight with his head straight and his guard wide, as you do when you’ve never had the experience of someone pasting you through it. He almost got his head ripped off for it by a Daniel Matusic right a couple years back, but the habit’s still there. Someone, someday, is going to exploit it.

I don’t think that someone will be Danny Silva. He’s tough, he’s athletic, he’s well-rounded, and he’s only barely been able to scrape by in the company. Most of his success still ultimately comes down to his wrestling, and just one fight ago we saw what a better counter-wrestler can do to him in the form of newly-ranked Kevin Vallejos outgrappling him for three rounds. If he manages to go full-throttle at Campbell and force him to fight and wrestle off his back foot he’s got a good chance of beating him on pressure and denial, but he’ll have to do it for fifteen minutes against someone who is, historically, a more successful wrestler.

It’s an undefeated, debuting British grappler against an American fighter coming off a wrestling-centric loss in London. You can do the math. KURTIS CAMPBELL BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: THE CONTINUING HUMILIATION OF THE HEAVYWEIGHT DIVISION BY THE COWARD HUNTER CAMPBELL
LIGHTWEIGHT: Mason Jones (17-2 (1)) vs Axel Sola (11-0-1)

The Mason Jones career arc continues to be weird as hell. Those with long memories (or anyone who has read these before, what with my need to constantly restate everything) will remember Jones coming into the UFC with a fair amount of hype as an undefeated Cage Warriors champ back in 2021 only to get released a year and a half later after going a truly stellar 1-2 (1) and, most damningly to management, failing to beat Ľudovít Klein. He went right back to Britain, he rattled off a few more wins, and the UFC called him back into the fold last year for a mission only he could handle: Beating Jeremy Stephens, who has lost several dozen fights and is at least seventy-three years old. Having conquered the man, they pushed Mason up to Bolaji Oki, who was 2-1 and had only barely survived Timmy Cuamba and tonight’s co-main eventer Michael Aswell Jr. Having defeated both of them and finally earned the first UFC winning streak of his life, there’s only one logical way for Mason’s career to go: Brand new prospect duty. We met to discuss Axel Sola’s first appearance back in September, when he walked into Paris as a French champion and received a hero’s welcome for knocking out Ireland’s Rhys McKee. Now the scales must be balanced as he comes to London to fight a guy from Wales, and fortunately, there has never been any historical enmity between Britain and Wales.

This is a tough ask for Jones. He’s very good and very well-rounded, but he’s also giving up a fair bit of size to a guy who shares his wrestle-boxing skillset. I’m still gonna go with MASON JONES BY DECISION, but this could get tight.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Nathaniel Wood (22-6) vs Losene Keita (16-1)

I spend enough time complaining about the UFC that I have to admit when I am being unfair, and sometimes, I put them in positions where they just can’t win. When they build out the roster with DWCS recruits, I complain that they’re ignoring the real talent pool in the wider world of combat sports. When they recruit talented outsiders, I complain that they’re booking them poorly. Losene Keita was one of the UFC’s best on-paper pickups, the kind of almost-undefeated knockout artist nerds like me put in the upper echelons of those “best fighters outside the UFC” lists that get republished on link aggregation websites next to clickbait headlines and pictures of Paige VanZant, and his debut against Patrício Pitbull last September was going to simultaneously test him against an all-time great and the border of the UFC’s rankings. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Keita blew his weight cut and Pitbull turned down the fight. It’s March, Keita’s been in bad-boy jail for half a year, and Nathaniel Wood has rifled off three wins in a row over competition just impressive enough to get him noticed but not enough to give him an in with the rankings, so he gets to welcome Keita back for take two on his debut.

Presuming Keita makes it to the fight, he’s got a real good chance of planting Nate the same way John Dodson did. LOSENE KEITA BY TKO.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Mario Pinto (11-0) vs Felipe Franco (10-1)

That’s right: It took this long to get to the Mario Pinto fight I complained about all the way back in the co-main event. At a time when the Heavyweight division is so hurting so badly that the #7 guy is 1-1 in the company and the #15 spot was briefly occupied by Tai Tuivasa last week despite being on a six-fight losing streak, the UFC has Mario Pinto, who is undefeated, on a knockout streak, bilingual, charismatic and an adopted son of London, and he’s down here. Funny story about that battle for the #15 spot, actually. When you look at the UFC’s event page, Mario Pinto is listed like this:

Is Mario Pinto the #15-ranked Heavyweight in the UFC? No. Has Mario Pinto ever been the #15-ranked Heavyweight in the UFC? Nope! But you know who has? Mick Parkin, the man Pinto was originally going to face here. Parkin lost his last fight, and before that his best victory was against Mohammed Usman. That got him ranked! Until they no longer needed that ranking as a way to hype him up for this fight. They didn’t even clear whatever backend data blob listed which competitor was ranked when they switched up the fight, they just moved Pinto to Parkin’s side and threw Felipe Franco in the other after he got short-notice signed thanks to his stellar victory over the 1-2 Douglas Felipe Santos down in Brazil last month.

This is why I harp on the UFC’s whole ‘this is an opportunity, you need to chase it and establish yourself’ bullshit line. Vitor Petrino lost repeatedly and got rewarded with main-card fights. Tallison Teixeira was crushed by Derrick Lewis and got rewarded with a shot at the most vulnerable part of the top fifteen, still just barely won, and will, shortly, be fighting for a spot in the top five. The UFC has put three men in front of Mario Pinto and he has knocked all of them out while cutting entertaining promos in multiple languages, and for his efforts he is stuck midway through the prelims, and the UFC didn’t even bother to clear the ranking text field they copy-pasted his name into, let alone get a picture of the guy he’s fighting.

Who knows. Maybe next time they’ll care. MARIO PINTO BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Mantas Kondratavičius (8-1) vs Antonio Trócoli (12-6 (1))

Antonio, my friend, I’m afraid this is the end. It’s been a long, unfortunate road through the UFC for Trócoli. He was supposed to join the company six years ago after his Contender Series win, but a steroid suspension pushed him back, and then he got injured, and then he got rebooked, and suddenly it’s 2024 and instead of a gentle path into the UFC he’s getting atomized by Shara Magomedov in Riyadh. And then Tresean Gore strangled him in a minute and a half. And then Mansur Abdul-Malik strangled him even faster. Once upon a time, an 0-3 prospect would’ve gotten a soft target so he had a chance at rehabilitating his hopes: Now the cycle must be served, so he’s got Mantas Kondratavičius, a knockout artist who just punched his way through DWCS back in September.

I’m sorry, Antonio. I hope three years from now we’re talking about you as the 205-pound champion of KSW or something. MANTAS KONDRATAVIČIUS BY TKO.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Louie Sutherland (10-4) vs Brando Peričić (5-1)

Speaking of the woes of Heavyweight, we have Louie Sutherland, who lost his PFL contract after going 1-2 with them and was last seen making his UFC debut by getting heel hooked by Valter Walker in under a minute and a half, and Brando Peričić, who walked into the UFC in September on the back of his incredible knockout victories over two 0-0 fighters in a row and defeated no less than Elisha “The Snack Panther” Ellison, who wasn’t good enough to win the Muckleshoot Fight Night Heavyweight Title, but is a UFC fighter. The fight ended when Ellison decided his best strategy was pulling guard on Brando, who is half a foot taller and about 21 pounds heavier than him, and was promptly punched into unconsciousness. Is it unfair to complain about the Heavyweight division when I also shit on the prospects in it?

When Vadim Nemkov, Denis Goltsov, Linton Vassell and Francis Ngannou are all fighting for other companies but Elisha Ellison has a home in the UFC: No. No, it is not. LOUIE SUTHERLAND BY TKO.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Shem Rock (12-2-1) vs Abdul-Kareem Al-Selwady (15-4)

And then, there was Shem Rock. Shem managed to build a bit of internet clout by being a) funny in Instagram videos, b) good at fighting and c) another Paddy Pimblett training partner, and last November it finally got him into the UFC, where he faced the undefeated and utterly unmarketed Nurullo Aliev. At the time I said Shem was good but going from barely scraping by journeymen in Germany to fighting undefeated grapplers in the UFC was a really big ask, and not only did Aliev beat him, he responded to Shem’s pre-fight trash talk about his one-dimensional nature by choosing to casually outstrike him. The punchline, of course, is that Shem is about to fight again and Aliev hasn’t been booked since. The UFC appears to agree that Nurullo may have been too tough, because Abdul-Kareem Al-Selwady being here at all is something of a surprise. He won his way through DWCS in mid-2023, he had one fight in March 2024, he got knocked out by Loik Radzhabov, and that’s it. Two straight years of getting injured and having people pull out of his fights and being unable to make it to Abu Dhabi, and after all that time, his return leads him to Paddy Pimblett’s non-union stunt double.

And I don’t know, man. Shem didn’t do so hot in his first run at things, but I’d pick Aliev to beat Al-Selwady, too. Moreover, it’s been two goddamn years. Everything’s a question mark when you’ve been gone for so long. I’m gonna go with my gut and say ABDUL-KAREEM AL-SELWADY BY DECISION but honestly, who knows.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Shanelle Dyer (6-1) vs Ravena Oliveira (7-3-1)

This was supposed to be a hyped debut. Those with particularly acute memories may remember Shanelle Dyer getting some real internet attention back in the Summer of 2024 after absolutely crushing Mariam Torchinava with a headkick out in PFL Europe--and if you do remember anything that happened on a PFL Europe card, congratulations, because the PFL sure doesn’t, as despite giving the PFL some of the only internet virality it’s managed to achieve they put Dyer deep in the prelims on their following card and quietly released her a year later. Dyer took her hype as an undefeated knockout artist to the Contender Series, where she, uh, lost a unanimous decision but got signed anyway. Ravena Oliveira does not have a happier story. She spent her whole career fighting people with 0-0 records or, even better, Simone da Silva, who has somehow managed to lose 33 straight fights between boxing and MMA in the last six years, and somehow that streak has still seen her wind up in the ring with people like Amanda Serrano and Cris Cyborg, because nothing is real. Shockingly, this resume has led to Ravena losing both of her UFC fights and getting picked up as a sizable underdog to hopefully get Dyer a hometown win.

May this run go better for you. SHANELLE DYER BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Melissa Mullins (7-2) vs Luana Carolina (11-5)

I can’t exactly do my ‘ranked women stuck on the prelims’ bit this week, but Melissa Mullins was ranked just one fight ago, so we’re gonna make up for it by pointing out how hilarious it is to have a card with big names like Felipe Franco and Austen Lane scattered across its breadth while the women’s fights are apologetically tucked away together right at the start of the card when they know the fewest people will be watching. As always: Fuck you, Women’s Bantamweight. You get nothing. Both of these women are, in fairness, pretty stuck in the mud. Mullins is 2-2 and alternates between looking like a really solid ground specialist and looking lost and tired, which isn’t aided by having just a 50/50 success rate at making weight for the division; Luana is 6-4, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realize she used to be a Flyweight until she, too, missed weight twice and had so much trouble with the cut that she gave it up for the 135-pound division, where she has fought only once and lost so badly one of the scorecards was 30-25. There was a point deduction in there, but there was also a 10-8 round that was just her getting thrown in a trash can for five minutes.

Luana’s better than she gets credit for, but if we get The Good Mullins she’ll get pretzeled on the ground. MELISSA MULLINS BY DECISION.

We recorded this when the fight announcements were still new and raw, as were we. We were so young, once, back at the end of February.

“Apartheid actually started off as a good idea in South Africa.”

“I am just so tired of the gay people’s rainbow flag colors [LGBTQ Pride Flag] being shoved down people’s throats.” (when talking about the gym’s colored stripes for social development in the kids class which is not anything to do with LGBTQIA+)

“I appreciate other people’s cultures, I don’t mind if that’s what they think. I just don’t see why they need to come here [a Western nation founded through colonialism].”

Folks, we have a bigotry issue in the jiu jitsu community. I know, I know, shocker. Really big shocker.

I wish those quotes were some random examples I made up on the spot but, unfortunately, these are comments I’ve personally had the displeasure of being forced to hear in my gym. Thankfully, they’re from only one specific black belt who is, also thankfully, not a coach.

When talking about jiu jitsu, there really is no other way of putting it than there is a longstanding issue with bigotry of all kinds existing. Be it sexism, racism, religion-based bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, and so on.

This sport, which has seen its spread across the world become more and more multicultural and multinational, simultaneously seems to invite some of the wildest bigots you will meet. Which makes very little sense since, well…let’s look at jiu jitsu in an objective and historically:

• Originally codified by a Japanese guy in the late 1800s.

• Was taught to a Scottish immigrant family in Brazil in the early 1900s.

• The sport was then exported to the United States, featured heavily in the first UFC which also saw multiple cultures, ethnicities, and ways of life displayed.

• Currently practiced on all six inhabited continents (idk maybe people in Antartica are doing it to pass the time*).

*Note from Carl: There was actually a guy running BJJ club at a station in Antarctica.

So, I hope you can see why I think it is genuinely stupid to consistently see bigotry on display by those who are, ostensibly, meant to be seen as “leaders” within the sport. And no, this is not just limited to social media influencers, high level athletes, or coaches. It applies to anyone who takes on a leadership role within any aspect of the sport, including being a black belt.

Today, we’re gonna talk about it because I’m sick of seeing it. I just wanna wear my cotton pajamas and throw or strangle people and have a good time with whoever shows up without having to hear why “(Insert Marginalized Group) are actually ruining society.”

Bigotry, A Very Stupid Thing

Look, I’m not going to sit here and explain how or why bigotry is bad. We all, as a collective society of apes living on this planet have agreed at a social, political, and cognitive level that bigotry is bad. It’s why we have laws that prohibit bigotry in place. On top of that, it’s an inherently stupid concept.

We know the focus of bigotry is to aim unwarranted hatred and animosity towards whatever group the person sees as “bad” or “unacceptable” based off a narrow and subjective world view. Typically we can see this in the form of race-based bigotry, but it does extend to other non-racially based group membership (eg. religion-based bigotry, gender-identity based bigotry, etc.).

Let’s first start with the concept of “race” as a means to differentiate between groups of people originated in medieval Europe and was then later used to justify further differentiating of outgroups. More notably, it is a product of the 15th century’s Iberian Reconquista where the alleged “impurity of blood” of non-Christians served as a means to justify expelling not only the Muslims but Jews as well, or at the very least convert them.

This in turn influenced how Christopher Columbus and his crew of Spanish bandits perceived and viewed the indigenous peoples of the Americas that they encountered. And again this applied to African people as debate came up on whether you could classify the non-Christians as actual people. If you’re already going “Jesus christ, that’s fucking disgusting” then congrats. You are probably not as on board with bigotry as some other folks around our community of jiu jitsu nerds.

Anyway, this would, as anyone who took a history class that actually was honest, help pave the way for the subsequent centuries of people, mostly white, finding rationale to exclude anyone who did not fit a specifically molded idea of what is an acceptable member of society.

And in practice, this simply will never end as it will essentially end up in a No True Scotsman scenario where everyone fails the purity tests because well…purity tests are dumb. If we base our societal standards on religious grounds, you kick out incredibly contributions made by the religious minorities. The same is said for literally any other form of bigotry aimed at cutting off sections of a society’s demographic make up.

There is, frankly, so much more to go into but for the time being I would highly recommend reading Lentin & Bargallie’s (2024) Key Concepts and Definitions for Building Racial Literacy to serve as a bit of a companion and to also help understand the many many forms of racism and ways they are expressed and applied.

The (Long) History of Bigotry in Jiu Jitsu

To save time we are going to start with everyone’s favorite globetrotting Japanese judoka, Mitsuyo Maeda. Sent out by both the Japanese government, and also Jigoro Kano himself, to promote Japan’s new entrance into the global society in the early 1900s, Maeda took with him not only the techniques of Kano but the social assumptions of a Japan that was deeply hierarchical and class-conscious. Throughout his travels through the United States, Europe, then to Cuba before ultimately arriving in Brazil, Maeda helped seed what would become jiu jitsu in the sense we discuss it today.

While explicit references to racial bigotry are not regularly present in the accounts from his travels, Maeda’s demonstrations nonetheless took place in social environments that were highly defined by rigid views of racial superiority, nationalism, and cultural competition. Martial arts challenges in this context were also used to not only provide entertainment, but double as assertions of cultural and ethnic dominance. These early cross-cultural encounters, which were simultaneously occurring with other ethnic groups in various sports such as black boxers competing in the USA, helped lay the foundation for later racialization. In particular for jiu jitsu this would become embedded in the social landscape of Brazil.

Following Maeda’s stint in Brazil teaching, among others, Carlos Gracie jiu jitsu developed within the Brazilian society that was stratified along racial and economic lines. Remember, the Gracies were a fairly affluent family at the time. Modern research into these early days shows that as Kano’s jiu jitsu began to be molded into “Gracie (aka Brazilian) jiu jitsu”, it was situated, implicitly, within the racial hierarchy of Brazil at the time. One that positioned “Brazilian jiu jitsu” as a “white” martial art especially through the explicit marketing of the Gracie family during their challenge matches against capoiera and judo practitioners in Brazil.

Although “Brazilian jiu jitsu” was promoted as egalitarian, its development within the Gracie’s academy reflected Brazil’s pervasive, yet unspoken, anti-Black and color-based social divisions. In more recent research and analysis of this early era of the sport, it has been noted that major schools in Brazil teaching “Brazilian jiu jitsu” intentionally, or even unintentionally, reinforced whitness as a marker of legitimacy and superiority within the sport despite simultaneously claiming that everyone is equal on the mats.

By the end of the 20th century and the explosion of the UFC, which again served as a means for the Gracie family to tout their superiority over others, “Brazilian jiu jitsu” had become a globalized sport. However, underlying issues of racial invisibility, structural, and systemic inequality persisted. In the 2020s, researchers have noted that many practitioners still describe the sport as one that is “democratic” (meaning it is open and equally accessible to all people) and racially neutral. Such sentiment exists even in settings where non-white athletes predominate yet still encounter subtle or systemic marginalization. This tension still remains.

Building Inclusive Settings

As mentioned, people within the sport really like to say, “On the mats, everyone is equal.” This is a beautifully worded idea on the surface. However, as both contemporary and historical research shows, this is not always reflected in real life. Jiu‑jitsu grew within societies with their own hierarchies, and some of those unspoken dynamics followed the art into its modern form. This is also not including the already existing bigotry that existed in nations and countries that the sport was later introduced to (eg. the USA). So when a high‑profile athlete or coach or even a local member of your gym posts online stuff that can be interpreted as racist it helps serve to remind us that the community has a long way to go to correct this disparity. So how can this be corrected? Well good news, it works the exact same way all other forms of stomping out bigotry work.

Call It Out

One of the biggest obstacles to addressing bigotry in jiu-jitsu is silence. In places like the US, UK, and Brazil, racism is often described as “invisible” precisely because people don’t talk about it openly. This is despite the reality that it clearly shapes social life beyond just the context of sports. In jiu-jitsu circles, this same quiet avoidance lets harmful behavior slide by unchallenged.

Coaches and gym owners can change this by simply acknowledging what research has already confirmed, that racism, colorism, and bias exists in our community. And when protests or political moments trigger openly racist commentary from well-known practitioners, the community shouldn’t quietly look away. It should call it out for what it is and allow people to identify those who are engaged in bigotry. A culture of honesty is the first step toward a culture of safety.

And we want our coaches, athletes, and participants in the sport to be honest people, right?

Set Clear and Public Standards

Recent scandals in the jiu‑jitsu world (even when not directly about bigotry) show what happens when hierarchies in gyms/academies go unchecked. Simply put that mindset of having such a strict hierarchical system allows for abuse to flourish and students feeling powerless to prevent being abused. In many cases, especially those that do not make much of a splash in the community, people just quietly leave the sport. It is only in rare instances that you may hear more about the situation and there being a wider discussion surrounding it. See: Andre Galvao’s accusations of grooming but you may not know much about any local instructors in your area doing the same.

In this day and age, an academy needs a system that is more than “trust the instructor” as a practice of standards. It needs at minimum:

• A written code of conduct

• Anti‑discrimination policies

• A confidential reporting system

• Consequences that apply even to black belts and leaders

All of which are things I spoke about in my previous piece. that can be implemented already. I even break down what the IBJJF, the leading governing body for the sport, could do to help. While I specifically talked about abuse by coaches/instructors in that piece, it can still apply to issues warranting punishment due to abuse caused by bigotry.

This breaks the “hero worship” mentality practitioners which I, again, have talked about previously.

More Voices Need to be at the Table

It’s also important to note that, based off existing research, “Brazilian jiu‑jitsu” was often positioned as a “white” practice within Brazil’s racialized social structure.

One of the most powerful ways to push back is to diversify leadership both within your local setting and within the upper echelons of the sport:

• Promote and encourage the advancement of individuals from underrepresented and historically excluded groups into leadership roles within the IBJJF (and local federations). This includes athletese who identify as female, identify LGBTQIA+, those from lower-income communities, those who are indigenous, and other marginalized groups within our Amerocentric/Eurocentric societies.

• Offer reduced rates or even, if possible, scholarships for underrepresented students from your community. Something Guardian Gym has done a fantastic job of for example.

• Amplify the experiences of people who’ve faced discrimination. Make their experiences known, and clearly outline how and why this should not be tolerated. We’ve already seen practitioners leave academies after leaders made racist comments, showing people will vote with their feet when given the chance.

These are, again, all things that are readily and somewhat easily available to local gym networks, federations, and even the IBJFF and similar multinational organizations. We see this in our sister sport of judo as well. So it is possible to do, and yet those in the sport who have positions of power have not done so yet.

Remember, representation isn’t purely symbolic. It’s structural change from within.

Make Education Part of the Culture

Most students can tell you when to invert or how to finish a bow‑and‑arrow choke, but very few can explain the contextual social history that shaped the sport. At best we get a highly glorified revision of history that puts the Gracie family as the main characters when, in reality, they were a small part.

By offering opportunities to share relevant articles and encouraging healthy discussions, gyms help practitioners understand why bigotry sometimes surfaces and, somewhat more importantly, how to recognize it and address it before it grows into something unwieldy.

Build Safer Spaces

Not all harm is “bigotry,” but bigotry thrives in the same environments that allow other misconduct to go unchallenged. The numerous examples recently within the sport highlight how easy it is for students to be silenced or dismissed when power dynamics are abused.

However, this is again not difficult to prevent happening. Measures can include:

• Not allowing people to be pressured into rolling with someone they don’t want to.

• Normalizing “no thanks” as a complete answer and leaving it there.

• Clearly discouraging sexualized, bigoted, or -phobic comments and boundary-pushing behavior. Even if its argued to “just be in good fun.”

• Designating trusted, trained points of contact for reporting concerns.

The Power of the Community Both On and Off the Mats

Sometimes the most meaningful accountability comes not from gym owners, but from the community itself. Online discussion platforms (Reddit, Threads, etc.) have become places where members of the jiu jitsu community have called out racism, shared experiences, and even distanced themselves from previously admired instructors.

This is good, and it is important to maintain. It signals that more than just the victim of bigoted comments do not condone nor do they support it.

Collective action is often what forces real change and not through the benevolence of just one person who happens to be in charge.

One More Thing…

Saying, “don’t politicize the sport” or “don’t take it so seriously” or anything similar to anyone who is calling out bigotry is not being neutral or helping in anyway.

You are actively allowing bigotry to continue, and are punishing the person who does not want any bigotry present.

Telling a bigot to shut the fuck up or to fuck off is not undue and unwarranted hatred. It’s a deliberate statement saying you’re not OK with racist, sexist, (insert word)-phobic behavior.

Something you’re entirely entitled to call out, and are highly encouraged to do.

SATURDAY, MARCH 14 FROM THE IRREPARABLE HOLE IN THE WORLD THAT IS THE APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PDT / 5 PM EDT | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

Sure does feel like things are turning a little bit, doesn’t it?

A huge fight for a bullshit belt that ended in beautiful, grapplocentric domination that everyone’s pissed about because the fanbase has been successfully trained to hate everything that isn’t fisticuffs. A White House card barely anyone wanted in the first place that has been hyped for a full year only to turn out to be a mandatory title defense, the fourth interim Heavyweight title match in the last four and a half years, and, of course, a Bo Nickal fight.

And now we’re in the Apex and our main event doesn’t even clear the top ten.

UFC, baby. We’ve never been more back.

MAIN EVENT: SQUEEZING THE ROCK
FEATHERWEIGHT: Josh Emmett (19-6, #11) vs Kevin Vallejos (17-1, #14)

I mean, honestly.

We’ve talked about the Apex as the beginning of the end of the sport for quite some time, but every year we underline the death sentence all over again. In 2020 and 2021? Completely understandable COVID precaution. Every year since? Spiraling doom. The death of meaning itself. Ordinarily this is where I’d go down memory lane and talk about the annual lowering of expectations, but we’re not measuring in years anymore, we’re down to weeks. Whatever complaints I am about to lodge regarding this fight are a fun little appetizer for three weeks from now, when we return to the Apex for no less than Renato Moicano vs Chris Duncan.

It’s a worse fight than this one! But it doesn’t feel as bad as this one does.

One of the phrases I have used so often I have come to kind of hate it is “value extraction,” but some of that hatred stems from having never really defined it. If fighters and their fortunes can be traditionally broken down into Champions, Contenders, Prospects, Gatekeepers, Journeymen and Jobbers, value extraction is the intentional process that demotes them down the line. It’s how you keep BJ Penn employed as he goes from one of the greatest fighters alive to competing midway through the prelims. You, as a promoter, spent so long cultivating his name, his brand, his worth, that the moment it seems like he’s on a downward slide the most profitable thing to do is impart as much of his remaining value to other fighters as you can, while you can. Do you have a realistic hope that a BJ Penn who failed to tackle Dennis Siver is going to do a damn thing to Ryan Hall? Of course not. Do you even think Ryan Hall, himself, is going to be a star? Probably not! But the remaining shreds of BJ’s credibility will live within Hall until Ilia Topuria releases them by smashing his face, and then the subatomic particles of the man who once took Georges St-Pierre to his limit will pay off for you one more time.

Josh Emmett wasn’t supposed to have much value to impart. Hell, as of 2019, he had largely been disposed of. He’d won but missed weight in his first-ever UFC co-main event, he’d come back three months later and (somewhat controversially) gotten knocked out by Jeremy Stephens, who was already something of a relic, it would be more than a year before he returned to the sport, and for most of the fanbase that seemed like the end of the Josh Emmett story. He was gritty and tough and had a fun, hard-knock style; he was also a 5’6” Featherweight entering his mid-thirties who seemed boxed out of the top ten.

Which made the resulting run to a title fight something no one really saw coming. Emmett was an underdog in damn near every fight he had, and it didn’t stop him from battering his way into the top five. And it was great! It’s always great to see a veteran of the sport defy expectations and punch their way out of a bad spot and back into main events. It’s always great to see someone get their laurels.

But in hindsight, those laurels were awfully spotty.

Michael Johnson is one of the most inconsistent fighters in MMA history. Mirsad Bektić was on the doorstep of retirement. Shane Burgos was about to hit his combat sports ceiling. Dan Ige is the most consistent doorman the Featherweight division has ever seen. Beating Calvin Kattar, though? That seemed like a really big deal. Kattar was a top contender, a man who’d only lost against the best, and even if it was a split decision involving some real screwy scoring, Emmett earned the biggest win of his career and his spot at the top.

Calvin Kattar proceeded to lose his next four straight fights and folks are talking about his career being over. Josh Emmett is only one step ahead of him.

Choked out by Yair Rodríguez. Outworked by Lerone Murphy. Caught a life-altering beating from Ilia Topuria. If you have observed that all three of those men have been cultivated as prospects by the UFC, you’ve caught onto the game. They wanted Emmett to help rehabilitate accomplished Hitler enthusiast Bryce Mitchell in the middle of that run, too, but in one of the rare moments of positivity in our godforsaken sport Emmett crushed him with one of the best one-punch knockouts we’ve ever gotten to enjoy with the whole of our hearts. But then that Murphy loss was followed by Youssef Zalal snatching Emmett’s arm in 98 seconds, and if getting knocked out by Jeremy Stephens in your mid-thirties made your future a hard sell, being 1 for 5 on the precipice of 42 is a whole lot worse.

It’s a long story, and it’s not the happiest story, but hell, it’s a story. Kevin Vallejos has been here for like five minutes and goddamn near every fight he’s had in the UFC has just been a different permutation of this one.

One of our most persistent punching bags in these write-ups has been Samurai Fight House, the Argentinian record-padding organization the UFC has been gleefully using as a feeder league for Latin-American talent because sourcing fighters from a company that cultivates them through constant squash matches is a feature and not a bug. This hasn’t changed in the past four years, for the record--their last card was headlined by the now 15-2 Omar Artega retaining his Super Featherweight championship against the now 4-2 Nicolas Jorge--and it was the case for Vallejos, who rode his way into the Contender Series on the back of a reign as the champion at both 140, 145 and 155 down there. (For the record: The 140-pound title fight was against a guy who was 1-5, the 145-pound title win came against a man who was 7-14, and the competition for his historic third weight class win was 6-4.)

Unfortunately for Vallejos, his DWCS competition was Jean Silva. It’s a credit to Kevin that he survived to the bell against the butcher, but he still lost the decision. So it was back to the Fight House, and back to beating people with no hope of defeating him, and after returning to the contract show for a second shot in 2024 and finding that now it, too, was willing to match him up with someone who only had half his experience, he won and sailed into UFC success.

Well, success of a sort. The same way we defined value extraction at the start of this essay, we can define prospect protection by looking at the way Kevin’s been booked. Did they book him against another prospect they had high hopes for? Of course not! He got Choi Seung-woo, who was 1 for his last 5 and coming off a knockout loss, which Vallejos dutifully added to with another first-round stoppage. After that? A step up to Danny Silva, who was an undefeated 2-0 in the UFC! Granted both fights were skin-of-his-teeth split decisions over people with negative UFC records, but hey, who’s counting. After that, though? Giga Chikadze, baby! The hottest title prospect of 2021! Who was, at the end of 2025, 1 for his last 4 and coming off two losses, a weight miss, and his thirty-seventh birthday. Vallejos knocked him dead in six and a half minutes.

One year. Kevin Vallejos has been in the UFC for one year, and he’s fighting for potential admission to the top ten, and--should he win--he’ll have beaten only one man who wasn’t or isn’t on a losing streak, and it’s Danny fucking Silva. That’s how you become a title prospect now. We never actually stopped touching base with Samurai Fight House. We didn’t need to. We’re slowly adapting its model instead.

Look, you do not need me to tell you Kevin is probably going to win this fight. He’s fast, he’s strong, he hits really fucking hard, he’s genuinely quite good at mixing up his striking techniques and, notably, he was born in this century. They know what they’re doing with this match-up and they’re almost certainly going to get what they want. But my fandom is at this point subsisting on spite and hope, so it’s JOSH EMMETT BY KO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: REVERSED PRIORITIES
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Amanda Lemos (15-5-1, #5) vs Gillian Robertson (16-8, #8)

Dateline, last April:

The UFC has been struggling to find Canadian talent for years. The last time the UFC had a Canadian card main-evented by an actual Canadian was Rory MacDonald all the way back in 2016. Gillian Robertson was born in Canada. There is a UFC pay-per-view in Canada next week. Presuming you believe in her chances you could have had Gillian Robertson, who has struggled for years to get noticed, beating a very visible top contender and finally getting the win that legitimizes her in front of a crowd of Quebecois sports fans who are currently feeling extremely fucking patriotic. There are, as of now, only eleven fights booked for that entire show.

We’re doing this again! Against all reason, we are doing this again. The UFC is making a trip to Winnipeg next month, and there are only eight fights booked thus far and they’re trying so hard to get Canadians on it that they honest-to-god rehired Tanner Boser, and here’s Gillian Robertson, Ontarian turned Floridian, fighting in the Apex.

In a top ten women’s match with a former world title contender.

Under a Kevin Vallejos fight.

The best part? This is an improvement. We were supposed to see this bout back in December for the final card of the year, and not only was that, too, in the Apex, it didn’t even qualify for the main card. Amanda Lemos and Gillian Robertson, either of whom could compete for the championship of their division after this fight, were going to meet in the preliminary headliner. Kevin Vallejos, Cezary Oleksiejczuk, Marcus Buchecha and Lance Gibson Jr. all qualified as main-card attractions, but #5-ranked former title contender Amanda Lemos and #8-ranked, four-fight-winning-streak-bearing Gillian Robertson were stuck on the prelims.

In the Apex.

You know, Mackenzie Dern is almost half a year into her title reign with nary a word about her first challenger. Valentina Shevchenko beat Zhang Weili four months ago and there’s no news about the future of Flyweight. Kayla Harrison went down for neck surgery and the same company that forced Jiří Procházka to abdicate his Light Heavyweight championship over a shoulder injury has simply shrugged and let Women’s Bantamweight continue to spin its wheels with no end in sight.

But hey: Women’s Strawweight is half the roster of The Ultimate Fighter 34 (jesus christ) featuring coaches To Be Announced vs To Be Announced (jesus christ), so I’m sure everything’s going to be just fine.

Anyway, they’re not putting any more effort into this match-up, so neither am I. Here’s a rerun of the writeup from when it was a prelim, which is mostly me complaining about the same shit I just spent several paragraphs complaining about.

I had someone tell me once that my persistent bitching about ranked women being stuck on the prelims was silly, because that could be a position of prominence. People need reasons to watch the prelims, and if you’re headlining the prelims, why, that means the UFC sees more in you than the people in random spots on the main card! Respectfully: This is backward as fuck. What this actually means is the UFC sees utility in you for them as an attraction just important enough to help the company fill out the part of the card the audience doesn’t want to watch, but not important enough to receive the benefit of actual promotion. As a case in point: Two fights ago, Amanda Lemos was on the main card of an Alex Pereira pay-per-view. And she won! As payment for her efforts, she and Tatiana Suarez got to fight midway through the prelims at this year’s Noche UFC. It was a fight between the #2 and #4-ranked women in the division. The prelim headliner was Duško Todorović vs José Medina. Amanda lost. For losing, she now gets to headline the prelims against Gillian Robertson. Gillian Robertson is on a four-fight winning streak that includes retiring Marina Rodriguez and Michelle fucking Waterson-Gomez, one of the best-known Strawweights in the world. It’s almost all been on the prelims, too. The UFC has been desperate for Canadian stars, and they held a show at Bell Centre in Montreal this past May, and instead of booking Gillian, maybe the most accomplished Canadian currently on the roster, to compete in her home country and get the promotional push that could make her a thing, they set her up on the previous week so she could fight on the prelims in Des Moines. But don’t worry: The preliminary headliner was a women’s fight!

It was Miesha Tate vs Yana Santos.

This shit is so tiresome. I’m aware I am ranting a lot more than I typically do, but goddammit, it’s the end of the year and there is so much that could have been done better. A couple months ago I would’ve been rabid for Gillian to win this fight just to see her get her shot at the top after Lemos failed to get it done against the top five, but now we’re in the bizarre position where the champion is someone Lemos very recently beat the stuffing out of. We’ve seen her repeatedly troubled by strong grapplers, so I’m still hoping for GILLIAN ROBERTSON BY DECISION, but at least there’s life at the top for Lemos now.

MAIN CARD: WOOF
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Oumar Sy (12-1) vs Ion Cuțelaba (19-11-1 (1))

And just like that, we are in the negative zone. The UFC lists 44 active fighters in their Light Heavyweight roster (technically 48, but their database is a mess that includes folks like Ryan Spann, the just-resigned Tanner Boser and the just-vacated Alex Pereira, all of whom are now Heavyweights, and, for some inane reason, Cub Swanson, who hasn’t even touched the Lightweight division in twenty years) right now, and of those 44 only 18 are currently coming off of a win, and of those 18, only 7 are currently ranked. Imagine being one of those eleven men, operating in arguably the thinnest Light Heavyweight division of all time, and your victory isn’t enough to get you a number by your name. Now imagine you’re Oumar Sy and a lot of folks thought you’d be a champion by now. Sy was supposed to excel. He was in the running to start challenging for regional titles at Heavyweight before he got the call up to the UFC as an undefeated man in a division of smaller, more vulnerable men. And it was all going well right up until last June, when his streak was snapped by Alonzo Menifield, the man who’s been knocked out in all three of his last losses and only barely eked out a split decision against no less than Julius “Juice Box” Walker. It’s one loss in thirteen fights, but being unable to beat Alonzo Menifield circa 2025 is a really, really hard thing to battle back from.

Which is why he has Ion Cuțelaba. In the land of the quickly-cut, Cuțelaba is king. We have just three months before we hit a decade of Ion in the UFC. This is his twentieth fight with the company. And in all that time, across all that mileage, his longest winning streak is two fights--and he’s only done it twice. He has no ranking, he has no cache, he simply Is. Once upon a time he was a reliable berserker that would either run opponents into the ground and butcher them in minutes or die trying, and now, in his ancient dotage as a man of thirty-two, he has learned, and adjusted, and matured, which is how he now loses split decisions to Modestas Bukauskas and only barely squeaks by Ivan Erslan. He is the gatekeeper the 205-pound division deserves. He is here to shoot vague takedowns and maybe throw some hooks, but these days, only if he feels like it, and if you can beat him, it means you’re either ready for the top fifteen, if you’re a Johnny Walker, or the UFC is going to cut you, if you’re Philipe Lins.

OUMAR SY BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Andre Fili (25-12 (1)) vs Jose Delgado (10-2)

If Ion is a spirit of constancy, Andre Fili is its living extreme. We’re closing in on year thirteen of Fili’s time here, but more importantly, we’re going on our seventh straight calendar marked by Fili never, ever getting back-to-back wins or losses. He refuses. He’s incapable. He would rather die than allow history to repeat itself. Which he came irritatingly close to, once, as a few years back Fili’s long career led to a brief hiatus after he suddenly lost vision in one eye thanks to, you know, all of the punching, but fortunately it’s perfectly fine and was never spoken of as a problem again because zero UFC fighters have ever suffered longterm consequences from not retiring after their eye got fucked.

Anyway, he’s here to lose. That’s the job. Jose Delgado is younger and cheaper and the UFC got dollar signs in their eyes after they saw him blast the legitimately decent Hyder Amil out of his gourd in twenty-six seconds last year. They threw Delgado on the annual money-making pay-per-view trip to Abu Dhabi and gave him Nathaniel Wood as a credible if still-rightfully-disfavored competitor to help Jose make it a bit closer to the top fifteen, but Wood ruined those plans by beating him. Is it a sign of favoritism that Delgado is fighting a known quantity with a recognizable name on a main card? Is it a sign of punishment that Wood, for his victory, is buried in the prelims next week fighting the debuting Losene Keita?

It is neither. Do not give more emotional importance to things than the matchmakers themselves did. You do not have to live in this tar pit with me. You can be free. JOSE DELGADO BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Marwan Rahiki (7-0) vs Harry Hardwick (13-4-1)

I mean...no. I can say no, right? I still have that option?

What are we doing here, man? Marwan Rahiki was just on the Contender Series in October, where he got nearly knocked the fuck out twice in one round by Ananias Mulumba, who got his shot at the show by defeating a man who is 10-12 with those victories all coming over fighters with no more than one win, and after Mulumba gassed out from beating the absolute shit out of Rahiki he got stopped in the second round, because 23 year-olds are better at recovering than you are. Harry Hardwick was supposed to be a big pickup last year, a Cage Warriors champion out of England who hadn’t lost a fight since 2020, and in one of the only times I have ever successfully looked smart in these write-ups I watched enough footage to say ‘it sure seems bad that this dude never moves his head or defends strikes’ and he proceeded to get completely destroyed by Kauê Fernandes in one round.

This is a UFC fight. This is a fight in the UFC. This isn’t even a random prelim, this is a main card UFC fight. The 0-0 guy who barely survived his DWCS appearance is fighting the 0-1 guy who had his legs smashed to bits by a man who couldn’t get past Marc Diakiese, and Charles Johnson and Chris Curtis and Brad Tavares and Bia Mesquita and even Eryk Anders are all stuck on the prelims. Do you have any idea how dire the matchmaking has to become for me to feel like the UFC is being unfair to Eryk Anders?

I don’t fucking care. I DON’T FUCKING CARE BY DECISION. Let’s say that means Harry Hardwick, I guess, but Jesus Christ, man. What are we even doing anymore?

HEAVYWEIGHT: Vitor Petrino (13-2, #15*) vs Steven Asplund (7-1, NR)

You know what’s especially fucking crazy? This is fine! After all of that, I think this is, somehow, an actually okay matchup.

Granted, we are grading on the curve of the current state of Heavyweight, because Vitor Petrino washed out of the Light Heavyweight division pretty hard. Getting choked out by pre-retirement Anthony Smith and flattened by Dustin Jacoby kills your title chances about as efficiently as anything possibly could. But the best base for mixed martial arts is saying ‘cutting weight is for chumps’ and simply moving up to a more natural division, and Heavyweight has treated Vitor very well. Are the people he beat particularly great? No! Austen Lane is 1 for 5 and is, himself, dropping to 205 in a desperate attempt to rescue his career, and Thomas Petersen got beat by Jamal god damned Pogues and it still took a third round for Petrino to get him out of there. But in today’s Heavyweight division, being able to simply throw effective punches past the six-minute mark is notable.

Throwing a bunch of punches is, coincidentally, also why Steven Asplund is here. He only made his UFC debut in December, and it sure wasn’t the quality of win that got him noticed--his opponent was Sean Sharaf, who is now 0-2 in the UFC, 4-2 overall, and 1-2 against people who have ever won more than one mixed martial arts bout. With respect to Sean, who works very hard and could beat up 99% of the people you know, besting him in a UFC fight is not that big of a deal. Beating him by throwing 292 strikes in eight and a half minutes? By the standards of the Heavyweight division, that’s an absolute miracle. Can he wrestle? Who knows. Does he have a chin? We haven’t had a chance to find out. But he can throw combinations for ten minutes without looking like he wants to keel over and die, and by god, that means he must be protected at all costs.

So don’t you dare ruin this for us, Vitor. STEVEN ASPLUND BY TKO.

*A NOTE FROM THE EDITING DESK: In the 48 hours between writing this and actually posting it the UFC updated its rankings, and now Vitor Petrino, who is on a two-fight winning streak, is no longer a ranked Heavyweight, and taking his place at #15 is Tai Tuivasa, who is on a six-fight losing streak that stretches back more than four years. Would it have been easier to just remove the ranking rather than writing all of this? Much. But then I would lose the chance to remind you that no matter how stupid the Heavyweight division is, we haven’t actually hit the bottom yet.

PRELIMS: MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
FLYWEIGHT: Charles Johnson (18-8, #14) vs Bruno Silva (15-7-2 (1), #15)

Let’s go back two weeks to when the UFC suddenly needed a Flyweight in their main event.

Hell, a multitude of Flyweights campaigned for this fight, but no one more visibly than the #13-ranked Charles Johnson. Sure, he just got knocked out by an overweight Alex Perez, but he still privately and publicly threw his hat in the ring and begged for the opportunity. After all, new champion Joshua Van only has one loss in the UFC, and it came from Charles Johnson flattening him. He’s always had the ability. Despite my lifelong InnerG fandom I thought it was a terrible idea the UFC should turn down, because booking people to fight just four weeks after they got knocked out is a terrible idea.

And then they booked Johnson for a random Apex bout with Bruno Silva two weeks from now, and announced Bruno Silva’s original opponent Lone’er Kavanagh was taking the Moreno fight instead. Lone’er Kavanagh, who is coming off of not just the first loss of his career, but a knockout loss.

Against Charles Johnson.

It’s a perfect storm for everything the UFC loves and everything I hate. Charles Johnson got dropped three times in three minutes and punched out so hard he did a Ric Flair faceplant and then tried to rush across the cage to simultaneously shoot a very wobbly double and escape the referee tendering his condolences on the official end of his hopes as a prospect, and now he’s fighting laterally through the rankings with no hope of ascension just forty-nine days after earning his latest concussion, and Joshua Van, whom he destroyed, is the world champion, and Lone’er Kavanagh, whom he destroyed, is the #6-ranked Flyweight in the world.

There’s this urge to think of combat as the great equalizer of sports. Teams will always have weak links, balls are influenced by the wind; two people fighting is the most honest competition of skill possible. But every fight is an opportunity, and when you roll the dice enough times, Things Happen. Uriah Hall spinkicks Gegard Mousasi. Matt Serra knocks out Georges St-Pierre. Kazuyuki Fujita almost punches Fedor Emelianenko’s head into the fourth row. Every match-up you see is an explicit choice, just like having guys fight within a month and a half of a knockout loss is a choice.

I am hoping it does not pay off for them, because it’s gross as hell. CHARLES JOHNSON BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Brad Tavares (21-11) vs Eryk Anders (17-9 (1))

A few years ago I watched/re-watched The X-Files. I loved it as a kid, as did so many nerds, but like them I, too, fell off it around the time David Duchovny decided to dip, and that led to the remarkably strange experience of the uncanny, familiar-yet-new excavation of a thing from my ancient past I had not, in fact, seen as much of as I thought. More importantly, though: I had never seen Millennium, and in preparation for the crossover episode that had gone entirely over my head as a child, I had to fix that. It was the occult horror mystery companion piece to the alien conspiracies of the X-Files, and for two seasons it’s an uneven but persistently interesting romp where Lance Henriksen looks confused all of the time. The bit that stuck with me most comes from the second season’s finale, which sets aside a full 10% of its runtime for a character’s lengthy, wordless mental breakdown as depicted through psychedelic visions of apocalypses both personal, global and galactic across all 9:36 of “Land” by Patti Smith. It’s brave and weird and there is very little like it in the history of television. And then the third season retools the show to be easier and more marketable and the ratings collapse and it gets cancelled and all you’re left with is lost media you have to find on the Internet Archive because it didn’t leave enough of an impression for Fox to figure out how to stream it legally.

“Oh, Carl,” you say, “I see what you’re doing. Referencing unearthed pieces of the otherwise well-trod past is just an oblique commentary on how crazy it is that Eryk Anders and Brad Tavares have dozens of UFC fights stretching back decades and somehow, they’ve never fought each other. Bringing up the ultimate failure of Millennium is just an analogy for how both men failed to ever really taste relevance in the grand scheme of their division. And focusing on the breakdown scene is just another way to make your usual joke about what Eryk Anders fights do to your brain!”

To which I say: No, man. I’m just talking about things I would rather think about than the twentieth Eryk Anders fight of my life. BRAD TAVARES BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Chris Curtis (32-12 (1)) vs Myktybek Orolbai (15-2-1)

I’m not sure there’s a single fight booked this year that emphasizes how thin the margins are in MMA sport like this one. Two years ago Chris Curtis was a single point on a scorecard away from taking a split decision over Brendan Allen, the #6-ranked Middleweight in the company; one fight later Curtis was one second away from potentially winning a ranked decision when he got called out on a walk-off TKO that he is still deeply upset about. Two years ago, Myktybek Orolbai was eating his first UFC loss against Mateusz Rębecki, and in response he essentially gave up on the cut to the Lightweight division and moved up to Welterweight, where he took on Jack Hermansson, a man who’s derailed numerous Middleweight prospects--including Chris Curtis!--and knocked him cold in one round. In exchange for almost-but-not-quite reaching Middleweight greatness, Chris Curtis is now a struggling Welterweight, and in exchange for destroying Middleweight’s great gatekeeper, Myktybek Orolbai is a former Lightweight in search of heavier ground under his feet.

Curtis beat Max Griffin the last time we saw him, but as is so often the case he only barely managed it, and I’m not sure his meditative style is going to play well against Orolbai’s ability to push the pace. MYKTYBEK OROLBAI BY DECISION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Bolaji Oki (10-3) vs Manoel Sousa (13-1)

Let’s indulge in a series of fun facts. Bolaji Oki is 2-2 in the UFC, and of the two men he beat, Timmy Cuamba is closing in on being borderline-ranked thanks to a well-booked winning streak and Michael Aswell Jr, whom Oki beat fairly handily last May, is in the co-main event of next week’s card in London. Manoel Sousa is the only man to ever knock out Mauricio Ruffy, and Sousa’s only career loss came against Archie Colgan, the #3-ranked Lightweight in the Professional Fighters League. Both of these men are legitimate talents who could have had very long reigns on the regional scene and I guess I can’t blame them for picking the UFC instead, but it sure is a bummer to see their contemporaries about to main-event shows while they’re here in the Apex on the prelims.

Oki’s shown a persistent issue with fatiguing as fights go on and I don’t think he’ll be able to get away with it against Sousa, especially after watching Mason Jones crush him last time out. MANOEL SOUSA BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Luan Lacerda (13-3) vs Hecher Sosa (14-1)

I said “every match-up you see is an explicit choice” a few paragraphs back, but sometimes that choice is just the choice to kind of shrug. The UFC had hopes that Rinya Nakamura could be a contender at Bantamweight, and then Muin Gafurov went and ruined that for him and they’ve been playing catch-up ever since. Luan was here to continue the Rinya rehabilitation tour, because Luan is notable for losing to everyone he fights that the UFC sees anything in, but Rinya couldn’t make it. There are ninety-ish other Bantamweights on the roster, but they aren’t brand new Contender Series winners, so come on down, Hecher Sosa, the UFC wants you to win. Hecher’s is the same goddamn DWCS story I have told you a thousand times, right down to the regional title (in his native Spain!) in a promotion with a name so masculinized it’s unintentionally silly (THE WAY OF WARRIOR FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIPS!) that books people who really shouldn’t be there (Hecher’s last fight before DWCS was a title defense against Yaman Mjahed, who had 3 professional fights and is now 3-2). He beat Mackson Lee to win his contract, and if you needed to ask if Mackson had the same exact story, it means there is hope in your heart not yet crushed, and you should hold onto it as tightly as you can.

I don’t think Luan is as bad as they think he is and I like Hecher’s commitment to his wrestling offense, but he really likes to throw himself headfirst into things in ways that make me worry he’ll inevitably get caught. LUAN LACERDA BY SUBMISSION.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Bia Mesquita (6-0) vs Montse Rendon (7-1)

When Bia Mesquita popped into the UFC five months ago I expressed a mixture of hope and concern about her future. The second she entered Women’s Bantamweight she became its greatest grappler, as a multiple-time world champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but she also became its second-smallest fighter at 5’4”, and eventually, that’s the kind of thing that starts to matter. I was also pretty sure Irina Alekseeva wasn’t going to be the woman to make her regret it, and unsurprisingly, Bia choked her out in two rounds. The UFC wants her to take care of one of their problem areas next. Montse Rendon represents a confluence of issues for the company: She doesn’t appear to be up to the task of rising into contendership, but she’s too solid to be trusted to lose, and worst of all, every fight of her professional career, win or lose, has gone to a decision. She’s their greatest fear, and she must be eliminated.

Bia has the chops to end that streak and finally submit Rendon, but it’s a lot funnier if she doesn’t. BIA MESQUITA BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Elijah Smith (9-1) vs SuYoung You (16-3 (2))

Last week we wrote about SuYoung You, and how he beat Xiao Long and got stuck here while Xiao got a fight with former world champion Cody Garbrandt in a preliminary headliner, and if that was funny seven days ago, it is hilarious after Xiao essentially won the fight only to still lose on point deductions thanks to his crippling addiction to hitting men named Cody in the testicles. So now it’s You, with his 3-0 run in the UFC, against Elijah Smith, who was last seen re-enacting Quinton Jackson vs Ricardo Arona by powerbombing Toshiomi Kazama into unconsciousness as a quick way to escape a triangle choke. I know we complain about the UFC having completely lost the plot when it comes to actually marketing fighters, and that’s obviously true for You here, too, but it’s really underlined by the fact that Elijah Smith is everything they want--young, cheap, tons of finishes--and he just scored the kind of knockout so rare and violent that most longterm MMA fans can still only remember one or two of them, ever, and to capitalize on that success he is here, two fights into the prelims of an Apex card with a barely-top-fifteen headliner.

Things could be better, man. SUYOUNG YOU BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Piera Rodriguez (11-2) vs Sam Hughes (11-6)

There was a point at which I wasn’t sure if we’d see Piera Rodriguez in the UFC ever again, and on one hand she’s on a two-fight winning streak, so that’s proving me wrong, and on the other hand she’s on a two-fight winning streak and still curtain-jerking the Apex in a rematch with a woman she just beat four fights ago, so she may not, in fact, have survived that bus crash. Piera had the makings of an actual prospect after that 2022 win over Sam Hughes, and then she got her arm yanked off by Gillian Robertson and followed it up with the exceptionally rare, thoroughly-deserved disqualification loss after intentionally headbutting Ariane Carnelossi, being warned by the referee to not do it again, and immediately doing it again. She’s back to winning, thanks to the misfortunes of Josefine Knutsson and Ketlen Souza, but the fact that she’s here means the company still clearly doesn’t quite know what to do with her. That’s preferable to being stuck in the Sam Hughes position, which is more or less permanent enhancement talent. Sam was 3-4 in the company when they booked her against the undefeated Victoria Dudakova, and when Sam upset the odds and came away with a decision they kept her stuck in the prelims against Stephanie Luciano, a woman they only initially signed in the hopes that she would lose to Shauna Bannon, and after Sam beat her, too, they just booked Sam against Shauna Bannon. They are perpetually hoping she will lose, and giving her a rematch with a woman who already defeated her would indicate this has not changed.

So you know what I’m gonna say. SAM HUGHES BY DECISION.

SATURDAY, MARCH 7 FROM THE T-MOBILE ARENA IN LAS VEGAS
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

(For the record, if you think my poster is overwrought you should look up the real one, which features the BMF title branding no less than three times on one page, including the main subject of the poster itself being the letters BMF with Max and Charles awkwardly shoved into them.)

There’s a lot to enjoy about this card. One of the greatest main events in UFC history! A big Middleweight prospect showdown! Drew Dober! Robocop is going to save us all! But there’s this really big stain that hangs over the show, and it drips more and more as you go down it, and I just can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

MAIN EVENT: LEGACY
LIGHTWEIGHT: Max Holloway (27-8, #4) vs Charles Oliveira (36-11 (1), #3)

There is only one way they could make me have even a moment of pause about this fight, and by god, they found it.

Because this is easily one of the single best fights the UFC is capable of promoting right now. Divisional importance, fan investment, personal legacy, outright action potential--it is a grand slam of a match and you only get a couple of those a year, and even by that very high bar, this is a standout.

When Max Holloway and Charles Oliveira fought for the first time, casual fans still existed. Normal people with varied interests would tune into the UFC by reputation alone. Barack Obama was still in office. And even then, damn near eleven years ago, the fight was a big deal. Max was a huge young Featherweight prospect who’d rattled off six straight wins since a decision loss to some dude named Conor McGregor who only had one fight with the company; Charles Oliveira was a former prospect who’d come out of the worst stretch of his career, taken almost a year off, and returned to a four-fight streak that made him look better than ever.

All eyes may have been on McGregor, but in 2015 Holloway/Oliveira was already a main event. Everyone knew it would be a great fight. Everyone knew it would crown a new contender. I went to an honest to god Buffalo Wild Wings with a couple friends who didn’t really watch the UFC but knew, reputationally, that it was a big deal.

And then the fight ended in ninety-nine seconds, and as it turns out, people still don’t really know why.

Oliveira comes out kicking, Holloway punches him a few times, Oliveira rushes for a takedown only for Holloway to spin him to the ground and walk away, and just as quickly as Oliveira stands up he finds himself sinking back down again, falling into the cage and folding to the mat with one hand clutching the side of his throat. The UFC reported it as a micro-tear in his esophagus, but Charles spoke with the New York Post in the press for this coming event, which we will gently forgive him for, and the story was a bit murkier:

Yeah, it really wasn’t exactly that. I lost movement on my left side in there, in the fight, and I think a lot of people didn’t know how to explain what it was so they talked about the esophagus and all of that. But the reality of it, it was an injury to my neck. There were talks that I could have been paralyzed because of that. But the reality of it was I lost movement on my left side. (...) It was no joke. I was told that in the ambulance, the guys were trying to put an IV in my arm, and I wouldn’t even feel it because I couldn’t feel my left side, so I was scared my career was over in that moment.

In case you were wondering: No, shockingly, the UFC did not ever clarify what really happened. I can name all of the UFC champions in every weight class in order, I can tell you about streaming Pride events in the dark ages, I remember the smell of the UFC VHS tapes I rented from Blockbuster Video, but were it not for my need to obsessively research before I write I would’ve incorrectly told you one of the most-anticipated fights of 2015 ended with an esophageal tear because the UFC never disclosed what actually happened.

Thankfully, what actually happened since 2015 has, for both men, been mostly-unadulterated success. Charles Oliveira went through another couple years of perdition, he dropped most of his next fights, and then in mid-2018 he decided to simply stop losing and be one of the best Lightweights in the history of the sport. He won eleven straight fights, he finished damn near all of them, and in the best year of his entire career he won the UFC title by knocking out Michael Chandler, defended it by choking out Dustin Poirier, and smashed through Justin Gaethje, which is forgotten in the drama of his losing his belt on the scale over a half-pound weight miss.

And Max? That weird win over Oliveira was the midpoint of a 13-fight streak that culminated in his becoming one of the best fighters of an entire generation. He trashed José Aldo twice in a row, man. He taught Brian Ortega how to block punches in mid-fight. In the vacuum left by McGregor’s disappearance Holloway became a star of the sport, and he probably would’ve racked up another title defense had he not tried his hand at Lightweight and faltered instead. And then he had the misfortune of running into the actual greatest Featherweight of the generation, Alexander Volkanovski, who managed to beat him three times and send him down the road that led back to 155 pounds.

All of it has been amazing to watch, and I cannot help feeling that just recounting it does both men a disservice by insufficiently explaining just how amazing they’ve both been. Sports careers are painfully short, and rarely moreso than in combat sports. Georges St-Pierre’s run as the greatest mixed martial artist on the planet was only six years long, and by the end of those six years he was barely holding on. Anderson Silva’s sport-defining title reign ended a few months before that, and the rest of his time in mixed martial arts was a slow-motion tragedy. José Aldo was only a UFC champion for five years and his career afterwards was one of constant struggle. Ronda Rousey’s days on top only barely made it past the three-year mark. Renan Barão won twenty-two fights in a row, got knocked out, and never managed back-to-back wins again. The space between “T.J. Dillashaw, top-class world champion” and “T.J. Dillashaw, man whose arm keeps falling out of its socket” was just three fights.

MMA is cruel. It eats the body, it eats the heart, and in the vast majority of cases, once you fall off the mountain, you never climb back up. There are too many other hands clawing at you for your worn-out fingers to keep you alive.

But in 2015 the UFC put on a top five fight between Max Holloway and Charles Oliveira, and eleven years later only 3 out of the 22 other fighters from that event are still actively participating in MMA at all, and Max and Charles are still in the top five, arguably better than they’ve ever been, and a hair’s breadth away from another crack at a world championship.

It’s an insane achievement. It’s an incredible rematch. It’s incredibly important to the future of the Lightweight division.

So how am I still, somehow, annoyed about it?

If you look closely at the header for this fight and you, like me, are a giant fucking weirdo about fine detail, you may have already noticed it. The UFC always bills their fights in order: Higher rank first, lower rank last. For once, you will notice, this isn’t the case. Max Holloway, #4, in pole position; Charles Oliveira, #3, behind him. This is because I am lying to you a teensy bit. The UFC isn’t promoting the #4 guy in the front spot, they’re doing something much more annoying.

Six and a half years ago the UFC accepted that it was never going to be able to get a belt on Jorge Masvidal or Nate Diaz, so they invented a fake one and they called it the Bad Motherfucker Championship, because you can only fight for it if you’re a Bad Motherfucker, and then they promptly started calling it the BMF Title instead because swearing makes advertisers unhappy and nothing makes you a bad motherfucker like going ‘oh you know what it means tee hee’ because you’re afraid Budweiser will get mad at you if someone cusses while standing on their logo. It was an aggressively silly idea that existed solely to trick fans into thinking fights were more important than they actually were and/or to help try to sell The Rock’s terrible shoes, but as a one-time gag, the sport has seen worse. Jorge won, the belt wasn’t really brought up afterward because I guess Kamaru Usman knocking him dead doesn’t make him a bad enough motherfucker to wear the PG-13 world championship, and then Jorge retired and we all agreed to forget it ever happened.

Except the UFC brought it back, because guess what, losers, we didn’t market this stupid bullshit just to give up on it. No, this is now a defended, UFC-ordained, totally legitimate championship, to the point that rather than billing Max Holloway as the #4-ranked man in one of the best weight classes in the history of mixed martial arts, it is more important to make sure you know he’s the defending champion of badly fucking mothers.

This is also the one and only way to make the triangle of madness at the top of the Lightweight division even sillier. At the end of this fight there will be four men atop the rankings, and situationally, it will break down like this:

• Ilia Topuria, who owns the undisputed Lightweight championship, knocked out Max Holloway just two fights ago, and wants to drop the title to go fight Islam Makhachev instead

• Justin Gaethje, who owns the interim Lightweight championship and is thus required to be next in line for the big boy belt despite having been submitted by Oliveira and knocked out by Max within his last six fights

• Either Max Holloway or Charles Oliveira, who will own the fake silver vanity belt that entitles them to nothing but a coupon for 10% off a pair of Toyo tires with the purchase of a second set of Toyo tires

• Arman Tsarukyan, the actual, undisputed #1 contender who already beat Oliveira and has been told he is in no uncertain terms getting anywhere near the belt anytime soon

That’s three championship belts among four fighters, and the fight for the fakest one of them is the most legitimate one booked this year because the guy holding the interim belt already got the shit kicked out of him by both of the people in it and the guy who should be fighting for the belt isn’t allowed to and meanwhile the guy who does have the real belt doesn’t fucking want it.

I die, here. I am killed by this. There is an absolute shower of riches at the top of the Lightweight division and every single person in it is right on the precipice of tipping into the end of their career, and instead of trying to maximize it they’ve been wasting it on repeatedly trying to get Arman out of the top five, or desperately attempting to get a world championship on Paddy Pimblett, or having two of the best fighters of all time compete for the right to wear a belt that sounds like a sixth-grader trying not to get in trouble with his parents, because even after they win there’s still no guarantee they’re going to get a title shot because Justin Gaethje’s next in line, and even he isn’t a sure thing because Ilia’s got his eyes set elsewhere, and Justin’s already said he’s retiring in the next year, so his next fight could easily be his last, and then the proud BMF champion is stuck fighting Benoît Saint Denis for the vacant world title.

Just kidding, it’ll be Paddy Pimblett again.

People have already chimed in and said you should simply ignore the bullshit and focus on the fun, but the problem is the bullshit is rapidly outpacing the fun. There are three title belts in the top four. The UFC used to very publicly pride itself on how its logical weight classes and well-deserved title fights made its championships more prestigious than the eight thousand belts of boxing, and now it’s 2026 and we’re here and buddy, it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.

I love this sport. I hate what this sport is. I love Charles and I hate that he gets repeatedly beaned by every single person he fights. Max is a better boxer than damn near all of them and he’s traditionally a lot harder to grapple. MAX HOLLOWAY BY TKO.

CO-MAIN EVENT: COLLAPSE
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Caio Borralho (17-2 (1), #7) vs Reinier de Ridder (21-3, #8)

If the story of the main event is the incredible achievement of staying vital as a contender across an entire generation of the sport, the story of our co-main event is the incredible achievement of becoming utterly overlooked in your athletic prime over a single loss.

Both of these guys were right there one goddamn fight ago. Caio Borralho had fourteen wins in a row, had never lost in the UFC, and was widely considered one of the most promising stars in the Middleweight division after outstriking former title contender Jared Cannonier. Reinier de Ridder was a two-division champion across the globe in ONE and rattled off four UFC victories in eight months, the last of them an incredibly tough split decision over former champion Robert Whittaker. The resumes were fantastic, the achievements were legitimate, and with their respective grappling chops both men were being widely discussed as potential title challengers for newly-crowned champion Khamzat Chimaev.

And then Caio Borralho flailed at Nassourdine Imavov for five rounds while looking progressively more lost on his feet.

And then Reinier de Ridder looked good for one round before Brendan Allen ate him alive and forced his corner to throw in the towel to save him.

And now they’re getting thrown against each other to see if one of them can be rehabilitated into contendership.

And in hindsight: You could kind of see it coming.

Caio Borralho has always been the kind of contender that makes you wonder about his ceiling. Strong technical grappling, solid chin; barely managed to scrape past Abus Magomedov. Great composure, solid cardio; even in victory got half of his face broken by Jared Cannonier. Getting completely flummoxed by a defensively sound guy like Nassourdine Imavov? Not actually that shocking.

Reinier’s fall was downright predictable, it was only shocking that Brendan Allen was the one who enjoyed it. Yes, Reinier was a double champion, but ONE’s weight classes barely exist, and his standup and stamina had both been consistent problems. As it turns out, if you are 6’4”, forcing yourself to cut almost 40 pounds five times in eleven months is a really bad idea, and someone you can’t abuse with your size and grappling can and will destroy your desiccated corpse.

All of which leads to this fight kind of making sense. Caio couldn’t handle Imavov’s striking defense: Outside of the clinch Reinier’s striking is the least dangerous part of his game. Reinier struggled with Allen’s aggression: Caio’s inability to dictate fight pace has been a persistent hole in his style. Will Borralho and the Fighting Nerds have come up with a better gameplan than the freeform-jazz nature of his last couple outings? Will Reinier de Ridder be in any better condition now that he’s had more than two and a half months between fight camps?

Is there any hope whatsoever that a fight between two really good grapplers could be a really good grappling match instead of a tepid kickboxing affair where Caio lands some extra jabs while Reinier repeatedly tries to clinch him so he can gangle some knees into his stomach?

Probably not. CAIO BORRALHO BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: FIAT
BANTAMWEIGHT: Rob Font (22-9, #13) vs Raul Rosas Jr. (11-1, NR)

They want this fight to happen so badly that, in a way, this is the third time they’ve tried to do it. Rob Font has kept the Bantamweight gate for a decade, allowing only the best and brightest to slip past him and into the upper echelons of the division, thanks to his powerful combination of crisp boxing, fantastic recovery, and a haircut that is perpetually somewhere between a mohawk, a pompadour and an early-oughts emo cut with no sign of clarity on the horizon. But if half the point of a gatekeeper is guarding against sub-par competition, the other half is existing to justify marketing’s favorite prospects. Last September, Rob Font was called upon to let David Martínez into the top ten in the hopes that Noche UFC 3 could give the world a new Mexican contender, and Font was dutifully beaten. But David was the second choice.

They wanted Raul Rosas Jr. They still want Raul Rosas Jr. He’s their child soldier in the marketing wars and they cannot let him fail. When he got absolutely mauled by Christian Rodriguez back in 2023 they had Raul back in the cage a few months later with Terrence Mitchell, a regional fighter from Alaska they’d picked up for lost-minute job duty, and after he got trounced in three minutes they realized he was perfect for making Raul look good again. If the UFC succeeds in getting him into the rankings with this fight they’ll have guided him to the top fifteen on the strength of a five-fight winning streak that includes only one fighter coming off a win, and that was Ricky Turcios thanks to his split decision over “Quicksand” Kevin Natividad, whom you do not remember because he got cut after going 0-3, nor do you likely remember Ricky, because the Rosas fight was his only one in almost two and a half years.

In fairness: They tried to book Raul against Rob back when he was on a whole two-fight winning streak! But they picked Rob for a reason: He gets taken down constantly. Cory Sandhagen and Deiveson Figueiredo both beat him with their wrestling, and Kyler Phillips and Jean Matsumoto came razor-close to doing it too. Wrestling is Raul’s ken. It is what he’s best at. He may have gotten outstruck 83 to 2 (to be clear that’s not a joke, it was 83 to 2) against Rodriguez, but that didn’t stop him from trying to take him down over and over and over. He never gave up on the wrestling. He can’t. It’s what he does. It’s who he is.

And it’s indicative of the UFC’s faith in his ability to do it that even though a win over Rob doesn’t get Raul into the top ten anymore they just rebooked this fight, because there’s a darned good chance anyone above him stuffs him and turns him into paste. For now, though? RAUL ROSAS JR. BY DECISION.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Drew Dober (28-15 (1)) vs Michael Johnson (24-19)

At a certain point there’s nowhere to go but the teeming morass of violence. Both of these men have been doing this since the dawn of time. Drew Dober is 37 and his first amateur fight happened one month before the UFC’s Lightweight Championship was reinstated after four and a half years spent lost in the void of combat. He fought on television networks that don’t exist anymore. The two best wins of Michael Johnson’s career were Tony Ferguson and Dustin Poirier, both of whom are now retired from mixed martial arts. The first non-exhibition appearance Michael Johnson had in UFC was twenty-two seasons of The Ultimate Fighter ago and half of the headlining fight on the event has been dead since 2022.

Their current states are immaterial. Drew Dober just got his first victory since 2023 and it was over Kyle Prepolec, who is now 0-4 in the UFC; Michael Johnson is on a three-fight winning streak that includes Daniel Zellhuber, whom the UFC was still trying to push just last weekend; their paths still led them to each other because that is all that is left. Drew has lost to too many contenders to be trusted with a run at the rankings despite his reliability as a knockout artist and Johnson has beaten too many desirable prospects to be trusted with any more careers they’d prefer to protect. The old guns must wipe each other from the map so the new can be fertilized by their bodies.

Johnson’s faster and longer and Drew likes to walk into punches, but I trust his hooks more than I trust Johnson’s reliability. DREW DOBER BY KO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Gregory Rodrigues (18-6, #13) vs Brunno Ferreira (15-2, #15)

The swings of matchmaking have taken a real toll on Gregory Rodrigues. Ol’ Robocop got a bunch of hype for being so absurdly durable that he knocked out Chidi Njokuani in 2022 despite having his supratrochlear artery hanging out of a hole in his face, and then Brunno Ferreira knocked him dead in a single round and the hype went away. After three winsi the UFC suddenly tried to jump Old Gregg from unranked to top ten with an abrupt main event against Jared Cannonier, but a promising start didn’t stop Rodrigues from getting crushed in the fourth round. But Rowdy Roddy Greggy knocked out Jack Hermansson--which is a lot better than Joe Pyfer did--and outfought Roman Kopylov, and got himself ranked the hard way. So he gets his shot at ascension, right? After all, again, he crushed the guy who beat Pyfer and Pyfer’s ranked below him and Pyfer’s fighting Israel fucking Adesanya at the end of the month, so they have big plans for Gregor Mandel, right?

Of course not! He gets a rematch with the lower-ranked guy who knocked him out. Which I can only mock so much because, in total fairness, Brunno Ferreira did absolutely knock him the fuck out. No one really remembers it because the now-missing Nursulton Ruziboev knocked Brunno out even faster in his next fight. Everything since then has been the very familiar story of the protected prospect. Brunno’s had six more fights, and exactly two of them were against fighters coming off wins in the UFC, and one of them, Abus Magomedov, strangled him violently. Most of the rest were on losing streaks. Hell, Brunno is only here in the rankings thanks to a decision over Marvin Vettori, who has one win in the last four and a half years. (Ferreira also dramatically blew his weight cut, but that only matters if they don’t like you.) He punches hard, he gets stoppages, and he came from the Contender Series, and that’s all that matters.

It is aggressively silly to pick Rodrigues here. We saw this fight. It was pretty definitive. I do not care. GREGORY RODRIGUES BY TKO.

PRELIMS: DEPRECIATION
BANTAMWEIGHT: Cody Garbrandt (14-7) vs Xiao Long (27-10)

They’re cashing in on you, Cody. Everyone knows the Cody Garbrandt story--the undefeated wunderkind who slew Dominick Cruz only to immediately implode and spend the rest of his career getting knocked out a bunch--but despite the outright ending of the tale having been written multiple times, at this point, he’s still here. Getting crushed by Kai Kara-France was supposed to be the end, but after a year and a half on the shelf he returned. Getting choked out by Deiveson Figueiredo in 2024 and dominated by Raoni Barcelos last June were supposed to mark the end of his contract, but in an era where Jailtons Almeida and Muhammad Mokaevi are being cut left and right, Cody Garbrandt is still here at 3 for his last 10, which should serve as an example to the entire industry that cultivating leverage is good for you. That said: He’s still around specifically because they’re trying to spread that leverage to as many favored fighters as they can. Deiveson was a contender in training, Raoni’s a borderline-ranked guy they want to get more mileage out of, and god above, they want Xiao Long to be a thing. He failed on the Contender Series and they still brought him to Road to UFC. He fell out of the tournament due to injuries, so they brought him back for Road to UFC 2. He got injured again, so they pushed the tournament finals back half a year to accommodate him. He lost, and they signed him anyway. He’s 1-1 since that signing and coming off a loss, and Xiao is still here facing a star of the sport headlining the prelims on a numbered show while SuYoung You, the man who beat him, is fighting in the prelims in the Apex next week.

So I need you to get one more big right hand into this one, Cody. I know you’ve got one left in the tank. Fuck ‘em. CODY GARBRANDT BY KO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Donte Johnson (7-0) vs Cody Brundage (11-8-1 (1))

Our congratulations here at The Punchsport Report to Donte Johnson for being the incredibly rare fighter to win Favored Prospect status from both us and the UFC. I should, for consistency, have a bone to pick with Donte. He is the precise picture of what the Contender Series wants the sport to look like: One year of experience, only one fight against an opponent with more wins than losses (that lofty record: 3-0), signed to the UFC to be used as an interchangeable late-replacement cog. But this particular cog choked out Sedriques Dumas, so by golly, I’m a fan. More importantly, though, it’s a fucking crime that Cody Brundage is here. We talk about Brundage’s reputation as the UFC’s favorite enhancement talent a lot around these parts, but Brundage just got battered to a TKO by Cam Rowston at the end of January. That is thirty-five fucking days between falling over after getting punched in the head 41 times and being booked to fight again. It should really matter that the UFC, which has 81 active Middleweights, three separate talent farms and free reign over essentially the entire regional circuit, is now so apathetic about fighter health that it can and will book someone with a TKO on their record more recent than the last time I put gas in my car.

It’s a small miracle and a genuine testament to the UFC’s medical practices that no one in their history has died or become (immediately) disabled from their fights in a sport built around brain trauma, but as the company cares progressively less about the quality of its product it has also begun to care less about the health of its fighters, and on a long enough timeframe, you can only book so many people into multiple short-term concussions before disaster strikes. DONTE JOHNSON BY TKO and fuck you for doing it.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Alberto Montes (10-1) vs Ricky Turcios (12-5)

The bell tolls for you, Ricky. You were The Ultimate Fighter once upon a time, and now, going on five years later, you are the man they put in front of fighters they want to thrive. Cruel masters sacrificed you on the altar of Raul Rosas Jr. and Bernardo Sopaj managed to best you and they really wanted to follow up by having you rehabilitate Cameron Smotherman for them back in January and you were saved by Cameron fucking fainting and faceplanting in the middle of weigh-ins, which really feels like it still should’ve been a bigger deal. That rescheduling could have led to Turcios getting matched up with another fighter in a similar place of struggle, but that’s just not how they feel about ol’ Ricky, so instead it’s Alberto Montes, who won his Contender Series contract a full year and a half ago and is only now getting around to his promotional debut after his previous life of choking people out in Combate and getting knocked out by dudes named Ira.

I keep picking Ricky out of some insane urge to root for him and he keeps losing. I am going to do it again. RICKY TURCIOS BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Cody Durden (17-9-1) vs Nyamjargal Tumendemberel (9-1)

Guess what, folks: It’s a package deal this week. You get THREE Codies. Three whole Codies. There are six men named Cody currently signed to the UFC, and by god, half of them will be assembled here in Las Vegas for this one-night blowout on the Cody supply in the combat sports world. If a plane crashes into the T-Mobile Arena they’ll have to activate the Chain of Codymand and reactivate McKenzie, Law, Pfister and Stamann just to fill the gap. Also, unrelatedly, Cody Durden has lost five of his last six fights and been stopped in four of them and Nyamjargal Tumendemberel is a finishing machine and a Road to UFC special attraction they’d really love to make something out of.

No idea why I’d bring that up. NYAMJARGAL TUMENDEMBEREL BY TKO.

EARLY PRELIMS: SILENCE
FLYWEIGHT: Sumudaerji (18-7) vs Jesus Aguilar (12-3)

Thank you for joining us on the annual trip to the alternate Flyweight reality that contains Sumudaerji. Across years of effort, somehow, his path through the division keeps swerving away from the rest of the roster. He was supposed to fight Bruno Silva and Manel Kape once upon a time! He wound up with Malcolm Gordon and Matt Schnell. He brushed the prime continuity when he met Charles Johnson in 2024, but he lost and found himself banished back to his pocket dimension. He’s on a two-fight winning streak right now over Mitch Raposo and Kevin Borjas and somehow, Raposo is fighting the borderline-ranked Allan Nascimento next month, and Borjas just got a main-card spotlight so he could lose to Imanol Rodriguez, and Sumudaerji is here on the early prelims fighting Jesus Aguilar, who is notable mostly for a) missing weight and b) beating Luis Gurule, who is 0-3 in the company.

Left hand paths need left hand solutions. SUMUDAERJI BY DECISION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Rafael Tobias (14-1) vs Diyar Nurgozhay (10-2)

We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel on these early prelims, man. Rafael Tobias comes from the path you and I have traveled together hundreds of times: Regional finishing artist built on jobbers and journeymen who only has a couple wins over people who even approach credibility until you look at their records and see that their competition was even worse and then he went on the Contender Series and choked out a guy with less than half his experience who got there by beating a man who was 3-5 in a company that asks hard questions like ‘what if the undefeated guy fights the 3-6 guy’ because no one else dares to answer them. Diyar Nurghozhay was Basically Also That Guy but last year’s model, and then he came into his UFC debut badly overweight and got submitted in a round and a half and then he came back vowing a better performance and got submitted in under three minutes and now they have him fighting their new guy who submits everyone but hasn’t yet abandoned all hope for the future.

Welcome to the circle of life, Diyar. RAFAEL TOBIAS BY SUBMISSION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Gaston Bolaños (8-5) vs JeongYeong Lee (11-3)

I am not saying the UFC is an inherently cynical organization that sees fighters under a certain threshold as identical parts based on marketable attributes such as, say, nationality. I would NEVER say the UFC would be so crass and obvious as to racially profile their own fighters for ease of advertising. That would be crazy. I am simply pointing out that Gaston Bolaños is a 2-2 fighter of very little importance who hasn’t won a match in a year and a half, and he was supposed to meet JooSang Yoo here, and when Yoo withdrew, out of the 100+ Featherweights they currently have on the roster, they chose one of the exactly two other South Korean fighters in the division to replace him. You know! For reasons.

Probably a total coincidence. JEONGYEONG LEE BY DECISION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Luke Fernandez (6-0) vs Rodolfo Bellato (12-3-1 (1))

God, I could just paste the entire Tobias/Nurgozhay section here and do a find-and-replace for their names and it would be the same fucking shit, but then we’d miss out on the chance to talk about the comical tragedy of Rodolfo Bellato. Luke Fernandez is your newly-minted Contender Series winner, and like most of them he’s barely started in the sport, he had a regional title (in this case, the 205-pound Cage Fury Fighting Championships belt) three fights into his career, and the guy he beat for his UFC contract is essentially a palette swap of the same shit and Luke dropped him in fifteen seconds. The wrinkle is Luke’s role as a Jiu-Jitsu guy, to the point of also being the lineal holder of the 225-pound Cage Fury Fighting Championships Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championship, a title so prestigious that he won it against Phil Hawes, and if you remember him you just winced, and I assure you, that is correct. Rodolfo Bellato, though? He was supposed to be a thing. They gave him two shots at DWCS in 13 months when the first didn’t work out, and for his debut they fed him no less than poor old Ihor Potieria himself, and when Bellato did his job and beat Iggy Pots they sent him straight to a pay-per-view main card to become their special new large tattooed boy. And then he went to a draw with Jimmy Crute, who hadn’t won a fight in almost five years. And then he got a No Contest against Paul Craig after an illegal upkick the UFC itself accused him of taking a dive on. And then they put him back on the prelims to lose to Navajo Stirling.

And now he’s here, curtain jerking the show against their shiny new large tattooed boy. Sorry, buddy. LUKE FERNANDEZ BY TKO.

Welcome to March. The sleepy start of the year is over, we are full speed ahead, we have multiple PFLs and half of your UFC events this year are main evented by Kevin Vallejos and Joe Pyfer, so, hey: You’re welcome.

THIS MONTH’S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS

• UFC 326: Holloway vs Oliveira 2, March 7

• UFC Fight Night: Emmett vs Vallejos, March 14

• UFC Fight Night: Evloev vs Murphy, March 21

• UFC Fight Night: Adesanya vs Pyfer, March 28

• PFL Madrid: van Steenis vs Edwards, March 20

• PFL Pittsburgh: Eblen vs Battle, March 28

• ONE Fight Night 41: Rodrigues vs Meekoon, March 13

• Rizin 52: Akimoto vs Mix, March 7

IS THERE ANY NEWS

Yes, really. Netflix is promoting their first-ever mixed martial arts event, and it’s Ronda Rousey, who hasn’t fought in ten years, against Gina Carano, who hasn’t fought in seventeen years. It’s being promoted by Jake Paul’s sports company, it’s trying to sell out an 18,000-person stadium, and as of the start of March it’s ten weeks away and there are no other announced fights. The MMA B-leagues are in such a state that this still matters, and that’s painful to admit.

WHAT HAPPENED IN FEBRUARY

RERUN! Taking place in January and February simultaneously thanks to the magic of Australia, we had UFC 325: Volkanovski vs Lopes 2. Before the event even started we got an early entrant for funniest moment of the year when the Road to UFC’s Flyweight final got scrapped after Aaron Tau got caught trying to cheat at the weigh-in and turned out to be 4 pounds over. Three of your four early prelims were the other finals, with Lawrence Lui winning a close split at Bantamweight, Keiichiro Nakamura scoring a third-round knockout at Featherweight, and Dom Mar Fan running the table at Lightweight, and the top-off was Kaan Ofli getting a, uh, questionable majority decision over Yizha. On your regular prelims, Jonathan Micallef overcame some early adversity to choke out Oban Elliott in the second, Jacob Malkoun won a decision over a barely-mobile Torrez Finney, Cameron Rowston knocked out Cody Brundage in two, and Billy Elekana choked out Junior Tafa after eight minutes. Up top, Quillan Salkilld managed to neck crank Jamie Mullarkey, Tallison Teixeira won just the saddest, gassiest decision in the world against Tai Tuivasa, Maurício Ruffy knocked out Rafael Fiziev, and Benoît Saint Denis pounded out Dan Hooker in two rounds. Your main event saw Alexander Volkanovski defending the Featherweight title against Diego Lopes, a rematch of their first fight from all of nine months prior. The first time around, Volk won a unanimous decision with two 49-46s and a 48-47; this time it was two 49-46s and a 50-45. Please stop doing unnecessary rematches. I am begging you.

The PFL got their 2026 started on February 7 with PFL Dubai: Nurmagomedov vs Davis. This marked not just the beginning of the year but the beginning of the PFL’s new life as a regular, non-tournament-based MMA promotion operated by private equity, and it was a tire fire, but it wasn’t their fault. The prelims were the expected mixture of local talent and stuff that matters--for every Makkasharip Zanukov decision over an Amin Ayoub you had Luke Trainer choking out Rob Wilkinson or Taylor Lapilus punching out Kasum Kasumov--but the main card had some fun surprises. Pouya Rahmani choked out Karil Williams, Salamat Isbulaev elbowed Jesus Pinedo to death and Abdoul Abdouraguimov got a decision over Kendly St. Louis, but part of their main-card placement was because a big match between Dakota Ditcheva and former Bellator title contender Denise Kielholtz got messed up when Dakota got hurt, and then replacement Antonia Silvaneide missed the Flyweight limit and the entire thing wound up on the prelims. Then the PFL inaugurated its Welterweight championship with a genuinely important matchup between final Bellator champion Ramazan Kuramagomedov and 2024 PFL tournament champion Shamil Musaev, and Kuramagomedov won, which was great right up until five minutes later when he retired during his post-fight interview, which is, in all fairness, incredibly funny. The main event was a much more boilerplate Usman Nurmagomedov win, as he defended the PFL Lightweight title after controlling and submitting 2025 tournament winner Alfie Davis in three rounds.

The evening also brought UFC Fight Night: Bautista vs Oliveira, which was a touch more normal if also decision-laden. Down on the prelims Klaudia Syguła pitched a shut-out over Priscila Cachoeira, Jakub Wikłacz choked out Muin Gafurov with one second left in the fight, Wang Cong took a decision over Eduarda Moura after they both mysteriously missed weight by the same amount (i.e.: they had an agreement), Javid Basharat beat last-minute replacement Gianni Vázquez, Ketlen Souza got the call over Bruna Brasil, Nikolay Veretennikov destroyed Niko Price in a hair under two minutes and Doniil Donchenko beat up but could not stop Alex Morono. On the main card, Dustin Jacoby knocked out Julius Walker, Farid Basharat squeaked by Jean Matsumoto with a split decision, Michał Oleksiejczuk got the duke over Marc-André Barriault, Rizvan Kuniev won a decision over Jailton Almeida who was promptly cut from the company, Kyoji Horiguchi pitched a winner against Amir Albazil, and in the main event, Mario Bautista put on an absolute grappling clinic and choked out Vinicius Oliveira.

February 13th was set aside for ONE Fight Night 40: Buntan vs Hemetsberger and I’m out of pithy things to say about how hard it is for me to keep track of ONE and their incredible distaste for mixed martial arts these days. I’ve been playing a lot of Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries to keep myself sane. Hu Yong knocked out Danny Kingad, Ben Tynan choked out Ryugo Takeuchi, Adrian Lee pounded out Shozo Isojima, Lucas Gabriel got a decision over Magomed Akaev and Jihin Radzuan elbowed Gabriela Fujimoto into a TKO, and I don’t know if any of it will do anything. Stella Hemetsberger won ONE’s Flyweight kickboxing belt off Jackie Buntan. Next month, even less.

The 21st got us UFC Fight Night: Strickland vs Hernandez and new levels of tragic nihilism. Like I rag on ONE and their cards, but does the phrase “Jacobe Smith knocked out Josiah Harrell” do anything for you? Does “Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani beat Philip Rowe” matter? Does an Adrian Lee fight mean more than a Rodolfo Bellato fight, because next month we’ve gotta talk about him again and I just don’t know, man. I don’t know. Maybe the UFC is drifting into textual highlight territory, too. maybe saying “the highlights of the prelims were Punahele Soriano beating Ramiz Brahimaj, Carlos Leal outpunching Chidi Njokuani, Alden Coria putting on a clinic against Luis Gurule and Joselyne Edwards possibly ending Nora Cornolle’s career after slamming her so hard she snapped her collarbone” is more useful than going through them step by step. On the main card Michel Pereira got a decision a whole bunch of people didn’t like against Zach Reese, Serghei Spivac got a decision over Ante Delija, Melquizael Costa knocked out Dan Ige, and Uroš Medić punched out Geoff Neal, which was fine, but in the main event Sean Strickland just destroyed Anthony Hernandez and knocked him out in the third round and there’s a good chance I’m just still salty about it.

The salt was not fixed by UFC Fight Night: Moreno vs Kavanagh on February 28. The latest trip down to Mexico followed the same marketing pattern as most of them and had similarly mixed results. Damian Pinas destroyed Wes Scchultz, Francis Marshall strangled Erik Silva, last-minute replacement Regina Tarin outworked Ernesta Kareckaitė, Javier Reyes overcame an early scare to get a TKO over Douglas Silva de Andrade, Cristian Quiñónez got a shutout over Kris Moutinho, Ailín Pérez wrestled Macy Chiasson but good, and Ryan Gandra knocked out José Medina in under a minute. On your main card, Santiago Luna got the nod over Angel Pacheco, Imanol Rodríguez managed to stop Kevin Borjas, Édgar Cháirez got a close split over Felipe Bunes, King Green styled on Daniel Zellhuber before nuking him in the second round, and David Martínez got a decision over Marlon Vera. But the main event was the silliest part, as Lone’er Kavanagh stepped in on short notice instead of any ranked Flyweights or the man who already beat him, and as the UFC hoped, he got a unanimous decision over Brandon Moreno and now leapfrogs the entire division.

WHAT’S COMING IN MARCH

Rizin’s 2026 begins on March 7 with Rizin 52, which doesn’t yet have a fun event name and that makes me sad. It’s a good, 13-fight card with a lot of good shit on it, although some of it is wild--living legend Hideo Tokoro is coming out of retirement at 48 to face the 10-5 24 year-old Jinnosuke Kashimura, which, like, why, man, why--Shoko Sato is facing off against John Sweeney, former Shooto Flyweight Champion Jo Arai is trying to get a win against Lee Jeung-hyun, Yusuke Yachi is back to face Kim Kyung-pyo, Karshyga Dautbek is meeting Ryuya Fukuda, Viktor Kolesnik is up against Kazuki Aimoto, Taisei Sakuraba is getting another big career test against Luiz Gustavo, Saori Oshima is facing off with Kate Oyama to potentially contend with Seika Izawa, and in the main event, Kyoma Akimoto is fighting the just-released-by-the-UFC Patchy Mix, who desperately needs to get his groove back.

Your first UFC of the month is also on the 7th and it is UFC 326: Holloway vs Oliveira 2, a card that can be best described as Not Bad, Just Weird. Drew Dober vs Michael Johnson could have happened in 2009 and instead it’s happening in 2026, and that’s weird. Brunno Ferreira was going to fight former title contender Paulo Costa and instead it’s Gregory “Robocop” Rodrigues, and that’s weird. Raul Rosas Jr. was supposed to fight Rob Font last year for a top ten ranking, and Font lost in his replacement bout and they just rebooked the fight again, and that’s weird. Caio Borralho is fighting Reinier de Ridder, and a few months ago that would’ve been a title eliminator and now it’s a desperate attempt to hang onto the top ten, and boy, that’s weird. But Max Holloway vs Charles Oliveira, an incredible rematch almost eleven years in the making, being put on solely for the fake BMF vanity belt they invented to sell shoes? That’s fucking weird.

ONE Fight Night 41: Rodrigues vs Phetjeeja happens on March 13 and there’s two MMA matches on it and one of them is the debuting Fábio Henrique vs Lee Seung Chul, who is on a four-fight winning streak in ONE, and the other is the 11-9 Jeremy Miado, who is 1 for his last 6, against Willie van Rooyen, who made his debut last November, lost, and is rebooked anyway. Please stop. I am asking you, Chatri, to stop.

The 14th gets us UFC Fight Night: Emmett vs Vallejos, which returns is back to the godsforsaken Apex for incredible matchups like Piera Rodriguez and Sam Hughes being rewarded for having multiple-fight winning streaks by having to fight each other to curtain-jerk Apex prelims and every day we stray farther from any form of meaning. Charles Johnson vs Bruno Silva despite Johnson having been knocked out a month and a half ago. Vitor Petrino and Steven Asplund are having a borderline-ranked Heavyweight bout but it’s under the debuting Marwan Rahiki vs Harry Hardwick, who got completely destroyed in his one and only UFC fight. Amanda Lemos, the former title challenger and #5 Women’s Strawweight in the world, is facing Gillian Robertson, who is on a giant winning streak and testing herself as a top contender, and that’s an Apex co-main event because the actual main is the 1-for-5 Josh Emmett vs Kevin Vallejos, who has been here for one year.

On March 20, it’s back to the PFL for PFL Madrid: van Steenis vs Edwards 2. The prelims are one of those zero-Wikipedia-page specials, which is unfortunate because Victoria Dudakova deserves better and I hope she beats Jacinta Austin because I would appreciate it, but other than that your most notable undercard fight is, like, Gino van Steenis vs Mark Ewen and that’s deeply unfortunate. Up top Linton Vassell is facing Denis Goltsov for tournament leftover pride, Franco Tenaglia and Yassin Najid get the ‘who are you’ fight of the night, Alexandr Shabliy faces Acoidan Duque, A.J. McKee has decided to stick around at Featherweight to take on Ádám Borics, and in your main event Middleweight champion Costello van Steenis runs it back with Fabian Edwards, whom he beat by split decision in Bellator back in 2020.

One day later we’re off to London for UFC Fight Night: Evloev vs Murphy and it, too, is a bizarrely constructed card to the point that it’s like the UFC’s matchmaking engine is simply shitting itself to death. Mário Pinto is an undefeated Heavyweight prospect on a two-fight knockout streak in the UFC: He is on the prelims against the debuting Felipe Franco. Antonio Trócoli is on his third straight loss, so he’s booked above him against Mantas Kondratavičius. Nathaniel Wood vs Losene Keita and Mason Jones vs Axel Sola are on the prelims, but Kutis Campbell vs Danny Silva and Iwo Baraniewski vs Austen Lane are on the main card. Michael “Venom” Page, ranked at Welterweight despite being on a Middleweight winning streak, is back at 170 to fight the unranked Sam Patterson, which is less important than co-main event Luke Riley vs Michael Aswell, and all of this is second fiddle to Movsar Evloev vs Lerone Murphy even though both of them already deserve a title shot.

But we’re right back to the PFL on the 28th for PFL Pittsburgh: Eblen vs Battle, which is, believe it or not, the first PFL event in America since August of last year. Josh Fremd is back! He’s fighting Jarrah Al-Silawi on the prelims alongside such old friends as Dakota Bush vs Robert Watley, Elora Dana vs Tatiana Postarnakova, Nathan Schulte vs Jakub Kaszuba and Bryce Meredith vs Jack Cartwright among others. On your main card, you get the joys of Lazaro Dayron vs Jacob Thrall, Julio Arce vs Alexei Pergande, Ariane da Silva making her PFL debut against Sumiko Inaba and Impa Kasanganay against Dalton Rosta, and in your main event, former champ Johnny Eblen faces promotional newcome Bryan Battle.

And finally, the 28th also nets UFC Fight Night: Adesanya vs Pyfer, and I gotta tell you, man, Israel Adesanya is obviously still a superstar of the sport, but “Johnny Eblen main event” vs “Joe Pyfer main event” is really, really philosophically close in my head. Michael Chiesa vs Carlston Harris! Chase Hooper vs Lance Gibson Jr.! Terrance McKinney and Kyle Nelson? Marcin Tybura plays footsy with Valter Walker? Alexa Grasso and Maycee Barber will have a fight, I guess! I just cannot get over the sentence “Israel Adesanya vs Joe Pyfer” and depending on how it goes, I may never.

CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Tom Aspinall - 15-3 (1), Either 1, 2 or 0 Defenses Depending On How You Look At It

You know, once upon a time, the UFC would’ve killed for a Tom Aspinall. Entire years of UFC events were spent desperately trying to get a Dan Hardy or Darren Till or Jimi Manuwa into championship pictures so they could cash in on UK superstardom. And somehow, Tom Aspinall just fell into their lap. They didn’t go out of their way to softball him, they didn’t put a ton of effort into marketing him, they just let him mulch everyone in his path. In 2025, Tallison Teixeira has a main event in just his second UFC bout: In 2022 Tom Aspinall had to notch five straight stoppages to get his first crack at the top of the card against Curtis Blaydes, and it ended with his knee imploding fifteen seconds into the fight. When he lost that fight, Francis Ngannou was the reigning UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World. By the time Tom returned in the Summer of 2023, it belonged to Jon fucking Jones. Within one fight Aspinall was a top contender again, and with Jon comically scheduled to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who hadn’t fought in two and a half years, Aspinall was left in a holding pattern--until Jon injured himself in training. With barely two weeks to prepare, Tom Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich for an interim championship. Sergei was the most devastating knockout artist in the Heavyweight division: Tom knocked him out in sixty-nine seconds. Not only did it give him gold, it gave him a golden ticket. The sole purpose of an interim champion is to one day reunify the belts, and that meant Tom had a shot at Jon Jones, one of the biggest fighters in the history of the sport. All he had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Tom waited so fucking long the UFC made him defend his interim title in a rematch with Blaydes--which he won easily, knocking him out in 60 seconds--on July 27, 2024. Four months later, Jon Jones returned and had his fight with Stipe, who by that point had been effectively retired for almost four years. Unsurprisingly, Jon won. Equally unsurprisingly, Jon and the UFC refused to commit to fighting Aspinall. Jones reportedly held the UFC up for a huge payday, and when they shockingly agreed, he changed his mind. In the end, the most obvious pair of conclusions happened: On June 21st, during the press conference after Fight Night Baku, Dana White announced Jon was retiring and Tom was being promoted to Undisputed Champion; an hour later, coincidentally, news broke that Jon was being summoned for arraignment in July on charges of leaving the scene of an accident after drunkenly crashing another car and leaving another heavily-inebriated half-naked woman behind in it and also threatening the police over the phone when they called him. It is the only way the Jon Jones story could possibly have ended. Tom Aspinall was an interim champion for 588 days, and he made his first undisputed one against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 26--and, because this division is fucking cursed, it ended in a No Contest after Gane poked him in both of his eyes at once. The UFC has decided this is mostly Tom’s fault, which has nothing at all to do with Tom’s dad talking about how he shouldn’t sign a new contract. A rematch has been vowed, but Tom needs literal eye surgery to regain his sight. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get an interim bout. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they strip him because He Just Didn’t Want To Fight.

Light Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

VACANT - Where we all go when we’re gone

For the last several months, this section has included the phrase “As it turns out, (Alex) Pereira doesn’t seem to have much interest in defending the 205-pound title at all. The second he won the belt he went about trying to manifest his next fight: A Heavyweight clash with Jon Jones at the UFC’s White House card in July.” Hey, y’all: Guess what happened. On February 27 the UFC announced Pereira was dropping the title, the scuttlebutt is they’re going to do either Pereira vs Jones or Ciryl Gane for a Heavyweight belt at the White House, and the new main event of UFC 327 in April will be Jiří Procházka vs Carlos Ulberg for the vacant belt. The UFC Light Heavyweight Championship has been vacated (to be clear: vacated, not stripped or we’d just be talking about Jon Jones again) six times in its almost thirty-year history: Five of those times happened in the last eight years and three of them were in the last three and a half. The new champion will be either a man who got knocked out by Alex Pereira twice or a man who got his title shot by beating 2025 Dominick Reyes. Existing in the Nothing Matters era of the sport sure is fun.

Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Khamzat Chimaev - 15-0, 0 Defenses

Yeah, this was probably inevitable. When Khamzat Chimaev showed up in the UFC in the middle of the Fight Island pandemic era and wrecked two people in ten days at two different weight classes, the world was prepared to believe he was special. When he ended Gerald Meerschaert with one punch less than two months later, all doubt was cast aside. The fighters, the audience, and the UFC itself were all true believers in the championship future that lay ahead for Khamzat Chimaev. Khamzat, in response, retired from mixed martial arts. As it turns out, fighting in the middle of a COVID pandemic makes it more likely you’re going to get COVID. Who’dve thunk? After a year, some prodding from Dana White and reportedly a lot more personal prodding from Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator in charge of Khamzat’s native Chechen Republic, Khamzat returned to the sport a year later. His dominance continued unabated, but his schedule never recovered--in fact, it worsened. After a particularly unfortunate 2022 episode involving Khamzat torpedoing his own pay-per-view main event against Nate Diaz after missing weight by almost ten pounds and very nearly cancelling the event altogether, he instead wound up strangling Kevin Holland, taking another year off, moving permanently to Middleweight, and adopting a new schedule whereby he fought only once every twelve months, and every time he appeared, something bizarre would happen. In the first episode of New Khamzat he showed up in 2023 for what was supposed to be a long-awaited showdown with Paulo Costa, but Costa, as he is wont to do, pulled out and resulted in Welterweight champion Kamaru Usman stepping in with just days to prepare. Even weirder: He gave Khamzat the closest fight he’d ever had. One judge scored the fight a damn draw. Khamzat’s struggle with a career Welterweight gave a lot of folks pause when, one year later, he returned to face Middleweight kingpin Robert Whittaker. Rob was universally respected as one of the best 185-pound fighters in UFC history, and while he’d lost, he’d lost only to the best and never easily. Khamzat steamrolled him in three and a half minutes. He face-cranked him so hard it snapped a previous palate injury and left Rob’s bottom teeth floating in his mouth. By the time Khamzat came back in 2025 for his long-awaited shot at the belt, Dricus du Plessis had etched his spot in the record books as one of just five men to ever defend the Middleweight championship multiple times. He’d beaten everyone the UFC put in front of him, and he was still a betting underdog. The conventional wisdom was Khamzat would choke Dricus out in the first two rounds or Dricus would drag him through a difficult back half of the bout. As it turned out: Everyone was wrong. Khamzat did hand out one of the most one-sided championship victories in UFC history, but rather than destroying Dricus, he just outwrestled him for five straight rounds. He didn’t engage on the feet, he didn’t land much in the way of heavy ground-and-pound, and he isn’t even credited with a single submission attempt. Khamzat landed 529 strikes and only 37 of them were considered significant. But Khamzat won, unquestionably and easily, and now he has the belt everyone long assumed he’d get. It looks like he’ll be defending the belt against Nassourdine Imavov, but not until after Ramadan.

Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Islam Makhachev - 28-1, 0 Defenses

The prophecy has been fulfilled. Khabib Nurmagomedov was considered by many to be the greatest Lightweight of all time, but in the later stages of his career he began to repeatedly reference his lifetime friend and training partner Islam Makhachev as not just his successor, but the man who would break the mold he’d left behind. And the fanbase was more than willing to buy another Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov protege coming in and wrecking shop--until he got knocked out by Adriano Martins. Khabib’s aura of invulnerability came from the simple, so-obvious-more-people-should-try-it factor of simply never losing a damn fight. When Islam got torched in under two minutes by a man that couldn’t beat Donald Cerrone, that aura vanished. A lot of folks still thought he could be a champion, but most felt the greatest-of-all-time lane was closed to him. It turns out there’s another way to regain that sense of unbeatable awe, though: Just don’t lose for so goddamn long people forget it ever happened. In the ten full years since that Martins bout, Islam has not lost a single fight. Most of the time, he hasn’t even lost a round. He worked his way up the Lightweight ladder and began to rack up incredible achievements. He tore through top prospects with virtually no effort, he choked out one of the best MMA grapplers ever in Charles Oliveira, he outlasted and later knocked out one of the two men with a claim to the all-time Featherweight crown in Alexander Volkanovski, he choked out Dustin Poirier and he broke the Lightweight title defense record after stomping Renato Moicano. And then he traded in his record-breaking reign to challenge for Welterweight gold. Jumping divisions is always difficult, but the 15-pound leap from Lightweight to Welterweight is a mountain, and no Lightweight champion had ever managed it. Even BJ Penn, the canonical first man to hold gold at both, had to do it in reverse: He failed at both of his attempts to win Lightweight gold and shocked the world by abruptly taking it at Welterweight instead, and it would be five more years before he finally got his shit together and won a title in the division that made him famous. His subsequent attempts all ended in defeat, half because Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre were both great and half because BJ was just a Lightweight. Even though Islam was Islam and widely agreed to be a monster in the cage, Jack Della Maddalena had won the Welterweight title with some of the cleanest boxing the UFC had seen, and his championship victory over wrestler Belal Muhammad had people convinced that Islam, at best, would struggle. They met in the main event of UFC 322 on November 15, 2025, and there was absolutely no struggle. Islam kicked Jack’s leg to pieces, landed some surprisingly big punches, and took the fight to the ground almost at will, and by the time the fight ended, it felt like Jack never had a chance. The shadow has been stepped out of. Islam Makhachev is a two-division champion. And now he has a brand new horde of contenders beating down his door.

Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Ilia Topuria - 17-0, 0 Defenses

One of the most exciting things about following mixed martial arts is picking which prospects you really, truly believe in. There are hundreds of fighters across history that you will enjoy watching, and you may have some hopes for their future, but you don’t necessarily expect the world from them. When Ilia Topuria showed up in the UFC in 2020, if you were paying attention, you knew he was going to be special. The combination of wrestling, grappling and absolutely murderous striking was almost immediately visible, but what really set him apart was the unshakable confidence with which he used it. Even when he went up to 155 pounds on short notice and almost got knocked out by Jai Herbert he survived the onslaught, recovered, came right back at him as though he was utterly unfazed and destroyed Herbert seconds later. That was the truly exceptional danger of Ilia Topuria: His belief in his technique was so absurdly complete that it came across as absurdly silly arrogance and it made huge swaths of the audience disdain him and then he’d somehow always find a way to just go do the damn thing anyway. He outgrappled Ryan Hall. He submitted Bryce Mitchell. He beat Josh Emmett so badly he got a 50-42 scorecard out of it. And on February 17, 2024, he ended Alexander Volkanovski’s historic, nearly-four-year reign as the king of Featherweight by knocking him out in two rounds. When Ilia followed that up by saying he was going to become the first man to ever knock out Max Holloway--a thing Volkanovski, Dustin Poirier, José Aldo and Conor McGregor failed to do--even with his title victory, the audience was still particularly skeptical. He did it anyway. Once again, Ilia walked into a fight with supreme confidence, and once again, it ended with his opponent on the floor, this time in three rounds. Ilia Topuria had knocked out the two greatest Featherweights of the generation and seemed poised for a longer title reign than either of them. And then he quit the division. One of those first overconfident boasts of his had been the desire to move up to Lightweight and knock out Islam Makhachev to become a double champion. The MMA world thought he was talking about a far-away future, but he wanted it and he wanted it now. Unfortunately, so did Islam. Right as Ilia vacated the Featherweight title to move up to Lightweight, Islam vacated the Lightweight title to move up to Welterweight. So Ilia was left to fight for his destiny against Charles Oliveira instead. Oliveira’s always been incredibly tough and dangerous, and he hadn’t been knocked out in almost eight years, and even then it wasn’t unconsciousness but rather because a Paul Felder elbow had broken part of his face. That streak ended on June 28, 2025 when Ilia Topuria punched him limp in two and a half minutes. The UFC may not do double-champions anymore out of sheer promotional frustration, but in any rational sense, Ilia is the king of Featherweight and Lightweight, which gives him a horde of contenders like Arman Tsarukyan, Justin Gaethje, Dan Hooker and Mateusz Gamrot. So he appears to be fighting Paddy Pimblett next. If you ask Ilia, he’s just killing time until Islam wins the Welterweight title, because his destiny is to take his 5’7” frame all the way up to Welterweight so he can kill the king and be the first ever three-division champion in UFC history. Does it sound aggressively silly and arrogant? Of course it does. Do you feel comfortable ruling it out? Then you haven’t been paying attention. Ilia is, however, dealing with some personal issues related to his divorce, so he’s going to be out of action until the Spring, which means the UFC made an interim title bout between Justin Gaethje and Paddy Pimblett for UFC 324 on January 24. Yes, really. How’d that one wind up going, you ask?

Interim Lightweight Champion

Justin Gaethje - 27-5, 0 Defenses

One of the foundational subjective mixed martial arts questions, right alongside ‘who’s the pound-for-pound best’ and ‘what if Cro-Cop ducked that kick,’ is ‘Who’s the best fighter to never win a championship?’ There are different answers for every generation, and one of the complicating factors is the inevitable debate over whether interim titles count. Was Carlos Condit a UFC champion? What about Colby Covington or Yair Rodríguez? It’s still an incredible achievement, but it’s just not quite real the way an undisputed title is. And I cannot imagine what sort of a backhanded career accomplishment it is to be the only person in UFC history to win their division’s interim title twice. Justin Gaethje has been right on the edge of the top for so long he’s got two half-championships in his closet. Back in 2020 he fought Tony Ferguson, then arguably the scariest Lightweight in the world, and beat him so horrifically that his career never recovered, and that netted Gaethje his first interim belt, which he promptly lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov in the latter’s retirement bout. Two years later, Gaethje got his second shot at the undisputed title against Charles Oliveira and he wound up strangled in three and a half minutes. Three and a half years after that, Gaethje was still right there at the precipice of the top, Ilia Topuria needed a break from the sport, and the UFC needed an aging veteran to propel their marketing star Paddy Pimblett to the top, and at UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, they threw Paddy’s big party and Justin crashed it. The UFC will tell you the fight was close, and it was in the sense that it went the whole way and one judge only gave Justin three rounds, but Paddy got brutally beaten and dropped repeatedly. Once again, Justin Gaethje is the interim champion. It just remains to be seen what the hell they’ll do now.

Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Alexander Volkanovski - 28-4, 1 Defense

And just like that, 2024 never happened. For eleven years Alexander Volkanovski was the best Featherweight on the planet, and most of that time was simply waiting for everyone else to notice. He was short and he won by decisions a lot and the world was entirely into Max Holloway so he skated under the radar right up until the moment he finally beat Max. And that wasn’t enough to convince people, so Volkanovski beat him again. And that somehow made the world doubt him even more, so he beat Max a third time. By 2023 Volk was second only to all-time great José Aldo in Featherweight title defenses--and he’d beaten Aldo in a fight, and his only actual loss was an all-timer of an effort against Islam Makhachev that still stands as the closest Islam has come to losing his title as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so it was very, very easy to accept Alexander Volkanovski as the greatest Featherweight on the planet. And then he took a rematch with Islam with only one week to prepare and got knocked out in three minutes, and then he came back less than four months later and got flattened by Ilia Topuria, and in the space of two fights the audience went from celebrating him as the best around to calling for his retirement. Volkanovski took an entire year off to heal and rebuild, which was enough time for Ilia to get bored and vacate the belt to go chase Lightweight greatness, and the Topuria/Volkanovski rematch became Volkanovski vs Diego Lopes at UFC 314 on April 12 to fill the vacant throne instead. It was somehow both close and clear. Lopes gained steam in the middle stanza of the bout and at one point dropped Volk, but Volk got right back up and resumed punching him in the face, and by the end of the bout he’d outlanded him more than two to one. The judges sided with him, the audience sided with him, and Alexander Volkanovski became not just one of the rare few to win back a UFC title, but the first man over 35 to ever win a UFC belt in the sub-170 weight classes typically reserved for young lions. His logical next contender should’ve been Movsar Evloev, but the UFC was busy trying to get him to fight an unranked, debuting Aaron Pico, thus clearing the way for a rematch with Yair Rodríguez in Guadalajara for Noche UFC 3 in September. Except the Arena Guadalajara wasn’t done yet, so Noche UFC 3 got moved to the most Mexican of places, Las Vegas, in October, and Alex’s manager said he had an eye injury that needs time to heal, so he took the rest of 2025 off. Good news, though: That left time for the UFC to get new contenders going. Lerone Murphy wound up fighting and knocking out Pico! Aljamain Sterling beat Brian Ortega! Hell, Movsar Evloev is still right there! The UFC looked at all of them and gave them all the finger. At UFC 325 on January 31, fresh off his title victory over Diego Lopes, Alexander Volkanovski had his first title defense against Diego Lopes. Unsurprisingly, the guy who beat Diego Lopes beat Diego Lopes again. The UFC’s going to have Evloev and Murphy fight in March, and presumably the winner’s got next.

Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Petr Yan - 20-5, 0 Defenses

Petr Yan’s road to the top has been incredibly circuitous. When Yan initially won the Bantamweight title back in 2020, no one was particularly surprised. He’d been one of the best in the world for years, he’d put together a six-fight winning streak on his road to the title shot, and the UFC had fed aging legend Urijah Faber to him in an attempt to make him a known quantity. Felling an even greater legend in José Aldo and taking the belt felt like an entirely expected passing of the torch, and a long reign as the division’s standardbearer seemed all but assured. And then, as they so often do, things went wrong. In quite possibly the most infamous title change in UFC history, Yan became the first champion to ever lose his title by disqualification after drilling Aljamain Sterling in the face with an illegal knee. Yan’s team cried foul and the world turned on Sterling, but when they had their rematch a year later, Sterling beat him by decision and that was that. But it was a split decision, and it was close, so the UFC gave Yan another theoretical title eliminator with Sean O’Malley, and this time the world was almost unanimously convinced Yan won--except for two of the three judges, who split in O’Malley’s favor. To top it off, Yan’s attempt to stay in the contendership conversation ran into the brick wall that was the rising Merab Dvalishvili, who handed him the most one-sided loss of his entire life. In the space of two years, Petr Yan went from being perceived as a generational champion to 1 for his last 5 and seemingly eliminated from contendership. After a year off to cope with injuries, reassess his career and figure out how to turn things around, Yan proceeded to take the path that most commonly leads to success: Just fucking beating everyone. He battered Song Yadong, he outpunched Deiveson Figueiredo, he won an exceedingly weirdly-booked matchup with Marcus McGhee, and suddenly, he was on a winning streak and right back in contendership. It might have taken him longer to get an actual title fight were it not for Merab Dvalishvili being a crazy person. Merab was on the greatest championship run the division had ever seen, and after clearing out most of his to contenders and recording a blistering three defenses in a single year, he announced his intention to break a UFC record and cement himself as the greatest 135-pounder of all time by recording a fourth--just two months after the last one--and Petr Yan was available and ready. The world saw the fight as a foregone conclusion, given how one-sided their first match had been, and the world was wrong. Yan put on the best performance of his career, not just battering Merab but outwrestling him, and in one of the best career comebacks we’ve seen, almost five years after he’d given it away, Petr Yan got his title back. He’s on top of the world again, and in all likelihood, the rubber match with Merab will be next. But it’s gonna have to wait until the second half of the year, because Yan’s having back surgery.

Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Van - 16-2, 0 Defenses

It would be disrespectful as hell to Joshua Van to say that no one saw this coming, as many people perceived it as a possibility, but I don’t think anyone saw it coming like this. Van was the Flyweight champion of the Fury Fighting Championships when the UFC came calling, as a 21 year-old regional titleholder with a penchant for collecting knockouts despite fighting at 125 pounds so thoroughly ticks all of their boxes that Van couldn’t have been a more perfect fit without also having a history of racist tweets, and his Contender Series debut was set for August of 2023. But the UFC needed someone to fill in against Zhalgas Zhumagulov, so Van got called up to the big show early and proceeded to justify their faith by beating Zhalgas, and then beating the man he was originally slated to Contend against, and then facing off with Legacy Fighting Alliance champ Felipe Bunes and handing him the first TKO loss of his entire career. In the space of six months, Van went from a little-known regional fighter to a borderline-ranked Flyweight in the UFC. And then he got atomized by Charles Johnson. It was the second loss of Van’s career, the first time he’d ever been knocked out, and the snapping of an eight-fight winning streak, and in many cases, that would’ve permanently ended his momentum. But Van was smart enough to learn from his mistakes, and the UFC was invested enough in him to bring him back up to speed with a gentle hand, and eleven months later he was on a four-fight winning streak again and had successfully made his way to the top ten after knocking out Bruno Silva, which left him in the perfect position to take advantage of an abrupt opportunity. Top contender Brandon Royval had just lost his opponent and needed a replacement, and Van was game to fight for the second time in three weeks if it meant a shot at the belt. It was a close bout, and if Van hadn’t knocked Royval down at the end of the third round he may well have lost, but he did, so he didn’t, and suddenly the prospect was next in line for the title. All but one month of Joshua Van’s UFC career took place during Alexandre Pantoja’s reign as the Flyweight king. His streak was monstrous and he was a sizable favorite coming into his defense against Van, but many were waiting to see if Van’s boxing could defuse Pantoja’s aggression. As it turns out: We’re gonna have to wait a bit longer. Twenty-six seconds into the bout Pantoja busted his own arm on the mat after a head kick gone awry. So Van’s the champion, but it’s under some real weird circumstances, and it means a number of people are immediately gunning for him. Alexandre Pantoja presumably has a rematch as soon as he’s back, but in the meantime, Tatsuro Taira just pounded Brandon Moreno out to make himself a top contender and he’s going to get his crack at Van at UFC 327 on April 11.

Women’s Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Kayla Harrison - 19-1, 0 Defenses

Every once in awhile the inevitable turns out to actually be inevitable. Ronda Rousey parlayed a 2008 bronze medal in Judo into mixed martial arts stardom; Kayla Harrison took the gold medal in 2012 and 2016. The world was already asking her about MMA before the second. The UFC made a play for her, but there was a problem: By the standards of female fighters Kayla was huge. Ronda had competed at 70 kg in the Olympics, which translated to about 154 pounds, well within the range of weight cutting for the insane standards of combat sports and Women’s Bantamweight. Kayla competed at 78 kg, which was almost 172 pounds. Even at a twenty-pound weight cut, her division simply did not exist in major mixed martial arts organizations. So she had to find one that would build it. The Professional Fighters League needed star power, and Kayla was their gal. They founded the first Women’s Lightweight division in a major American organization, and it was populated mostly by Bantamweights and Featherweights who were trying the best they could. For four straight years, Kayla was their recurring, undefeated champion. She won the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, and in 2022 she made it to the finals and looked poised to take it for a third time, as her only competition was Larissa Pacheco, whom she’d already beaten twice. In a massive upset, Larissa took a decision off of her. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it was also more or less fine, because Kayla was more or less done with the PFL. She took one more fight against Aspen Ladd as a one-off, but her future was with the UFC. Even with her loss to Pacheco, the world was sure she was a future UFC champion--as long as she could stomach the weight cut. And it did, visibly, kill her! But she made it. She choked out Holly Holm in her debut, she took a decision over Ketlen Vieira in a title eliminator, and all she had to do after that was wait. Julianna Peña was a +500 underdog in her own title defense against Kayla, and that turned out to be just about right. On June 7, 2025, at UFC 316, Kayla achieved the inevitable, ragdolled Peña and tapped her out in just two rounds. She’s the best in the world and she’s going to get her shot at the superfight everyone wanted in the first place, as Amanda Nunes is coming out of retirement to face her later this year--actually, this got delayed so much it’s only now finally booked for UFC 324 on January 24, 2026--maybe never? A couple weeks before the superfight Kayla had to pull out for apparently fairly major neck surgery. No word on when she’ll be back or what on Earth happens now.

Women’s Flyweight, 125 lbs

Valentina Shevchenko - 26-4-1, 2 Defenses

After almost two years of suffering, we have gone back to the start. At the end of 2022 Valentina Shevchenko was so thoroughly ensconced as The Greatest Women’s Flyweight that a sizable segment of the fanbase had built an honest-to-god antipathy for her over it. Sure, she won, all the time, and sure, her only losses in almost a decade and a half came to the greatest of all time in Amanda Nunes, and sure, Shevchenko arguably won their second fight, but familiarity breeds contempt, and after watching the purported greatest struggle with a split decision to Taila Santos that could easily have gone the other way, too, a big chunk of the mixed martial world was ready to move on from Val. And then, unexpectedly, it did. Valentina was a -900 favorite when Alexa Grasso shocked the world, choked her out, and took her title away on March 4, 2023. An instant rematch was obligatory, given Val’s long history on top, so half a year later they ran it back at Noche UFC in 2023, and, awkwardly, it ended in a draw. If the rematch had been obligatory, the threematch was mandatory, but a hand injury on Val’s part and the UFC’s desire to put an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter behind their promotion meant a full twelve months passed before they got back in the cage. That’s a long goddamn time, and it left a lot of air, and that air was filled by doubt. Alexa won the first fight, after all--but she was on her way to losing a decision before Valentina made a costly mistake, threw one of her trademark nowhere-close-to-landing spinning back kicks, and got immediately jumped on and choked out for her troubles. Alexa didn’t lose the second fight--but based on the scorecards, she should have, and would have, were it not for one judge handing her a completely indefensible 10-8 in the final round. When the third fight came on September 14, 2024, it was seen as Alexa’s chance to cement her legacy: Either she was the superior fighter and the herald of a new generation for Women’s Flyweight, or the whole thing was just a weird episode. Unfortunately for Alexa, it was the latter. Valentina dominated her. She outstruck her and outwrestled her with almost comical ease, the fight was a complete shutout, and despite their series being now tied at 1-1-1, no one has any doubts about the winner, nor any desire to see them fight again. Once again, much to the internet’s chagrin, Valentina Shevchenko is a champion. And--only two years late--she defended her title against Manon Fiorot at UFC 315. It was close, it was contentious, and it was also a fight the audience does not want to see again. Her next fight was a long-awaited champion vs champion affair against Zhang Weili at UFC 322 on November 15, 2025. After years of watching Zhang dominate her competition, the world felt she had genuine double-champ potential and could be the woman to unseat Valentina. As it turned out: Not even close. Val dominated her in every aspect of the game, Zhang got completely shut out, and her Flyweight hopes are dead in the water. Valentina has multiple title defenses again and is now tied with Amanda Nunes and Anderson Silva for the fourth-most wins in title fights in UFC history. We’ll have to see who they give to her next, but Natália Silva feels like a safe bet.

Women’s Strawweight, 115 lbs

Mackenzie Dern - 16-5, 0 Defenses

On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Mackenzie Dern signed with the UFC as a 5-0 fighter all the way back in 2018 and they’ve been trying to get a belt on her ever since. She came into mixed martial arts with a pre-existing pedigree as one of the more decorated women in the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Gi championships, no-gi championships, pan-Am championships, Asian open championships, world championships, ADCC championships, she took them all. And the UFC marketed her as a grappling champion who was bringing some of the best submission offense in the sport to the Strawweight division! But they also marketed her as an extremely conventionally attractive woman who frequently wore bathing suits. It was one of the touchiest things to comment on with her career: Where other women would have to struggle for their matchmaking and featured spots, Mackenzie’s opportunities kept coming, and they were almost always on the main broadcast and, on multiple occasions, in the main event slots women almost never received. And she needed them, because despite being legitimately quite good, she just wasn’t great. She could make it into the top fifteen, and sometimes even brush the top ten, but every time they tried to get Mackenzie into title contention, she’d falter. It was Amanda Ribas in 2019, it was Marina Rodriguez in 2021, and between 2022 and 2024, Mackenzie had the worst run of her life, winning only one out of four bouts, getting shut down by Yan Xiaonan and Amanda Lemos, and taking the first stoppage loss of her career after being knocked out by Jéssica Andrade. She managed to get her way back up the ladder again by outgrappling Loopy Godinez and submitting a struggling Amanda Ribas in a six-years-belated rematch, but with so many losses to top contenders, her path to the title still seemed closed. Then a funny thing happened: Zhang Weili gave up the Strawweight belt to move up to Flyweight and challenge Valentina Shevchenko. Suddenly, the door was wide open. And conveniently, the UFC had booked all the women who beat Mackenzie into other matches, leaving Mackenzie with just one contender left--and it was Virna Jandiroba, a career grappler whom Mackenzie had already beaten back in 2020. The two met at UFC 321 on October 25, and after seven years of effort, the UFC finally got its way. Mackenzie beat Virna again, fair and square, in a close and hard-fought but ultimately clear decision. She is, at last, the Strawweight Champion of the World. And she’s in the exceptionally weird position of being a newly-minted champion that has very recently lost to several of her own top contenders. If Zhang Weili fails to beat Valentina Shevchenko, it’s very likely the UFC will try to pressure her back down to 115 for a money match with Mackenzie, in which case Dern would almost certainly be a big underdog in her own first defense. If not, at this point, it’s either a rematch with Yan Xiaonan, a grappling match with Tatiana Suarez, or the UFC stops pretending entirely and has Mackenzie beat Contender Series women until she turns a profit.

NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs

Ilkhom Nazimov - 13-3, 0 Defenses

After four and a half years we finally have the second-ever Rizin Lightweight Champion, and it feels a little bit like he came out of nowhere. Up until the 2025 New Year’s event, most folks had only seen one Ilkhom Nazimov fight. He’d been operating out in the Russian regional scene, which has the unfortunate crossover of being a) low-visibility and b) notoriously tough, and no matter how good you are, there just isn’t going to be a lot of international broadcast attention on the Tyumen Extreme Sports Expo. Nazimov didn’t get his first real taste of the spotlight until he made it to UAE Warriors, one of the biggest leagues in the middle east; unfortunately, that spotlight included him getting knocked out in eight seconds. Despite the loss, Rizin was in need of locally-appealing talent for their 2023 foray into Azerbaijan--for the folks who aren’t into flags out there, Nazimov’s representing Uzbekistan--and Nazimov was present, ready, and more than capable of beating “The Crazy Cameroonian” Jaures Dea. It was a good win, but it was also on Rizin’s Landmark series, the lesser-advertised prospect showcases. He’d get pulled up to the main show long enough to pound out Sora Yamamoto, but demoted back down to Landmark duty for a win over Sugaru Nii. Those three wins were enough to get him booked for 2025’s New Year’s special--but against the man they call Blackpanther Beynoah, a 5-3 Lightweight. It wasn’t until DEEP champion and Japanese prospect Shunta Nomura had to pull out of his championship bout with Roberto de Souza that Nazimov got his shot at the belt. Given Souza’s years of dominance as the only man to hold the belt in Rizin’s history, Nazimov’s status as a relative unknown and the short-notice nature of his move up the card, the odds were both figuratively and literally against him. He intercepted a de Souza takedown with a knee and knocked him cold in thirteen seconds. However unknown he was last week, he’s one of the most visible Lightweights in the world now.

Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Razhabali Shaydullaev - 17-0, 2 Defenses

I asked how long the second reign of Kleber Koike Erbst would last, and as it turns out, the answer was sixty-two seconds. Razhabali Shaydullaev’s rise through the sport has been impressively meteoric. Four years ago he was a rookie fighting on Batyr Bashy cards in Kyrgyzstan as a predominantly grappling-based fighter. Three years ago he was disposing of journeymen in the developmental leagues of Russia’s Absolute Championship Akhmat. Two years ago he was choking out top contenders in South Korea’s Road FC. One year ago he got signed to Rizin. In just six months he choked out a DEEP champion, submitted a Bellator champion and smashed through a K-1 Kickboxing champion with virtually no resistance. He was the favorite against Erbst, but few thought it would be an easy night, with Erbst having been finished only once in his entire career, and even that was an armbar all the way back in 2009 when he was still a rookie. Shaydullaev, as he has been doing for the entirety of his run thus far, destroyed Erbst. He walked through him and flattened him in just barely over a minute. Rizin’s got another gaijin champion, and given how good he’s looked, they may be stuck with him for awhile--or, worse, they might lose him to the UFC sooner than later. With Mikuru Asakura’s victory over Chihiro Suzuki on the same night he’s the logical next contender, but that would just be stupid, so instead it was Shaydullaev making his first defense against Viktor Kolesnik at Rizin 51 on September 28: He knocked Kolesnik out in just thirty-three seconds. His successful murders got him the main event of 2025’s Japanese New Year’s MMA special, where Rizin secretly hoped their big national star Mikuru Asakura would get the job done; Shaydullaev chain-suplexed him, grounded him, and laid an unconscionable amount of ground and pound on him in one of those Japan-likes-to-let-its-heroes-die moments before the ref finally called the fight in just shy of three minutes. Shaydullaev’s the best guy in the company, and now there’s a question of what’s left for him to do. For now, inexplicably, the answer is carry the murder of the 5-2 Yuta Kubo at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, which is wild because they already fought at the end of 2024 and Shaydullaev destroyed him in seven and a half minutes.

Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Danny Sabatello - 17-4-1, 0 Defenses

When Naoki Inoue won Rizin’s Bantamweight title I wrote that Rizin was one step closer to its dream of an all-Japanese championship roster, and it’s fitting that as gaijin once again take over the majority of the championship belts in the biggest organization in Japan, Danny goddamn Sabatello is one of the men to do it. Sabatello has been dogged by a reputation as a grinding wrestler without a ton to offer since 2020, when he got the call to compete on Dana White’s Contender Series, won, and was notably not offered a contract on the grounds of Boring Grappler. He made the move to late-stage Bellator instead, where he attempted to establish himself as their own personal Chael Sonnen: An indefatigable wrestling machine whose mouth ran just as hard as his double-legs. But it never quite caught on. The talk seemed a bit forced, the wrestling wasn’t that fun to watch, and all his 1980s wrestling promos about the bums in Bellator’s Bantamweight Grand Prix ended with an elimination at the hands of Raufeon Stots. Sabatello swore he’d won and that he’d get revenge; instead he ended his Bellator tenure getting choked out by Magomed Magomedov, decisioned again by Stots, and losing out on a shot at the PFL after going to a draw with Lazaro Dayron, who would’ve won the decision were it not for a point deduction. It was a bit of a shock when Sabatello signed with Rizin in 2025, but it seemed to have paid off when he scored his first knockout in six years during his debut against Shinobu Ota and swore he’d reinvent himself as Japan’s new American superstar. Then he went back to wrestling. It was still enough to get him his shot at Inoue’s belt at 2025’s New Year’s special, and despite the common wisdom of judging favoritism, a very close split decision went Danny’s way. It took three years longer than he intended, but Danny Sabatello is holding gold. Now we see if he can, in fact, become Big In Japan. His first title defense will be against Joji Goto at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11.

Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Hiromasa Ougikubo - 30-8-2, 0 Defenses

It’s been an incredibly long road to gold for Hiromasa Ougikubo. He was a teenager when he made his professional debut all the way back in 2006, and even at 19, he was notable for the tough, gritty way he handled his grappling. Within a year he was a Shooto rookie tournament winner, within a dozen fights he was a regional champion, and a year later, he was Shooto’s Bantamweight World Champion. And then he immediately lost it after getting choked out by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Having faced a level of force he didn’t feel he could contend with, he dropped down to Flyweight, where he was an immediate success, winning the Vale Tudo Japan tournament and, ultimately, the 125-pound Shooto title. That win got him called over to America for the most talent-rich season of The Ultimate Fighter ever, 2016’s Tournament of Champions, where he distinguished himself as one of the best fighters in the house and even beat a young Alexandre Pantoja on his way to the finals. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get past Tim Elliott. He returned to Japan, where, in his absence, Rizin had been reborn in the ashes of Pride FC, and as one of Japan’s best fighters, he got immediately called to the show--where he was immediately defeated by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Ougikubo went back up to Bantamweight and fought his way to a title shot at company star Kai Asakura, but Asakura lanced him with a knee and ended his title hopes again. Undeterred, Hiromasa entered Rizin’s 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix and stormed the bracket, winning four fights in a year and two in the same night, including the sweet revenge of a championship final where he defeated Asakura and staked his claim as the best Bantamweight in Japan. And then South Korean Kim Soo-chul beat him. So Ougikubo dropped back down to Flyweight for 2022’s massive Bellator vs Rizin supercard--where he was, for the third time, beaten by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Someone should find out if that dude’s any good at fighting. Ougikubo still got his shot at Rizin’s Bantamweight title, but Juan Archuleta beat him, and for the first time in seventeen years of fighting, Ougikubo found himself on a three-fight losing streak. But Horiguchi, Rizin’s Flyweight champion, left the company to return to the UFC, and with the throne empty, Ougikubo wanted one more shot. He went back down to 125 pounds, he entered the 2025 Flyweight Grand Prix, he ran the table one more time, and at the 2025 New Year’s Special he faced and defeated Yuki Motoya to win the tournament and, with it, the vacant belt. It took several tries and almost twenty years, but by god, Hiromasa Ougikubo is the world champion.

Rizin Women’s Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs

Seika Izawa - 18-0, 3 Defenses

All hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan’s best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don’t care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP’s strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women’s fighters in history on Rizin’s New Year’s Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin’s atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin’s talent is open to her--but that also means she’s got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin’s Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out, shockingly. It took more than an entire year, but Izawa finally had a title defense against the 8-4 grappler Claire Lopez, and Izawa scored the fastest championship victory in Rizin history, choking her out in just barely one minute. Seika scored one more win on New Year’s Eve, choking out Miyuu Yamamoto in her retirement bout, and while it was an honor, it does sort of emphasize the problem with Seika’s position. She’s unquestionably the best Atomweight in the world, but the last real top fighter she faced was more than a year ago. Will Rizin bring her real competition, or are they trying to simply build a star? And what IS real competition at Atomweight? She choked out Si Yoon Park at DEEP JEWELS 44 to add yet another win and belt to her credit, but the Rizin title wasn’t on the line, so she’s still only got the one defense. She was booked for Rizin 48 on September 29th, and once again instead of a top contender it was Kanna Asakura, and once again, it was a non-title match. Three months later, Rizin booked her for their New Year’s Eve supershow--against Lucia Apdelgarim, a 2-3 kickboxer who’d never beaten an MMA fighter with a single win. Seika submitted her easily and requested international competition, and in their eternal mockery of me, Rizin instead booked her to defend her title against the 3-0 Yu-jin Shin, who fights a weight class and a half up. Shockingly Shin did not make the Atomweight limit, so when Seika beat her easily it was a non-title affair. She had her first actual title defense in two years on November 2, where she beat DEEP’s Saori Oshima, and she shot for a third in very short order, by defending against striking star RENA on the 2025 New Year’s Eve special. It was by far Seika’s toughest fight, with RENA flooring her on a left hook and very nearly knocking her out in the first round, but Seika fought her way back, got RENA down, mauled and ultimately choked her out in the second.

ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Oumar Kane - 7-1, 0 Defenses

The triple championship days are over, and we can go back to appreciating ONE’s Heavyweight division for just how silly it really is. Oumar Kane’s origins are very serious: He grew up near Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and established himself as an undefeated star of Laamb, better known as Senegalese wrestling, a particularly harsh form of the sport that takes place on sand or turf and is fought in tiny shorts. As a giant 6’4” muscle monster with a wrestling background, Kane was an internationally visible talent, and ONE picked him up just one fight into his MMA career and promoted him as an undefeated monster of African wrestling. And it was true! For two fights. In his third bout with ONE, “Reug Reug” lost his undefeated streak in 2021 after gassing just two rounds in against Kirill Grishenko, but the actual ending of the fight was a bizarre sequence involving Grishenko throwing a punch right at the bell that appeared to graze Kane’s chin, only for Oumar to motion that he had been illegally punched in the throat after the bell and collapse onto the mat. After replays showed the punch barely connecting, the fight was ruled a TKO, and Oumar was accused of pulling a soccer dive. He spent three years building a three-fight winning streak--including a kickboxing match with “Boucher Ketchup” Mamadou Kamara, who is not a fighter but an influencer, and who fought exactly the way that sounds--and eventually that led him to a November 9, 2024 showdown with triple champ Anatoly Malykhin. The resulting fight was, to be gentle, pretty dreadful. Malykhin didn’t know how to get in on Kane, Kane repeatedly backed himself into a corner to focus on countering, and outside of the first round and a bit of the fifth, very little actually happened. But a takedown in the first round, a yellow card on Malykhin’s part for grabbing the ropes and a flash knockdown in the fifth were enough for Kane to win the title by split decision. “Reug Reug” is the champion. ONE was trying to position Marcus “Buchecha” Almeida as the top contender, but given that Kane beat him to get his title shot in the first place--and, uh, Buchecha left the company after the fight--and they don’t have any other fucking Heavyweights except, like, Kirill Grishenko--unsurprisingly, ONE decided to just book a rematch an entire year later. Kane vs Malykhin 2 was scheduled for ONE 173 on November 16, 2025, but Reug Reug managed to get concussed in a car accident and the fight had to be postponed until an indefinite future date.

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

For the second time in as many title reigns, ONE has managed to put a ton of hype behind a champion only to squash them prematurely. Anatoly Malykhin is one of the most successful marketing campaigns ONE ever ran: An undefeated, heavy-punching Russian Heavyweight with a 100% finishing rate. He knocked out everyone he faced, he carried ONE’s Heavyweight division as an interim champion while standing champion Arjan Bhullar was having contract issues, and when Bhullar finally re-entered the fold, Malykhin destroyed him with ease. But ONE had greater hopes for Malykhin as their spearhead for real international notoriety: They would make him the first three-division champion in the history of mixed martial arts. And it’d be real easy, because the other two belts were held by one guy. Reinier de Ridder had been their superstar double-champion, but his relationship with ONE had soured, and they cashed in by having de Ridder face Malykhin, twice, at both his weight classes. Malykhin destroyed him and became the first-ever 265, 225 and 205-pound champion the sport has ever seen--admittedly easier when you consider 225 is not a division that exists in almost any other federation on Earth. But he did it! And then they organized his first-ever title defense by having him put the Heavyweight belt on the line against Oumar “Reug Reug” Kane, and he lost a split decision, and now he is a lowly two-belt schmuck. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Malykhin now, given that the last 205-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s bout against de Ridder, and the last 225-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s 2022 bout with de Ridder. He was hoping to get the Heavyweight title back at ONE 173, but with Reug Reug injured, Malykhin’s playing the waiting game.

ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 0 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 1 Defense

It took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE’S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE’s repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y’know, that clearly did not happen. ONE held an interim title fight between Alibeg Rasulov and Ok Rae Yoon to welcome him back--but that didn’t exactly happen either, as Rasulov failed hydration tests, became ineligible to win the title, then won the fight anyway. Lee vs Rasulov was scheduled for October. And then November. It finally happened on December 7, 2024--and it ended in a No Contest after two rounds thanks to Christian unintentionally gouging Rasulov’s eye. They ran it back almost a full year later at ONE 173 on November 16, and this time Lee knocked him out in the second round, marking Lee’s first win in three years.

ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs

Tang Kai - 19-4, 1 Defense

Tang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China’s WBK (after investigating, we THINK it’s World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz “Ong Bak” Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai’s weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai’s Dragon Gym and Phuket’s legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It’s worked out quite well: He hasn’t lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China’s Rebel FC got ONE’s attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he’s held for two years. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. His position hasn’t improved much, either. He was supposed to defend his title against Akbar Abdullaev on January 10, and Abdullaev pounded him out in the fifth round, but he also missed weight by a pound and a half and thus was ineligible for the championship. So, hey: Still a world champion! You just got knocked out a little bit. It’s fine.

ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs

Engh-Orgil Baatarkhuu - 14-3, 0 Defenses

By god, ONE had an MMA title change hands in 2025. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is one of the precious few success stories for ONE’s feeder system. He was a 5-2 champion in the small (but competitive!) regional scene in his native Mongolia, which put him on ONE’s talent-scouting radar for their Warriors of the Steppe tournament in 2022. Enkh won two fights in six days to earn his contract with ONE, where he quickly discovered that no matter where you go in the wide world of sports, being a grappler-type Pokemon makes companies less invested in promoting you. Enkh went 6-1 across two years--8-1, if you count those aforementioned tournament wins--and finished most of his opponents, but title contention eluded him in no small part thanks to ONE’s turn away from mixed martial arts as a whole. It wasn’t until December 6 that Enkh finally got his long-belated shot at Fabricio Andrade’s Bantamweight title, and the first round and a half looked pretty thoroughly one-sided in Andrade’s favor, as most had figured it would be given the gap in Enkh’s striking game, and Andrade battered him to a near-stoppage on a couple occasions. But Enkh, as it turns out, is tough as shit. He weathered the storm and used his grit, his power and his wrestling to turn the tables, and towards the end of the fourth round, an exhausted Andrade gave up the ghost and got himself strangled. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is ONE’s Bantamweight champion, and his very first act as a champion was to call for a cross-class title match with Tang Kai, because weight classes aren’t real.

ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs

Yuya Wakamatsu - 20-6, 1 Defense

After two years of solitude, ONE’s Flyweight title has a home again, and it is to one of the men most denied it. Yuya Wakamatsu was a Pancrase standout in Japan for years before the rest of the world knew his name, but even there, he couldn’t get over the hump, winning their Flyweight Neo-Blood Tournament in 2016 only to get knocked out by standing champion Senzo Ikeda when he challenged for the title itself. But ONE’s aggressive expansion in the late 2010s brought in a lot of Japanese talent, including both Wakamatsu and Ikeda, and fittingly, both lost their first two fights and were promptly forgotten by most of the audience. But where his nemesis retired in fairly short order, Wakamatsu kept grinding and ultimately built up a five-fight winning streak, which was more than enough to justify a shot at then-champion Adriano Moraes--which he lost. And then he missed weight and got knocked out. And then he won, but missed weight again. ONE was decidedly unhappy with him, but he got his weight cut under control and returned to his winning ways, and when Demetrious Johnson retired and abdicated the belt, ONE needed an answer. On March 23, 2025, Wakamatsu and Moraes had a rematch three years in the making, and this time, Wakamatsu made it count by pounding Moraes out in a single round. After a decade in the sport and three at-bats, Yuya Wakamatsu finally has his championship belt. His first defense was a champion vs champion match against Joshua Pacio at ONE 173 on November 16, because ONE needs to fire their bullets as soon as they have them. Yuya punched him out in six minutes.

ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Pacio - 23-5, 1 Defense

It’s been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. “The Passion” stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they’d become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE’s lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE’s ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE’s tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and was out for an entire year. On February 20th, 2025, Pacio and Brooks finally fought again and it was weird, but definitive. Jarred Brooks seemingly exhausted himself after a round and Pacio pounded him for the entire second round, which eventually elicited a mercy stoppage from the ref. ONE has only one 125-pound champion again. So he, of course, challenged for the 135-pound title next. Pacio vs Wakamatsu happened at ONE 173 on November 16 and ended in Pacio getting smashed in six minutes.

ONE Women’s Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Xiong Jing Nan - 19-2, 7 Defenses

Xiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She’d enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China’s Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn’t one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE’s women’s MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan’s belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee’s belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE’s best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. An entire 364 days later, she had her next fight: A special rules match, with MMA gloves but only punches and no takedowns or clinching allowed, against Muay Thai champion Nat “Wondergirl” Jaroonsak. Half a year later her next fight was finally announced, and it was, once, defending her title against ONE’s new postergirl in Stamp Fairtex as the company attempts, once again, to make a double champ at Xiong Jing Nan’s expense, and with Stamp out injured ONE went back to radio silence. It took half a year for Xiong to get rebooked--and it was a non-title fight against Bo Meng at 115 pounds. Xiong won, and once again, what the hell are we doing.

ONE Women’s Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs

Denice Zamboanga - 12-2, 0 Defenses

Denice Zamboanga, to be clear, is not the problem with ONE’s women’s divisions. She’s a good fighter. She’s been trucking along in ONE since 2009, she’s proven herself repeatedly as a solid all-around competitor. She’s tough, she’s talented, she’s never been finished. She’s also never beaten a top fighter. She’s fought 0-0 rookies, she’s beaten journeywomen on losing streaks--in a dozen fights with ONE, she’s only beaten someone coming off a victory at all twice. She was also notably defeated by Seo Hee Ham, the top Atomweight contender and former Rizin champion, twice in a row. It was consequently a bit of a surprise to Ham when ONE announced an interim title fight to make up for Stamp’s injury absence and she wasn’t in it. Instead of her, the #1 contender whose only loss in ONE was to Stamp herself, it would be Denice Zamboanga, the woman she beat, against Alyona Rassohyna, a woman she also beat and who, as a bonus, had not fought in ONE since September of 2021--when she lost to Stamp Fairtex. This was all supposed to end in a unification match with Stamp at ONE 173 on August 1, but in early May, ONE announced that Stamp had reinjured her knee and was going to miss at least the rest of 2025. With the awareness that it would have been close to two and a half years between title fights, Stamp ‘voluntarily relinquished’ her title. This wound up being even more infuriating when ONE failed to rebook Denice for so long that upon finally scheduling her again, they chose ONE 173 on November 16, where Stamp Fairtex, who is now healthy, will be fighting a completely unrelated kickboxing match. Denice will face Ayaka Miura. Rather: Denice was going to face Ayaka Miura, but at the end of August she announced medical issues will prevent her from fighting. So they made an interim title fight for Stamp’s return against a non-#1 contender, and then they stripped Stamp for being unable to compete, and then they didn’t schedule the next championship fight until the card where Stamp was making her return anyway, and now Stamp is healthy and fighting but the Atomweight champion isn’t. Stamp lost and Denice has yet to be rebooked. Just fucking stop already.

Invicta Bantamweight Championship, 135 lbs

Jennifer Maia - 23-10-1, 0 Defenses

It did not take Jennifer Maia long to find her way back home to Invicta after the UFC cut her in 2023, and it only took a year for her to reclaim gold in the company she left behind. This is, in fact, Maia’s third stint with Invicta: The first time around was back in 2013, when Invicta was barely a year old and Maia was only a couple years and nine fights into her career, and it saw Maia distinguishing herself as a hot prospect but failing to get past the top ranks. She came back in 2016 as a more seasoned fighter and captured its Flyweight championship, but, as is the fate of all regional champions, she traded the belt for a ticket to the UFC. Her half-decade in the big show was by no means bad--she even fought Valentina Shevchenko for the UFC’s 125-pound title--but she still couldn’t crack the top of the mountain, and eventually, the UFC got tired of her derailing prospects and let her go. It only took two fights for Maia to dethrone Talita Bernardo and gain her second Invicta gold. Hopefully she sticks around this time.

Invicta Atomweight Championship, 105 lbs

Elisandra Ferreira - 9-2, 1 Defense

The only major Atomweight division in America is back, and as happens so often, it belongs to Brazil. Elisandra “Lili” Ferreira started competing as an amateur at 19, lost all of her amateur fights, and proceeded to turn pro anyway, because giving up sucks. She spent the first third of her professional career fighting at Strawweight simply because Atomweight opportunities are few and farbetween, but she made the turn to the lower weight class in 2021 and never looked back, and boy, it’s worked out for her. With one exception--a loss to Anastasia Nikolakakos, maybe the best Atomweight on this side of the globe--Ferreira’s cleaned house on the division. She made the jump to Invicta in 2023, and a year and a half later she’s 4-0 and the new bannerwoman for its most unique weight class, thanks to a hard-fought decision over Andressa Romero on September 20, 2024. Invicta’s 2024 comeback has reclaimed its first lost title; now we just have to see who they line up to test Ferreira over the next year of its renaissance. Her first at-bat came against Ana Palacios at Invicta FC 61 on April 4, and Ferreira earned a near-shutout on the scorecards.

PFL Heavyweight Championship, 265 lbs

Vadim Nemkov - 19-2 (1), 0 Defenses

When the PFL announced that it was going to crown a standing Heavyweight champion, they had a raft of interesting options. Oleg Popov, their 2025 tournament champion, had a strong argument. Denis Goltsov, 2024 champion and the only man in almost ten years to beat Popov, could’ve called dibs. Hell, the PFL still technically has Francis Ngannou, the best Heavyweight on the planet, under contract. They, of course, did not choose any of those men. They chose Renan Ferreira, the 2023 tournament champion whose only fight in almost two years was a TKO loss to Ngannou, and Vadim Nemkov, Bellator’s best Light Heavyweight. Nemkov, a Fedor protégé, hadn’t lost since 2016, when he got himself punched out by Jiří Procházka and narrowly edged out by Karl Albrektsson, and it’s a testament to both his skills and the world’s dim view of the Heavyweight division that when the PFL acquired Bellator and Nemkov announced he was leaving 205 for the 265-pound world, instead of the expected fretting about how a 6’1” man would contend in the world of the big boys, more or less everyone said “Yeah, that’s fine.” And lo: It was. Nemkov choked out 2021 PFL champ Bruno Cappelozza, and then he choked out the ever-pained Timothy Johnson, and when he fought Renan Ferreira at PFL Champions Series 4 on December 13, 2025, shockingly, he choked him out, too. Nemkov’s now the only major Heavyweight champion in American MMA outside of the UFC. Hopefully it pays off.

PFL Light Heavyweight Championship, 205 lbs

Corey Anderson - 20-6 (1), 0 Defenses

One of the best Light Heavyweights in the world isn’t in the UFC, and they have only themselves to blame. Corey Anderson was the precise kind of fighter the UFC wanted when they first got ahold of him in 2014: Big, young, athletic, talented, undefeated. He had all the makings of a future champion, and his victory on The Ultimate Fighter 19 (jesus christ) cemented him as a prospect to watch. Unfortunately, he had also barely been in the sport for a year and only had four professional fights to his name. In short order he’d suffered his first loss, and a couple years later, a pair of back-to-back knockouts in 2017 sent him to the realm of afterthoughts. But a recommitment to his wrestling style, an extremely well-aged victory over Glover Teixeira, and a devastating knockout over Johnny Walker got Anderson back in the title picture, and in 2020, he fought Jan Błachowicz to determine the #1 contender to the soon-to-be-vacated belt. They’d done battle once, five years prior, and Corey had won a clear decision. This time, Jan flattened him in three minutes. Despite his top-ten ranking and the four consecutive fights he’d just won, the UFC decided to dump Corey, sending him from main event to unemployment in a week. Corey went straight to Bellator and proceeded to become one of its best stars, and he would have become the first man in America to beat Vadim Nemkov had they not banged their heads together and ended the fight prematurely. Corey lost the rematch, but he became the last man to hold Bellator’s Light Heavyweight title after beating Karl Moore, and on October 3, Corey had a champion vs champion match against the PFL’s 205-pound tournament champion, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov. Corey had pounded him out in Bellator four years prior, and while he didn’t get the stoppage in the present, he did get the win, and in so doing he became the inaugural PFL Light Heavyweight Champion. What that actually means going forward, we’ll have to see.

PFL Middleweight Championship, 185 lbs

Costello van Steenis - 17-3, 0 Defenses

For years, the Professional Fighters League has threatened to crown standing champions. Did they carry through any of their major tournament winners? Nope. Did they bring out their holdout Bellator champions? Not exactly! Did they at least make a big hubbub about finally going through with it? Of course not. Instead, just five days before PFL Champions Series 2, their promotional debut in South Africa, they abruptly announced that Bellator champ Johnny Eblen was suddenly the first-ever PFL Middleweight Champion, and his match with Costello van Steenis was the first-ever defense of the title. Costello, himself, was a Bellator veteran who’d been absorbed in the PFL buyout, but he’d always played second fiddle in the organization, unable to get through the John Salters and Douglas Limas of the world, and thus said world was mostly overlooking him as a challenger. The first three rounds of Eblen gradually grinding him into dust bore out that expectation, but then a funny thing happened: The inexhaustible wrestler got tired. Eblen found himself punched up by van Steenis in the fourth round, and he seemed to be pulling it together again in the fifth, but right before the bell could ring van Steenis managed to take his back and sink in a choke, and with just seven seconds separating him from an almost-certain decision victory, Eblen passed out. Costello van Steenis is the first man to truly hold a standing PFL Championship, and he’ll be defending his title in a rematch with Fabian Edwards on March 7.

PFL Lightweight Championship, 155 lbs

Usman Nurmagomedov - 21-0 (1), 1 Defense

The Nurmagomedov family is trying to run the sport, and Usman is their B-league beachhead, but that assault has proven to be an awful lot rockier than the rest. As the kid brother of Umar and the cousin of Khabib, Usman had great expectations thrust upon him very early in his career, and he dealt with them the way regional talents with great camps traditionally do: Squashing severely overmatched competition until you get a contract from one of the big companies. Bellator won the Usman bidding war and brought him over in 2021, and he proved to be one of the breakout stars of their final days, blitzing his way up the Lightweight ranks, knocking off several contenders and ultimately beating Patricky Pitbull to win the 155-pound championship and securing his reign by retiring former star and UFC champ Benson Henderson. It was 2023, and even though Bellator’s upcoming death was clear, Usman was a name and widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world. Unfortunately, then, things got weird. He was a massive, -2200 favorite to beat Brent Primus in the waning days of Bellator, and he did--and it became the first non-win of his career after failing a drug test for something that was never disclosed. He carried Bellator’s title over into its new life as a colony of the PFL, and he immediately ran into controversy after barely scraping a majority decision off of Irish superprospect Paul Hughes. The world wanted a rematch for the inaugural PFL Lightweight Championship fight, and on October 3, at the PFL’s big Dubai show, they got it--and this time, it waws even closer, with media scorecards split right down the middle. This, by itself, is not that unusual, nor is one fighter winning a controversial decision unusual. It is unusual when the decision is not only unanimous, but one judge scores the entire fight as a 50-45 shut-out. So Usman’s last two wins were dubious, and his future as part of the PFL depends on how they treat their own championship, but for now, he is the damn champion. He notched his first title defense by choking out Alfie Davis on February 7.

PFL Women’s Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Cris Cyborg - 29-2 (1), 1 Defense

Are you noticing how all of the inaugural PFL champions are just Bellator’s champions? Funny, that. Cris Cyborg is the greatest Women’s Featherweight of all time, and we all just kind of have to deal with that, because Women’s Featherweight has only barely ever existed. Strikeforce set the standard back in 2006 because Gina Carano was one of their biggest stars, and that star lasted right up until 2009, when they attempted to put a belt on her and failed because Cris Cyborg punched the shit out of her. In the following sixteen years Cyborg’s only lost one mixed martial arts fight, and it took Amanda Nunes, the greatest Women’s mixed martial artist of all time, to do it. Aside from that one loss, she’s run the table. She was the Strikeforce Featherweight Champion until it closed, and then she was Invicta’s Featherweight Champion until they let the UFC have her, and then she was the UFC’s Featherweight Champion until Amanda dropped her, and Cyborg promptly went to Bellator and won their title, too. When the PFL brought her over in the Bellator buyout, they set her up for an interpromotional superfight against Larissa Pacheco, a two-time PFL tournament winner and the only woman who’d ever beaten Kayla Harrison. On one hand, Pacheco’s one of just six women to ever make it to the final bell with Cyborg. On the other, she lost 4-1. In the ultimate act of promotional cowardice, the PFL promoted Cyborg to champion status three days before her appearance at the PFL Champions Series on December 13, 2025, meaning her fight with Sara Collins was, technically, a title defense. It was as one-sided as you’d expect. In theory, this is great! The biggest female fighter outside the UFC has a belt and the PFL is bringing back a division the UFC threw in the garbage. In practice, Cyborg didn’t even get out of her post-fight interview without noting that after her next fight she’s going to retire from MMA in favor of focusing on her boxing career. So welcome back, Women’s Featherweight. I hope you still exist by 2027.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28 FROM THE ARENA CDMX IN MEXICO CITY
PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

Last year we talked about the way the UFC prioritized their huge Mexican-appeal attempts at the Noche UFC cards while getting weirdly understated about the cards they actually put on in Mexico. Last year’s Noche UFC was a Sean O’Malley/Alexa Grasso championship double-header at the Sphere and their visit to Mexico City was Brandon Moreno vs Steve Erceg and Manuel Torres vs Drew Dober.

This year’s Noche UFC 3 was a blockbuster Fight Night headlined by Diego Lopes vs Jean Silva. This year only 6 out of the 26 fighters booked on this Arena CDMX show are coming off of a UFC win. But good news: Both of them have David Martínez in the co-main slot, which means we’re closer than ever to quality parity!

Bad news: That parity includes 2-1 Lone’er Kavanagh in the main event and that’s portentous for the future.

MAIN EVENT: THE FAST WAY UP
FLYWEIGHT: Brandon Moreno (23-9-2, #6) vs Lone’er Kavanagh (9-1, #15)

I’ve been laughing about this since they announced it, but it’s that kind of laugh that comes from a place of pain deep under your ribs. Let’s get the good side of this matchup out of the way before we get to the dark comedy: Brandon Moreno is in a really tough spot right now, and that’s saying something, because he’s been in a really tough spot for, like, the last five years.

Moreno was not supposed to be a Thing. He came up second on The Ultimate Fighter 24 (jesus christ) back in 2016, he had a good-but-not-great 3-2 run before the UFC cut him, and his return to the company in 2019 started off on a split draw. Nothing about him screamed title contender, but a couple wins, a serendipitous last-minute replacement and busting Brandon Royval’s shoulder got him into the championship picture a year later anyhow. He was a virtual afterthought, a +300 underdog against the force of Flyweight nature that was defending champion Deiveson Figueiredo, a man the entire MMA world had picked out as a future great we’d talk about right alongside Demetrious Johnson one day.

Realistically: Moreno would’ve lost the fight if Deiveson hadn’t gotten a point deducted for low blows. But he did, and that meant it, just like Moreno’s return, was a draw, and that locked them into a progressively more insane series of rematches that didn’t end until they’d fought four times in twenty-five months. The second time, Moreno choked Figueiredo out. The third time, Figueiredo dropped him repeatedly and won a decision. The fourth and final time, Moreno punched Figueiredo’s eye shut in three rounds and Figgy hugged him and left the Flyweight division. Brandon won the rivalry, won the belt, and won the respect he’d been denied by the UFC the first time around.

Unfortunately, he had a bogeyman. When he’d been choked out of TUF seven years prior, it’d been at the hands of Alexandre Pantoja. When the UFC cut Moreno in 2018, it was after a loss to Alexandre Pantoja. As the champion, Moreno’s #1 contender was, once again, Alexandre Pantoja, and barely half a year after Moreno ended the most exhausting rivalry of his career, his true nemesis beat him again. It was only a split decision, but with three career losses to the new champion getting a rematch was going to require a run through all the top contenders Flyweight had to offer, and Moreno’s rebound against fellow rematch fanatic Brandon Royval ended in another split decision loss. Moreno was stuck on the outside looking in, and when you’re as notable as he is, that means having to repeatedly beat back your own replacements.

At first he was supposed to be a way to potentially rehabilitate the perpetually-injured, 17-1 Amir Albazi; instead Moreno trounced him with ease. Then he was supposed to help get the UFC’s favorite Australian Steve Erceg back into title contention; instead Moreno carried the banner for their ride into Mexico City by winning a wide decision. It wasn’t until this past December that the company finally got what it wanted. Tatsuro Taira was supposed to be the UFC’s big hope for their first-ever Japanese champion, but he’d been set back by his first-ever career loss thanks to our old friend Brandon Royval. At the last pay-per-view of the year--the last UFC pay-per-view ever, as of now--Taira finally got to the top of the heap after becoming the first person (outside of TUF) to ever stop Moreno, pounding him out in a round and a half.

Was the stoppage a little early? Yes. Did Taira still outwrestle him and punch him in the head 24 times in twenty seconds? He sure did. It was an entirely fair win, and it left Moreno fighting to stick to the top ten for the first time in six years. But he’s still the UFC’s best hope for headlining Mexico, so despite what was technically a TKO loss just 84 days ago, they booked him to main event the Arena CDMX against the rising Asu Almabayev, either giving the crowd another big local hero victory or rubbing off a little more of Moreno’s notability on another, cheaper prospect.

Then Asu had to pull out, and things got really fucking silly.

I’m gonna quote from November of 2024 real quick.

And here, we have the fight the company is really invested in. Lone’er Kavanagh reads like he was drawn up in a UFC marketing department: An undefeated Chinese-Irish striking artist who finishes almost all of his fights, kills people with spinning heel kicks, and would rather drop people on the Contender Series and sign the dotted line than gamble on free agency. He’s the precise ideal of what their entire contract mill enterprise is out to find, and they would desperately like him to win this fight.

Lord knows the UFC has options. Tim Elliott’s right there, and he just choked out former title contender Kai Asakura. Steve Erceg’s coming off a win again, they could have run back the rematch. Hell, a multitude of Flyweights campaigned for this fight, but no one more visibly than the #13-ranked Charles Johnson. Sure, he just got knocked out by an overweight Alex Perez, but he still privately and publicly threw his hat in the ring and begged for the opportunity. After all, new champion Joshua Van only has one loss in the UFC, and it came from Charles Johnson flattening him. He’s always had the ability. Despite my lifelong InnerG fandom I thought it was a terrible idea the UFC should turn down, because booking people to fight just four weeks after they got knocked out is a terrible idea.

And then they booked Johnson for a random Apex bout with Bruno Silva two weeks from now, and announced Bruno Silva’s original opponent Lone’er Kavanagh was taking the Moreno fight instead. Lone’er Kavanagh, who is coming off of not just the first loss of his career, but a knockout loss.

Against Charles Johnson.

This fight is like the phases of the favorability moon. The UFC wants Lone’er Kavanagh. They always have. He’s an undefeated Chinese-Irish striker, you could not stop them from throwing fortune and fame his way, and that includes getting him to 2-0 in the UFC without having to fight a real wrestler. Charles Johnson? They fuckin’ hate that dude. No matter how many fights he wins or how well he wins them, they refuse to promote him. When last we saw him, Johnson was on a four-fight winning streak that included not just beating but knocking out Joshua Van. Johnson’s next fight was in the Apex; Van’s was in The Sphere. And what did Johnson get for winning that fight? The very first curtain-jerking fight on another set of Apex prelims against Ramazan Temirov, one of the best prospects the UFC has signed in years.

Lone’er Kavanagh is 2-1 in the UFC. Those two victories were decision wins over Jose Ochoa, who is 1-2, and Felipe dos Santos, who is 1-3. That was still enough to get him ranked in the top fifteen. The day before he was ranked, the #14 Flyweight in the UFC was Joseph Morales. He’d just won TUF 33 and followed that up by choking out former top-ten contender Matt Schnell in a single round. Then the rankings updated to include the newly-returned Kyoji Horiguchi, and mysteriously, Morales was out and Lone’er, who hadn’t won a fight in almost a year and was coming off a huge loss, was in.

Morales isn’t booked to fight again, yet. Neither are Brandon Royval, Tagir Ulanbekov, Rei Tsuruya or Tim Elliott.

But Lone’er Kavanagh has a main event against the most visible Flyweight in the UFC. Michael Bisping is going to tell you about Lone’er Kavanagh’s stardom and fanbase and how his path to the top was entirely natural and in no way astroturfed, and he does not care if you believe him.

Ronda Rousey had an interview with Jim Rome this week regarding the UFC’s refusal to book the spectacle fight between herself and Gina Carano, and she made the point a lot of pundits, activists and insufficiently-subscribed-to bloggers have been making for the last several years: The UFC has completed its journey out of the fan business. They no longer need to attract you. They got their deal. They made their billions. Their money doesn’t come from your views anymore. They now have exactly one goal: Get their preferred marketing favorites to the top of the card as fast as possible, while their contracts are still cheap. They’d love it if you wanted to see Lone’er Kavanagh! But your participation is not required for their purposes, because they’re going to do it anyway.

It is nihilistic and short-sighted and deeply, deeply destructive for the sport, and that is the age we are going to be in for the next seven years, and we’re only two months into that near-decade era and we’re already getting Lone’er Kavanagh contention bouts, so buckle the fuck up, because where we’re going, they won’t need buys to see.

I like Charles Johnson. I’m pretty sure Moreno is still better than him. BRANDON MORENO BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE SLOW WAY DOWN
BANTAMWEIGHT: Marlon Vera (23-11-1, #9) vs David Martínez (13-1, #10)

Oh, Chito. I think we’re getting close to the end.

We’re really not that removed from a time when World Champion Marlon Vera felt like a possibility. At the end of 2022, Chito was the people’s goddamn champion. He battled for his family, he treasured his daughter, he was too rough for marketing but too charismatic to ignore. He fought with an incredibly odd, sniping style that eschewed volume in favor of opportunism, and somehow he could make it work. He would get outstruck almost 2:1 and still win decisions because after absorbing dozens of punches he would land one shot that almost killed his opponent. He executed Frankie Edgar. He retired Dominick Cruz. He made himself a part of the contendership conversation.

And then it turned out ‘what if I fight a low volume style and wait for my opponents to make mistakes’ doesn’t work at the highest level of the sport. Vera’s 1 for his last 5 and even that win was a questionable decision. Cory Sandhagen dominated him. Sean O’Malley dominated him. Deiveson Figueiredo outgrappled him. It wasn’t until Aiemann Zahabi took him to a decision loss this past October that most folks accepted it was simply over. The knockdowns aren’t there anymore. The gameplan hasn’t adjusted. People have figured him out, and the UFC has extracted his value, and now he’s been fighting his way down the rankings as a test for the next class of contenders.

David Martínez is in that class now, and it’s very funny, because he really wasn’t supposed to be. He had the typical path to the Contender Series--hang around the regional circuit, beat a 2-0 guy nine fights into your career, win a C-level championship, trade it in for a shot at the contract mill against someone with half your experience--and when he unsurprisingly won, they snatched him up in a heartbeat. His debut was only eleven months ago, and it came against Saimon Oliveira in the great churn of former DWCS prospects for new DWCS prospects that’s going to dictate the entire span of the sport for the next terrible era of history. Unsurprisingly, Martínez nuked him in a round, and the UFC set him up for a step up against the 1-1 Carlos Vera.

But Vera couldn’t make it, so instead it became a fight with the 1-2 Quang Le. And then Quang Le couldn’t make it, and coincidentally, the UFC was making an attempt to exchange longterm Bantamweight Cerberus Rob Font for their child soldier Raul Rosas Jr. that fell through when Raul pulled out, too. So David Martínez, at 1-0 in the UFC, wound up fighting Rob Font, who has been ranked for damn near a decade, in the co-main event of Noche UFC 3. And he won! It was a close fight and Font might have been en route to yet another 29-28 decision win until Martínez dropped him in the waning seconds of the bout. Font survived to the bell, but Martínez got the third round and with it the well-deserved decision, and suddenly, after just two fights in the UFC, he was in the top ten.

Now there’s just the rest of the climb up the ladder. Martínez and his style seem more than capable of beating the Chito Vera of 2026, but if we’re being depressingly honest, that seems like most of the Bantamweight top fifteen. Vera’s already been beaten by most of the people ranked above him, and the people below aren’t that much less scary. Is Payton Talbott going to get stymied by fear of Vera’s headkicks when he hits just as hard? Will Vinicius Oliveira’s looping style leave him open to counters when he eats punches for breakfast? If Montel Jackson and Marlon Vera wind up in the cage together will they simply stare at each other while circling intensely for fifteen minutes?

I really wanted Champion Chito to be a thing. I’m sad we’ve wound up here instead. But when you keep doing the same thing over and over again, the world is going to catch on. DAVID MARTÍNEZ BY DECISION.

MAIN CARD: PREEMPTIVELY NOTING THAT THIS WEEK’S RANKED WOMEN’S FIGHT ISN’T UP HERE BUT IMANOL RODRIGUEZ IS
LIGHTWEIGHT: Daniel Zellhuber (15-3) vs King Green (33-17-1 (1))

Speaking of prospects that cannot be allowed to fail: Hi, Daniel. This isn’t even the first time we’ve had this conversation about you. If you have a long memory for these endless essays, you may remember all the way back in 2023 when we discussed the way Zellhuber got beat by Trey Ogden and got booked into nice, comfortable, visible rehab matches while Ogden got just a touch buried, because losing had no relevance on the UFC’s plans to make the man literally nicknamed ‘Golden Boy’ a central part of their plans to invade Mexico. And he got a three-fight winning streak out of it! Sure, it was over Lando Vannata, Christos Giagos and Francisco Prado, bringing the total UFC records of said streak to an incredible 11-19-2, but he won, so that’s what matters! And then he got just barely beat by Esteban Ribovics, which wasn’t really the plan, and then he got beat again by a seventy-two year-old Michael Johnson, which definitely wasn’t the plan, and now his rehabilitation campaign has been replaced by a losing streak.

Which is why he’s on a main card fighting King Green, the master of prospect-enabling. Green’s been the UFC’s most valuable player when it comes to boosting the guys they want boosted and stopping the guys they want stopped. Islam Makhachev, Drew Dober, Jalin Turner, Paddy Pimblett and Mauricio Ruffy have all made hay out of Green’s head over the last four years and gone on to give the company the business it wanted. But Jared Gordon, in exchange for beating* Paddy Pimblett, got a King Green headbutt to the jaw, and Grant Dawson, for the sin of wrestling, got punched out in under a minute. Green’s own losing streak got snapped this past December with a decision over Lance Gibson Jr., an unexpected import from the Bellator graveyard, which means his prospect-popularizing powers have recharged and it is time to once again book him against a bigger, younger, more marketable fighter so he can impart a modicum of momentum based on being one of the few remaining fighters anyone actually remembers from the days before the company stopped caring about marketing most of the roster.

Zellhuber’s bigger and stronger and younger and faster and he’s got half a foot of reach in his direction and I am choosing to stand obstinately in the flow of the river of time and deny it. KING GREEN BY DECISION.

_{*We have eyes.}

FLYWEIGHT: Edgar Cháirez (12-6 (1)) vs Felipe Bunes (14-8)

We talk about how fighters are becoming utility players as the UFC gets more explicit in their targeting, but I want to be clear: This is all they have for Edgar Cháirez to do. His initial debut was a regular-ass fight card, and I guess losing made them realize he was worth more for targeted marketing than actual contention, because he’s stuck on the Mexican-appeal circuit and they’re never letting him go. Noche UFC, Arena CDMX, back and forth, every year. The only reason he wasn’t on this September’s Noche was an untimely leg injury. Is he going anywhere yet? Not really, he has yet to string together two wins or two losses. He simply Is, and as long as his Isness is helpful for advertising, he has a job.

Felipe Bunes is more of a convenience. They picked him up back in 2023 as a potential foil for Zhalgas Zhumagulov, he got hurt, and in a scramble to rebook Zhalgas the UFC found some assuredly unimportant prospect named Joshua Van, and three years later, unintentionally giving the world Van is still Felipe’s biggest contribution to the sport. He ironically fought Van and got smashed, he came back to submit Jose “You Can’t Pluralize Lone Ranger” Johnson a year later, eight months after that he put up a solid fight against a considerably overweight Rafael Estevam but still got outworked, and it’s been a half-year and that’s about it. Three years, three fights, one win and it came against a guy who got knocked out by Mana “Manaboi” Martinez.

Bunes has a tendency to get outgrappled and out-muscled, and Edgar’s probably not gonna have a lot of trouble with either. EDGAR CHÁIREZ BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Imanol Rodriguez (6-0) vs Kevin Borjas (10-4)

Awhile ago someone asked me how I didn’t understand that main card fights are built to be fun and women’s MMA fights aren’t, which is why they get stuck on the prelims while prospects get main card slots, and my response was a) first off, fuck you, Sean Strickland, and b) everything the UFC does is an explicit choice and the reasons for those choices matter, and reducing them down to ‘fun’ or ‘not fun’ is missing the forest for a bunch of weirdly misogynistic trees. Imanol Rodriguez has six professional fights. His one Contender Series fight constitutes 17% of his career. And they wanted him before that--he was pulled onto TUF 33 (jesus christ) where he got beat by eventual champion Joseph Morales. But Imanol fights wild and he knocks people out and he’s in his mid-twenties and he has no leverage in the sport and he’s from Mexico and consequently he is everything they want to maximize their potential return on interest, which is the only thing that matters now.

You can underline that point by their having him debut against Kevin Borjas. Borjas, too, has been a recurring part of the Latin-American push, but as he is Peruvian and thus not the marketing-optimal nationality he tends to be the B-side. He was supposed to fight Edgar Cháirez at Noche 2, he was supposed to lose to Ronaldo “Lazy Boy” Rodríguez at last year’s Mexico show only to make things awkward by daring to win, and the UFC was so thrilled with his efforts that they sent him to Shanghai to fight Sumudaerji as another, different flavor of disfavored foreigner and this time he dutifully and correctly lost. He’s 1-3 in the company, he’s been an underdog in every single fight he’s had, and their expectation is that he will, once again, get beaten to make the crowd cheer for a local hero because matchmaking has regressed to the days of the WWF making Sergeant Slaughter an Iraqi sympathizer.

In other words: I am choosing to be stubborn against the odds and believe in Borjas. KEVIN BORJAS BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Santiago Luna (7-0) vs Angel Pacheco (7-3)

The last time we saw Santiago Luna--naturally at Noche UFC 3, because of course it was--I was complaining about how he was being booked on the main card despite being a UFC debutant with a definitionally unremarkable record while Tatiana Suarez and Amanda Lemos, the #2 and #4 Women’s Strawweights, were fighting in a top contendership bout midway through the prelims. More the fool me, because Suarez, who is still #2 and has only ever lost to Zhang Weili, is fighting the #6-ranked Loopy Godinez next, and now there’s another, different ranked women’s fight stuck in the middle of the prelims, and Santiago Luna is still here on the main card even though the UFC cut Quang Le, the man he beat in his one and only fight in the company, after Luna knocked him out. Are they going to give him a better fight this time?

Nope! Angel Pacheco has been signed to the UFC for two and a half years and he has one fight and it was all the way back in March of 2024, and not only did he lose, but the man he lost to, Caolán Loughran, got released two fights later. Even though Loughran won his last fight, and the man he beat, Nathan Fletcher, is still signed. Angel didn’t even win his Contender Series fight--he dropped a decision to Danny Silva, but Pacheco was ‘just so tough,’ so they signed him anyway. It is 2026 and he’s either 0-1 or 0-2 in the company depending on if you count DWCS, and before his shot at the bigtime he was beating up a 9-14 guy, for the second time, in the main event of BUDWEISER’S BUD BRAWL II. He hasn’t won a fight since the Summer of 2022. The last time we saw him he got outstruck almost 2:1 and thoroughly outwrestled. He’s a guy from Minnesota in his mid-thirties and the UFC is employing him specifically to lose.

It’s funny how the record-padding I complain about in DWCS is just becoming the UFC now. SANTIAGO LUNA BY TKO.

PRELIMS: YEAH, I KNOW, ME TOO
MIDDLEWEIGHT: José Medina (11-6) vs Ryan Gandra (8-1)

Like, you’re just doing this to fuck with me, right? The top ten women’s fight is one slot down from here, it’s almost the headliner, but god forbid, because we need to make that space for José Medina, who is 0-3 and that’s not counting the Contender Series fight he also lost, and Ryan Gandra, who is making his debut and whose standout skills include “throws punches” and “can kick someone in the dick twice and then get mad at them for it,” which is the kind of stuff I really like to see when I do tape review. They’ve already thrown Medina into the meat grinder of prospects they are explicably or inexplicably invested in--Zach Reese, Ateba Gautier, even Duško Todorović--and he’s been beaten by all of them and finished by most, so why not chuck him in with the new guy they want to knock people out? It worked so far, it can work again. Fun fact: Gandra’s UFC contract came from beating Trent “The Terminator” Miller, who earned his DWCS spot by beating the 7-10 Said-Magomed Abdulgaziev, whose best victory was over a Russian fighter named Magomed “Molodoy” Magomedov who had only fought twice in the previous six years.

Only the best of the best for our UFC. RYAN GANDRA BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Ailín Pérez (12-2, #7) vs Macy Chiasson (10-5, #8)

It’s just the complete refusal to even entertain the idea of fixing Women’s Bantamweight that baffles me. Ailín Pérez is from Argentina, which means with Irene Aldana missing in action she’s the closest thing the UFC has to a demographically-desired marketing star in the weight class, and she’s on a five-fight winning streak, which is the second-longest the division has to offer. Hell, there’s only one other woman in the back half of the top fifteen with a smidge of momentum, and it’s Joselyne Edwards, and Ailín already beat her a year and a half ago. She’s good, she’s fun, she’s got an active top game, and they’re clearly setting her up for success here because Macy Chiasson has been struggling ever since the company got rid of the Featherweight division, and now she’s down two fights in a row, she’s repeatedly failing to make weight, and she exists to get other women up above her in the rankings. This fight is tailor-made for Ailín to ascend off a known quantity and ensconce herself as an actual contender. Which is why it is on the fucking prelims under Imanol Rodriguez and Ryan Gandra.

There’s a part of me that wonders if they aren’t just going to give up on Women’s Bantamweight eventually the same way they did Featherweight. Kayla Harrison’s gonna be 36 in July and just had neck surgery, Amanda Nunes may just retire again after their fight, the only other woman they’ve marketed in years is Julianna Peña and she too is 36 and has already had multiple major injuries. There’s no one left to fill that void. Is the UFC going to suddenly market Norma Dumont and Yana Santos, who are also already 35 and 36? Are they going to beg Miesha Tate to come out of retirement for the sixth or seventh time? There’s no one left, because the UFC hasn’t done a god damned thing with any of them. No pushes, no prospects, no one in the pipeline. The Contender Series provides virtually all of the UFC’s roster replacements nowadays, they’ve signed somewhere around 400+ contracts off it--not including random late replacement signings--and about 250 of those were in just the last five years. Do you know how many of those 250 contracts went to fighters at Women’s Bantamweight?

One.

They signed Hailey Cowan four years ago and then she lost and they gave up. Gave up on her, gave up on the division. They never officially announced the end of Women’s Featherweight, you know. No video package, no Jon Anik speaking with respectable solemnity about the legacy of the sport, no on-screen graphic an intern made that misspells ‘de Randamie’ in the title history, no thanks-for-your-hard-work office pizza party. It was a division built by two of the greatest fighters in the history of women’s combat sports and they just stopped marketing it, stopped creating prospects for it, stopped booking title fights for it, and then, one day, they simply stopped talking about it altogether, and now it’s gone.

But I’m sure it was a fluke and they’d never do something like that again. AILÍN PÉREZ BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Cristian Quiñonez (18-5) vs Kris Moutinho (14-7)

Some fighters are put here to suffer, and Kris Moutinho is one of the kings of suffering. He was brought into the UFC in 2021 because Sean O’Malley desperately needed a replacement, he got punched in the head hundreds of times, and then he got his revenge not by winning, but by facing a 42 year-old, 8-6 Guido Cannetti who effortlessly knocked him out in two minutes, because fuck you, Sean O’Malley, that’s why. The UFC cut Moutinho immediately, and after five regional wins over the next three years they finally brought him back--because they had a new big-punching prospect in Malcolm Wellmaker and they needed someone to lose to him, and Kris obliged by getting smashed in one round. It is only now, almost five years on, that Kris has a fight that isn’t built entirely on comedy. He is, of course, still supposed to lose, because Cristian Quiñonez is from Mexico and he hasn’t won a fight since 2022 and he hasn’t fought at all in the last two years and it’d be very convenient if he channeled the energy he once used for knocking motherfuckers out and got his hype back by destroying one of the company’s favorite punching bags.

I haven’t had a chaos pick on this card yet and I’m spending it here. The chips must fall Moutinho’s way one day and there is no day but today. KRIS MOUTINHO BY TKO.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Douglas Silva de Andrade (29-6 (1)) vs Javier Reyes (22-5)

We passed twelve years of Douglas Silva de Andrade in the UFC this month. Twelve goddamn years. DSDA’s been in there with everyone from Lerone Murphy to Petr Yan to Renan Barão, and once upon a time he was a wonderful violence elemental who seemed like he could beat anyone if you caught him on a good day. Those good days seem like they’re just a touch behind him. In 2026 “D’Silva” hasn’t been in the cage in almost two years, hasn’t won a fight in almost three, and hasn’t beaten a ranked opponent in multiple presidential terms. He’s still absurdly tough, but that toughness used to be backed up by effective aggression, and the aggression’s still there, but the effectiveness has waned. He doesn’t land as much or as hard anymore, he doesn’t wrestle as well or as often anymore, and he just doesn’t do all that much winning anymore. So Javier Reyes is here to take what’s left of his time in the sport. Ordinarily I take this opportunity to complain about DWCS and the thin nature of fighter scouting, but Reyes is one of the rare, welcome exceptions. He’s been in the sport since 2014, he’s gone around the world, he’s got a ton of experience and he’s proven himself worthy of a shot in the spotlight. Does he still catch punches with his face? Sure, but at this point that’s just his damn style, and he’s got a funky way of looping his right hands into spaces where they just don’t seem like they should fit.

If DSDA had about eight years less mileage on his bones I think he’d be able to pressure Reyes back and break him. Now? JAVIER REYES BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Ernesta Kareckaite (6-1-1) vs Sofia Montenegro (6-2)

For as much as I excoriate the UFC for falling down on the job when it comes to women’s MMA, I cannot help feeling a sense of ennui about the prospects for whom I, personally, feel nothing. Ernesta Kareckaite came into the UFC with a little bit of hype as an undefeated striker, and then people said ‘does it really count as being undefeated if you had a draw and all of your wins are split decisions,’ and lo and behold, the past became the future. She squeaked past Carli Judice with a split on the Contender Series, she got beat by Dione Barbosa in her promotional debut, and she just barely survived a split decision against Nicole Caliari a year ago, who, coincidentally, went on to get brutally fucked up by Carli Judice one fight later. Sofia Montenegro is her heir apparent. She, too, got on DWCS thanks to a kickboxing background and victories over people with iffy records that I promise you’ve never heard of, and she, too, went to a split decision--except Sofia lost hers. The UFC signed both her and her opponent Jeisla Chaves, who I’m looking forward to talking about one day because up until DWCS she had an incredible zero fights against anyone who’d ever won in their lives, but Jeisla is Brazilian, so she doesn’t get to come to the Mexico City party.

There are cases where there are prospects the UFC is insufficiently pushing and there are cases where the prospects that should be there aren’t. ERNESTA KARECKAITE BY DECISION.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Erik Silva (9-3) vs Francis Marshall (8-3)

Even here, on the regional appeal cards, we have potential pink slip battles. Erik Silva got picked up for beating a 3-0 (now 5-6!) guy on the Contender Series three and a half years ago and in the time since he’s only fought twice, and the first time he got choked out by TJ Brown, who got cut in 2023, and the second time he fought Muhammad Naimov and got his leg crumpled in forty-four seconds. That’s it. That’s the run. Francis Marshall is also 1-3 in the company, which is especially unfortunate because a) one of those three losses was an absolute coinflip of a decision that could’ve gone either way, b) one of those losses was a TKO to Isaac Dulgarian who has since been implicated in a fight-fixing scandal and c) the most recent loss was a split decision to Mairon Santos that was voted the #1 robbery of 2025. It’s been a fucking snakebitten run, and now both of these men are colliding in a match where the loser could very plausibly get cut.

Marshall’s so much better than his record indicates or the judges allow. I’m hoping he gets to show it. FRANCIS MARSHALL BY SUBMISSION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Wes Schultz (8-2) vs Damian Pinas (8-1)

Do you remember Dylan “The Mindless Hulk” Budka? The guy who kind of looked like pre-injury Darren Drozdov, got pushed so inexplicably by the UFC that despite doing nothing but losing he somehow still worked his way up from early prelims to televised main cards, and ultimately got drummed out of the company after going 0-3 and managing the incredible statistic of landing an average of just 6 strikes per fight? That guy beat Wes Schultz, and it cost Schultz his first shot at a UFC scouting opportunity. A year and a half later he got a second shot through the Contender Series, and Mansur Abdul-Malik smashed his head in. Another year and one fight later he was back and he finally got his contract thanks to one of the raddest submission holds in the world, the Doink the Clown stump pullerSuloev stretch, and that’s why it saddens me that they are putting him here against a fuckin’ Nova União prospect with a 90% knockout rate in the clear hopes that he’ll punch Schultz until he forgets what grappling is and thus removes one more obstacle to the UFC’s plans of world domination.

DAMIAN PINAS BY TKO. But I’d prefer more neat submissions if possible.

Get rid of the whole division!

Why, God, hast thou forsaken me? To torture me with this interminable slog and steal away precious moments of my all too-fleeting life in fifteen minute increments?

Such are the sentiments often expressed when heavyweight fights go the distance. So it goes for the division with the biggest men when a fight doesn’t reach a satisfying (read: concussion-based) ending after three minutes. As the clock ticks on, fans, and perhaps worst of all, the fighters themselves, are continually held hostage by, and are at the mercy of, two poorly conditioned athletes. Men, who all too frequently, eschew fundamental techniques and skills honed with hours of practice, in favor of fleeting raw power.

After the UFC foisted a double shot of unwatchable dreck more closely resembling slowdance night at the senior assisted living facility than a fistfight, a slate of articles bemoaning the dire state of the heavyweight division were churned out. That’s fully understandable, when two of the worst fights in heavyweight history came on back-to-back cards. That kind of psychic punishment gets people antsy, and they start talking about getting rid of the division, or, even worse, talking about the Good Old Days. Not that I’m against wrapping up in a thick blanket of nostalgia, that’s one of my favorite things to do with my MMA fandom. No, the issue here is there are sweeping statements that posit just about any fighter of the last fifteen years and beyond would beat just about any fighter on current offering above 205 pounds.

Look, I love a good thought experiment, but I’ve got to put a stop to this a mere two to three weeks after it has gained traction and, like a heavyweight fighter, has lost most of its steam and is slowly petering out.

My argument is fairly simple. Heavyweight MMA, from its inception in 1993, through 2026 and beyond, is 1) entirely stagnant and 2) entirely fungible as a corpus. It is stagnant because while individual fighters may grow and show improvement, the general level of skill of the division mostly resembles two bull elephant seals crashing into each other on the beach. Heavyweight as a whole does not get better, nor does it get worse. Heavyweight simply Is. It is fungible because rather than saying a fighter from 2012 would beat a fighter from 2026 flat out with no caveat or equivocation, I strongly believe any fighter from any era would simply rise or fall to their nominal level of success and competency when placed in a different timeline.

Don’t believe me? Here’s some highly cherry-picked examples. Take a guy like Valter Walker. He’s on a four-fight win streak, all by heel hook. He could, theoretically, plop into 2008 and tap out Brock Lesnar. Or, he could land in 2002 and get knocked unconscious trying to leglock Ian Freeman. I say this with certainty because that’s just Frank Mir.

Sergei Pavlovich at one point was on a six fight KO streak. Look me in the eyes and tell me with conviction: Would he catch 1997 Mark Coleman with an uppercut shooting for a takedown, or would he get double legged five times in eight minutes, and then turned into a pile of wet lumps after a series of headbutts and hammerfists? It’s a damn coin flip.

Tank Abbott was both bad and fat, but I fully believe he could at least make a crack at the current UFC top 15. Because a few weeks ago number 15 was Tai Tuivasa, and now it’s Mick Parkin, a man so unremarkable I always think that’s Parker Porter. Tank Abbott could probably beat Parker Parkin, the inhuman transporter accident fusion result.

Another example: I give you the entirety of Alistair Overeem’s career. He might KO Brock Lesnar in devastating fashion. He might get pummeled by Travis Browne and look utterly crestfallen. He could win 24:50 of a 25 minute fight and then Jairzinho Rozenstruik punches a hole in his lip with seconds to spare. The multitudes of heavyweight are contained within that Pantastic Body.

To circle back around to the argument that the old guard of heavyweight was so much better to watch: motherfucker, Assuerio Silva? You want to talk about bad heavyweight fights? Assuerio Silva versus Tim Sylvia was so mentally abrading it made me forget how much I hate MMA to the point that I still watch MMA. Cheick Kongo? The guy who knew two moves: groin assault and split decision.

Speaking of Tim Sylvia: remember when Tim Sylvia was a mere two fights removed from UFC title contention and he got knocked fully dead by a nearly 50 year old Ray Mercer in 9 seconds? Remember when Martin Buday got cut with a three fight win streak and then was trounced at Oktagon MMA? Heavyweight is a flat circle, man. It’s all the same and will always be the same.

I take you back to UFC 1’s opening bout, before the concept of weight classes. Former sumo wrestler Teila Tuli gets his teeth kicked out of his head 26 seconds into the contest, thus indelibly etching the first rule of heavyweights into the great Fight Codex: big man fall down real hard. Such is existence, such is the plight of the Large Lads. The Big Beef’um Boys. The Meaty Men.

Much like water finding its own level, heavyweights will gravitate towards the dumbest outcomes.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t that heavyweights have gotten worse. It’s that the average fan is now seeing the bad fighters that normally wouldn’t have made it to the UFC because, much like modern society, there’s no longer a middle class. Now, I’m not saying PRIDE was middle class, and it had some real good heavyweights, but they also had some garbage. For every Fedor vs Big Nog fight, they had Giant Silva falling over slowly, or Alexander Otsuka trying to snap suplex someone to no avail. There’s no more EliteXC, or Strikeforce, or Bellator for mid-level guys to get some experience under their belt fighting someone roughly their same size, instead of just bull rushing the jumped-up middleweight too stupid and brave to fight them at Duke Phillips House of Chicken and Fisticuffs.

Now, there’s PFL, but a lot of their cards are under the MENA or Africa banners, which creates the same issue facing Rizin, and the two times a year ONE pretends they have heavyweight MMA. It’s hard to get US-based heavyweights to fight internationally when they’ve all got nine DUIs and are banned from entering another country.

In times past, a fighter would win some at the bar out past route 9 where they hold the TuffMan on the weekend, then move up to something like Island Fights in Pensacola. Win some of those, you get to face the mini-boss, Chase Sherman. Beat the Vanilla Gorilla, you get put on the Bellator prelims. The ladder starts anew.

Now? All it takes is a stinky wrestling singlet, ringworm, and some virulent, outspoken bigotry and any horrid oaf gets a shot on the Contender Series against a Brazilian guy who’s 9-3 against an assortment of scarecrows.

Sad thing is, there isn’t a fix. Not really, unless PFL becomes something. And PFL isn’t awful, Vadim Nemkov is pretty good. Some of the other heavyweights there are ok, but I don’t want to just Name Guys at you. Bruno Cappeloza. Ok, sorry, I’m done.

Without the super regionals and the B-Leagues, there’s no winnowing of the dross. That leaves everyone who puts on a pair of four ounce gloves as a potentially viable option for the UFC to sign. Which gives noted ratfuck Hunter Campbell too many choices. And Hunter Campbell ain’t a fight pervert sicko like Joe Silva was. Joe Silva wrote into Black Belt magazine to talk about the up and coming Kumite fighters. Hunter Campbell fucks ROI spreadsheets. They are not the same. Now, the metric for a UFC-caliber heavyweight is “will you accept this pile of filthy pennies and then shut the fuck up?”

There isn’t a fix, so there’s no point in expounding on how to change things. But why are they like this in the first place? The first answer is that any moderately large man with an inkling of athletic skill has been occupied at a Real Sport. By that I mean something with at least two of the following: revenue sharing, union or contract protections, pensions, respect, lowered risk of concussive impacts. When all you take in is cast-offs, don’t expect more than a handful of actual gems in amongst the dirt clods.

Sometimes it doesn’t take an actual real sport to pull a high level heavyweight away. Sometimes it is just the stability of a normal job that pays well and doesn’t involve getting hit in the head so god damn hard. For example, Shane Carwin, hydroengineer, or Cole Konrad, dairy futures trader. Sometimes it’s the glamorous allure of the silver screen, in the case of D-level actors in C-level movies, like Don Frye and Oleg Taktarov.

It’s also reasonable to believe that simply being extremely large and powerful can lead to bad habits in training which leads to skill stagnation. If a heavyweight has few to no equally or larger sized training partners, they could, in theory, roughneck everyone at the gym. Sure, that boosts confidence, but it does nothing for technique and skill when facing another actual heavyweight fighter.

And for the fighters who do train with larger opponents, or at the very least don’t just power through everything and actually develop skills? Well, here comes an enormous bearman who doesn’t do any of that, but his wild and aggressive flailing is enough to catch your chin and put you out. Sorry!

So, the division is bad. Has always been bad. Will remain bad. The fighters coming into the sport have minimal opportunities for improvement before being thrust far beyond their capabilities. What is a MMA fan to do? Could stop watching. Get up and go for a walk when the heavyweights come on screen. Stretch, drink some water. Call a friend or loved one you haven’t spoken to in a while.

Or, if you are incapable of not being a fight pervert sicko, recognize heavyweight MMA for what it is: A stupid trash heap that is continually on fire. Sometimes a can of gas buried deep in there sparks up and you get a cool explosion. Mostly, it’s just old tires putting off harmful fumes. Stand well back and just let it smolder for fifteen minutes.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21 FROM THE TOYOTA CENTER IN HOUSTON, TEXAS
PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

You ever get the sense that the line between what constitutes a road-worthy card and what constitutes an Apex card is becoming increasingly blurry?

MAIN EVENT: THE OVERTON WINDOW
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Sean Strickland (29-7, #3) vs Anthony Hernandez (15-2 (1), #4)

The velocity decline can reach is disarming as hell.

We’ve been talking about Sean Strickland and his role as the UFC’s most successful bigot for years, to the point that when I last expressed my deep longing for the ancient days of anything mattering in the face of his constant bullshit, it was during his first and only attempt at defending his title back at the start of 2024:

Things used to matter! We used to think it was kind of racist that Chael Sonnen said Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira tried to feed a carrot to a bus because he thought it was a horse! Matt Mitrione had to release a public apology for his horrible transphobia and that was just a decade ago! And now the Middleweight champion says women belong in the kitchen and jokes that gay children come from weak men and hey, we’re all shitposters here, so what’s a little idiot bigotry in our sport? What, the female fighters got offended that there’s absolutely no pushback on their male counterpart saying they shouldn’t exist?

How silly of them.

That was two years ago, and it’s incredible to think about just how much worse things have gotten in those two years. Two years ago we didn’t have Holocaust deniers getting promoted as pay-per-view attractions. Two years ago we didn’t have post-fight promos about the need to replace Democracy with a moneyed theocracy and the most-hyped Heavyweight prospect in the company didn’t make his name talking about beating up trans people. Two years ago Kash Patel didn’t have his own UFC walkout.

Hell, that quote was part of a complaint about Bloody Elbow, one of the few bright spots in combat sports journalism, writing things about Sean Strickland I didn’t particularly agree with. Over those two years Bloody Elbow got sold to corporate publisher GRV Media, who deleted its entire archive of articles, sold its organs on the black market and built an indistinguishable-from-ChatGPT clickbait farm where its heart used to live.

And everything’s gotten so much worse that even the shambling corpse facsimile of the website has articles about how the UFC kind of sucks now and should consider things like shutting down its Heavyweight division.

But we talk about the depressing decline of the sport all the damn time. Why don’t we talk about what all’s been going on with Sean Strickland instead?

You may notice that everyone’s coverage--mine, the media’s, even the UFC’s--focuses on the Everything Else instead of the Fight. That is because the is-it-real-or-not non-argument the MMA communtiy always has about fighters being assholes to each other (while ignoring footage of them laughing and hugging in their off-time) is the much more interesting side of things. Sean Strickland’s specialty is hypnotizing people into letting him gently cross them up for three to five rounds. He knocked Israel Adesanya down and hit him in the head eighty-five times, and Izzy barely had a mouse under his eye after the fight. The UFC tries very, very hard to get you to focus on Sean Strickland’s personality because his fighting style is exactly the kind of technically sound but casually uninteresting boxing they otherwise try to discourage.

Oh, right. That’s why. Guess what: There’s still nothing else to talk about with Sean Strickland.

It’s been 25 months since that fight, and in those two-ish years Strickland has fought exactly twice. The first was an absurd match-up with Paulo Costa, a man with one victory (over retiree Luke Rockhold!) in the previous five years, that Strickland took to a decision with his usual arsenal of push-kicks and defensively sound if boo-inducing boxing, and after refusing to defend his position against anyone in the division with even a mote of relevance Strickland was instead granted his title rematch with Dricus du Plessis, who completely shut him down for five rounds.

That’s it. That’s the Sean Strickland story you’ve missed. His last fight was an entire year ago and it eliminated him from title contention entirely and since then all he’s done is make controversial tweets and piss off his teammates by bringing Kyle Rittenhouse to their gym and do whatever he can to prolong his time as one of the canker sores in the sport’s collective cheek so long as it doesn’t involve actually fighting anyone. He is slowly drifting into Colby Covingtonian status as his momentum dies and all he has left is increasingly tired controversy.

So he’s fighting Anthony Hernandez, the only Middleweight contender with any actual momentum, because God is dead and we turned their body into advertising for Draftkings.

We’ve been rooting for the Hernandez title run for years over here at the MMA essay mill, but boy, I feel every one of those years. “Fluffy” has seemed like a sure-fire contender since he was strangling dudes all the way back in 2022, but constant scheduling issues and nagging injuries have kept halting his momentum. His career-defining submission over world-class grappler Rodolfo Vieira was followed by 14 months of inactivity, his subsequent three-fight winning streak earned him almost a full year on the shelf, there was only one bout in the subsequent eight months, and after making up for it with a blistering three victories in ten months, Anthony’s body gave him the finger again and put him out for half a year.

There are no bad Anthony Hernandez fights. He’s a constantly aggressive wrestleboxer with an endless gas tank and dangerous submission holds and the kind of old-school ground-and-pound that just looks profoundly painful. He breaks people down by pace as much as damage. He tortured Michel Pereira, he outworked Brendan Allen and he’s the only person to ever finish Roman Dolidze.

And we’re picking him. We’re obviously picking him. There is no power on Earth that could make me pick Sean Strickland over Anthony Hernandez.

Will he win? Man, I’m nervous about it.

Hernandez is great, but he’s not the most technically sound fighter. Aggression, cardio and a solid chin let him walk his opponents down and tire them out, but he eats his fair share of shots getting it done. The success of Strickland’s offensive minimalism is a measure of just how defensively sound he is, and he’s proven to be remarkably difficult to effectively grapple against. Both men favor a striking style that involves forward movement, and both men have gotten dinged by fighters like Jun Yong Park and Dricus du Plessis who used forward pressure against them instead.

I’m glad I’m biased enough to say ANTHONY HERNANDEZ BY SUBMISSION regardless of my feelings, because this match feels like the answer to a lot of questions about both men. Either Sean’s going to prove he still has trouble handling people who can out-pressure him or Anthony’s going to prove he can’t out-cardio everybody. Or a right hook ends it in ninety seconds because prediction is bullshit and all you can do is hope for the less awful person to get into title contention. Fuck ‘im up, Fluffy.

CO-MAIN EVENT: SLIPPING
WELTERWEIGHT: Geoff Neal (16-7, #12) vs Uroš Medić (12-3, NR)

Really? This is what we’re going with for an on-the-road co-main event? You know we have a top ten Heavyweight matchup two fights down from here, right? Like, I get it, Geoff Neal is from Texas and That’s Where We Are This Week, but c’mon, this fight is so Apex-coded you can hear the plastic chairs scraping the floor as you read about it.

And I love Geoff Neal! I’ve written so many things about Geoff Neal being an underrated almost-contender over the years that I want to like this fight. But Neal’s days of near-contendership feel very far away at the moment. In the last six straight years he’s 3-5, which doesn’t look all that bad until you realize those five losses were all relevant, high-performing contenders and those three wins were a barely-there split decision over a Santiago Ponznibbio on the edge of the worst run of his career, a knockout over a Vicente Luque who was about to enter his late-stage collapse, and an injury TKO against Rafael dos Anjos, who was 40, winless for multiple years, and had been at Lightweight seven months beforehand.

It’s been a long run, and the UFC has had Neal on such a tour of contender-proving work that, aside from dos Anjos, his last three opponents were Shavkat Rakhmonov, Ian Machado Garry and Carlos Prates, and he lost to all three of them and got finished by two. The days of his contendership potential have never seemed farther away.

But those days did exist. I don’t really know what Uroš Medić is doing here.

He got a couple knockouts? I guess that’s it? Like, we talked about Geoff Neal’s record against the best of the best, but here, from oldest to newest, are the last five fights of Uroš Medić:

• Got strangled in two rounds by Myktybek Orolbai, who was making a short-notice debut and spent the next two years at Lightweight before moving back to 170

• Knocked out Tim Means, the longtime veteran who was 1 for 4 and is now 1 for 6 and possibly retired

• Got punched silly by Punahele Soriano in thirty-one seconds

• Dropped The Ultimate Fighter 29 runner-up (jesus christ) Gilbert Urbina in a minute, who is now 1-3 in the company

• Sparked Muslim Salikhov in a minute, which is probably his best win except Muslim is also 41 and 9-5

It’s fine! That record is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. That is a perfectly sensible record for someone who’s going to be fighting Jake Matthews on an undercard or in the Apex. But in a division with guys like Joel Álvarez and Yaroslav Amosov in it, Uroš Medić is the one getting a co-main event on a road show that could get him into the top fifteen?

You know that list we just went through? Punahele Soriano and Myktybek Orolbai are both fighting this month! Orolbai’s fighting Chris Curtis three weeks from now! Punahele Soriano is on this card! You will find him nine fights down from here, buried in the prelims, fighting Ramiz Brahimaj. He’s on a three-fight winning streak, and two fights ago he knocked Medić into the third row in less time than it takes to watch someone lie to you about a fun new way to make eggs on TikTok, and he’s curtain-jerking against a dangerous unranked prospect and Uroš Medić has a shot at a number by his name against a man who’s been on pay-per-view for the last three years.

Matchmaking is just so broken right now. Uroš is a big puncher and he could get Neal out of there just like Prates did, but he’s also too unconcerned with his defense for me to feel comfortable picking him against a guy this dangerous. GEOFF NEAL BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: DAY OF THE HAMSTER
FEATHERWEIGHT: Dan Ige (19-10, #14) vs Melquizael Costa (25-7, NR)

God bless you, doorman Dan. The sport will never respect you the way it should, just as it has forgotten Martin Kampmann, Tyson Griffin and Alexis Davis, but the real fans know MMA doesn’t function without you. You are the backbone of the sport. You are the you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride-the-rollycoaster bar that keeps the Seans Woodson and Andres Fili out of the main event scene. Your loss to Patrício Pitbull last July was the breath of fresh air that let the world know maybe, just maybe, Big Patty Pits wasn’t actually done in the sport. If a fighter can pass the Ige exam, there’s hope for their prospects as a contender; if they fall short, they are doomed to battle Jamall Emmers forever.

Melquizael Costa is finally prepared for that test. His first year in the UFC was the kind of unsuccessful, one-for-three run one expects from fighters the UFC brings in on last-minute replacement contrasts, but through a magical combination of rounding out his skillset and Not Fighting Steve Garcia he’s finally hit his stride. Five straight victories is awful hard to do at Featherweight, and the headkick knockout he landed on Morgan Charrière last December sealed his shot at a ranking. He’s proven his chokes are absurdly dangerous, he’s proven his chin and his cardio can hold up for three rounds, and now he’s proven he can decapitate a Frenchman with his tibia. He is ready.

MELQUIZAEL COSTA BY DECISION. The time has come for new blood. Melk’s still very loose and Ige’s ultra-sharp boxing could give him trouble, but he’s looked better every time we’ve seen him and I don’t think he’s done improving.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Serghei Spivac (17-6, #7) vs Ante Delija (26-7, #9)

You know, Heavyweight is supposed to be the crown jewel of combat sports. Everyone lusts after large men battering each other. People still won’t shut up about Fedor Emelianenko and the last time he beat a relevant Heavyweight was 2009 and even then he was fighting for a title belt made out of dinner plates. Jailton Almeida, a top ten, 8-3 fighter, just got cut by the UFC for being boring, and Tom Aspinall, the undisputed champion, is out indefinitely having eye surgery that the UFC keeps calling him a coward for, and the most likely next contender for the Heavyweight title is 205-pound champion Alex Pereira, and the out-of-the-UFC prospect everyone’s talking about most is wrestling champion and attempted rapist Gable Steveson, who is 2-0 in the sport and could still probably get a UFC title shot within a year.

And this is a top ten matchup, midway through a random television card, between two men who both lost to Waldo “Salsa Boy” Cortes-Acosta in their last matchups. Ante Delija is a PFL tournament champion, Sergei is a multiple-time main eventer, whoever wins is two fights away from competing for the biggest belt in the sport, and they are less notable than Uroš Medić and less advertised than Dan Ige. All of the calls to abolish or reform the Heavyweight division are missing the point: This is the reformation of the Heavyweight division. This is the great terraforming of the sport. At a time when talent is harder to find than ever the company is repeatedly cutting top-ten performers because the more interchangeable the fighters become, the less they have to pay people, and the less they have to care about matchmaking. The UFC tried to book Serghei against Shamil Gaziev twice, and when that failed they booked him against Waldo, and when he lost to Waldo they tried to book him against Gaziev, and when that failed they just gave Gaziev to Waldo too.

None of it means anything. There is no Heavyweight ladder. The division is the ad-hoc model they’d love to pursue for the rest of the sport because money makes you myopic. ANTE DELIJA BY TKO because I don’t think Serghei remembers he’s a wrestler anymore.

WELTERWEIGHT: Jacobe Smith (11-0) vs Josiah Harrell (11-0)

This is Jacobe Smith’s third UFC fight during his tenure with the company, and every time I have been called to write about him, I have passed. The first time he showed up I wrote about the samey nature of the stories the Contender Series contributed to the annals of mixed martial arts and how hazy and indistinct it made everything, and he wound up punching out Preston Parsons; the second, I was too busy focusing on Niko Price, the aging enigma of battle, and the UFC’s constant attempts to sacrifice him. (Which they did, as Jacobe choked him out in two rounds.) Is this the time Jacobe will finally get his just dues from me?

Nope! He’s been overshadowed almost completely in this fight by his late-replacement opponent. Josiah Harrell signed up with the UFC all the way back in mid-2023 as a fill-in fight for Jack Della Maddalena, only for his pre-fight medical exams to reveal Harrell suffered from Moyamoya disease, an extremely rare brain disease that makes you exceptionally prone to abrupt death by cerebral implosion. Harrell took a hiatus from the sport to get brain surgery so as to achieve his primary goal of Not Dying, and after a three-fight streak on the regionals that included choking out Melvin Guillard--yes, that Melvin Guillard from TUF 2 (jesus christ) twenty-one years ago (jesus christ)--he’s finally back where he started: Getting signed as a last-minute addition to a random UFC card to pump up a Contender Series prospect.

And, man, c’mon. Come on. Do you have the heart to pick against him? You should be ashamed. JOSIAH HARRELL BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Zach Reese (10-2 (1)) vs Michel Pereira (31-14 (2))

In some ways, this fight feels like an inevitable clash of we-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-yous. Zach Reese was supposed to be a sure-fire thing: Tall, undefeated, 100% finishing rate, spoke openly about eschewing the very concept of defense in favor of chasing highlight-reel finishes, fought for cheap. Everything the UFC could possibly want. They even matched him up with their version of the Brooklyn Brawler, Cody Brundage, to give him a solid debut. And then Brundage picked him up and dropped him on his skull. Another couple soft targets, another couple wins, and then it was Azamat Bekoev smashing Reese in a round. A repeatedly-scheduled matchup with Sedriques Dumas ended in under a minute after Reese punted him in the balls, and once again, he got an 0-1 soft target to recover. They keep trying and trying and trying with this man, and he keeps struggling under the spotlight.

So once again he has been called upon to execute a man on a losing streak, but this time it’s the most notable opponent of his career. Michel Pereira was so, so close to being taken seriously as a title contender, and in hindsight, that’s very funny. He popped up to Middleweight because he couldn’t make 170 pounds anymore and the MMA world was immediately taken by the streak of violence he visited on his opponents as he rattled off three straight victories in one minute apiece. It was great! Except for the part where he was doing it to, like, Andre Petroski and Ihor Potieria. The second they put him up against Anthony Hernandez he melted, and then Abus Magomedov made him look positively glacial, and then Kyle Daukaus smoked him in forty-three seconds and suddenly Pereira’s on a three-fight losing streak for the first time in thirteen years and everyone’s wondering if he’s done.

There’s a lot of mileage on Pereira. He’s only a year older than Reese but he’s got almost four times the wear and Daukaus cracking him made it show. Reese is bigger, he’s longer, and he is unmistakably being set up for success here, and I am picking MICHEL PEREIRA BY TKO anyway after kicking out his liver and doing a backflip.

PRELIMS: THERE’S A KILLER ON THE ROAD
WELTERWEIGHT: Chidi Njokuani (25-11 (1)) vs Carlos Leal (22-7)

Here, we have the battle of the killing machines that weren’t. Chidi Njokuani was supposed to be a force of nature as a 6’3” Middleweight with 80 inches of reach and ridiculous knockout power and then he got repeatedly pounded out by people who could actually outgrapple and outgrit him because, much like his older brother from the World Extreme Cagefighting days, wrestling and cardio are still not his forte. He dropped down to 170 pounds to turn around his fortunes only to lose his streak after getting choked out by Jake Matthews last July. Carlos Leal hopped into the UFC as a last-minute replacement, got utterly screwed out of a decision against Rinat Fakhretdinov, and immediately captured everyone’s attention by destroying the exceedingly durable Alex Morono in one round. He then proceeded to lose all that hype after walking facefirst into a Muslim Salikhov right hand in under a minute. Now the Very Tall Welterweight must fight the Very Wide Welterweight and only one man can survive.

After watching Muslim drive a tanker truck through the holes in Leal’s aggressive style I feel deeply concerned about watching him fight his way through half a foot of reach disadvantage against a man who can hit even harder. But I like his pressure game and I’m going against my better judgment and choosing to maintain my faith in it. CARLOS LEAL BY TKO.

FLYWEIGHT: Ode’ Osbourne (13-9 (1)) vs Alibi Idiris (10-1)

Ode’, you are called upon once more to do your holy duty. Ode’ was a Contender Series prospect once upon a time as the kind of Flyweight prospect that would drop and submit people left and right, but right around the time Manel Kape crushed him with a flying knee the UFC switched tracks and traded Ode’s prospect status in for a new role as a support fighter for folks they wanted to potentially invest in. It doesn’t always work! Asu Almabayev and Lazy Boy Rodríguez may have passed the test, but Ode’ spoiled Luis Gurule’s post-DWCS debut last year by knocking him out, because you still cannot underestimate him. Alibi Idiris was supposed to be the TUF 33 (jesus christ) champion. He’d become one of Kazakhstan’s best Flyweights within the first year and a half of his career, he’d made it to the TUF house without ever losing and he was buzzsawing people with spinning kicks and ground-and-pound left and right. He walked into the tournament final as a -500 favorite and he walked out eight minutes later with the first loss of his career after getting completely rolled by Joseph Morales.

This is the test. Either he proves himself worth rebuilding or the UFC cuts bait. ALIBI IDIRIS BY DECISION.

FLYWEIGHT: Alden Coria (11-3 (1)) vs Luis Gurule (10-2)

Hey, speak of the devil. Luis Gurule was also an undefeated Fury FC main-eventer before the UFC gave him a shot at the Contender Series, and then Ode’ flattened him and Jesus Aguilar beat him and now he’s staring down a possible three-fight losing streak just ten months after he got started, and that’s real, real hard to come back from. We’ve only gotten to see Alden Coria once and it was as a short-notice fill-in, but he made an exceptional accounting for himself by taking on the always-tough Alessandro Costa and just taking him apart. He outboxed him, he outkicked him, he outwrestled him, and despite the situation he outlasted him, too, ultimately folding him in the third. He looked like an exceptionally complete, well-rounded threat, and that’s potentially a problem for Gurule, who is perpetually game but tends to be a little stylistically limited by his focus on winging punches and power takedowns.

So, sorry, Luis. ALDEN CORIA BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Nora Cornolle (9-3, #12) vs Joselyne Edwards (16-6, #14)

You know my constant complaints about the UFC’s unwillingness to promote people and how it’s helped Women’s Bantamweight turn into a wasteland? This. This is that. This is that fucking thing. The corporate mandate of the moment is very clear: Go out there and knock people out and you will be rewarded. No decisions, no defense, just murder. In the only division in the UFC that’s actively hurting for contenders as badly as Heavyweight, Joselyne Edwards took the lesson from her three decision victories and her two consecutive losses and went out there and started fucking everyone up. She choked out Tamires Vidal, she punched out Chelsea Chandler and when last we saw her she was atomizing Priscila Cachoeira. Priscila’s nickname, “Zombie Girl,” is derived from her durability. Valentina Shevchenko hit Priscila two hundred and thirty times and still had to resort to a choke to stop her. Joselyne knocked her out in two and a half minutes. So Women’s Bantamweight has a woman on a winning streak that’s included two straight knockouts. How do they capitalize on it? They book her into a rematch with Nora Cornolle, who is 3-2 in the company, lateral to her in the rankings, and already beat her in a coinflip of a decision two years ago, midway through the prelims on a card that’s highlighting Zach Reese and Jacobe Smith.

What are you doing? What can you possibly be doing? There are only two people in the entire top ten of this division booked. Was Irene Aldana so unavailable? Does Jacqueline Cavalcanti have nothing to do this Winter? Do you need them to fill out May’s slate of prelims instead? JOSELYNE EDWARDS BY DECISION but by god, please stop turning me into a nihilist.

WELTERWEIGHT: Ramiz Brahimaj (13-5) vs Punahele Soriano (12-4)

Speaking of nihilism, let’s have that conversation we started up in the co-main event. Ramiz Brahimaj is on a three-fight winning streak, all three of those wins were violent finishes, and the last was a genuinely impressive pay-per-view prelim that saw him become the first and only man to ever submit star wrestler Austin Vanderford. Punahele Soriano is on a three-fight winning streak that saw him soundly out-fight the recently-featured Nikolay Veretennikov on that same card, and of course, tucked in the middle of said streak, he knocked Uroš Medić the fuck out in thirty-one seconds. They’re both tough, talented, multifaceted fighters who’ve been showing off their grappling skills, they’ve both built real momentum for the first time in the five-plus years they’ve spent in the UFC, and they’re both itching for a chance to show they belong in the Welterweight mix, which is why even though, once again, one of them knocked half of the co-main event out in thirty-one seconds, they are both down here ass-deep in the prelims preparing to steal each others’ hype.

I miss matchmaking the way we’re all going to miss potable water in ten years. PUNAHELE SORIANO BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani (9-2) vs Phil Rowe (11-6)

Phil Rowe, they are trying to figure out what to do with you. Much like Zach Reese you were a tempting prospect as a big, giant man for the Welterweight division, and much like Zach Reese you keep running into trouble every time they try to promote you. In 2021 it was Gabe Green, in 2023 it was Neil Magny, and after recapturing some much-needed hype with your flatlining of Ange Loosa last year you promptly got completely dominated by Seokhyeon Ko. Like, 124:11 striking differential dominated. By a man you have almost half a foot on. This is the point where the UFC no longer knows about your future, and Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani is the attempt to cash in. I am deeply, deeply curious about how JPL is about to look in the UFC. He’s been a solid hand in the LFA for a couple years, now, and he’s looked absolutely phenomenal in a lot of his wins--fast, smart, knows what head movement is, able to effectively mix some solid wrestling into slinging headkicks--but it’s a lot easier to look good against the Adam Wamsleys of the world. He looked great destroying Jack Congdon in all of a minute on the Contender Series, but Congdon’s another of those guys who record-padded like hell (he beat Jay Ellis! Jay Ellis is back!) and Lebosnoyani’s struggled on occasion with the better fighters on his list.

And I still just want to believe in Phil Rowe, man. He has the tools! He could be a thing! If I keep typing I can maybe talk myself out of JEAN-PAUL LEBOSNOYANI BY DECISION aw, dammit.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Jordan Leavitt (12-3) vs Yadier del Valle (10-0)

I know I’m setting myself up for disappointment here, but I’m excited for this one. We just don’t get grappler vs grappler matchups anymore, man. There aren’t enough buffalo left in the wild and we are losing out on our chances to observe them. Jordan Leavitt was really cool five years ago when he was slamming senior citizens in the octagon and twerking periodically, and then Paddy Pimblett choked him out and everyone got tired very quickly. Yadier del Valle has put two consecutive grappling clinics on in the UFC, first choking out Connor Matthews and then Isaac Dulgarian, and all of that has been completely overshadowed by the Dulgarian fight revealing a massive insider-information betting scandal the FBI is reportedly investigating. Is this Yadier’s fault? No, his is merely the hand that chokes the cradle.

All I want is for this to be cool. Please be cool, fight. YADIER DEL VALLE BY SUBMISSION.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Juliana Miller (4-3) vs Carli Judice (5-2)

JULIANA MILLER BY SUBMISSION. JULIANA MILLER BY TKO. JULIANA MILLER BY DECISION. Time will fold in on itself in a Dragon Break and all three finishes will happen at once. I have been waiting for the Juliana “Killer” Miller comeback story and by god, we’re here. This is it. This is where a 4-3 woman becomes the greatest fighter on the planet. Is Carli Judice a cleaner striker? Definitely. Is she better-conditioned? Almost undoubtedly. Is she going to win this fight? It seems absurdly likely. But is she going to win this fight? Never. You cannot stop the forces of destiny and they have anointed Juliana Miller as the one true holder of the chalice. The entire legacy of The Ultimate Fighter was sacrificed to create one final spirit bomb of combat prowess and it lives in the heart of the Killer and now she can do Anderson Silva headkicks and Nick Diaz gogoplatas. I have seen it. I created it in my mind, and it’s real. It’s real.

Let no one stand in the way of fate. Let no one unwind the loom.

So first off, I need to apologize. I meant to have the Tap Cancer Out / Jiu Jitsu Charities episode of the podcast out already. However, a lot of stuff has been happening in my personal and professional life that’s caused a delay in that. I’m working on it but it will be a bit later than I would like.

However, today we are going to talk about a topic I think is worth discussing following the recent community effort to hold gym owners, coaches, and athletes accountable for abuse.

Allegations Against Andre Galvao

If you’re unaware, and I certainly envy you for not being in the thick of this stuff, in early 2026 world champion and Atos Jiu‑Jitsu co‑founder Andre Galvao was directly accused of sexual misconduct and grooming of a minor.

These allegations primarily were brought forward by Alexa Herse, an 18‑year‑old former Atos student who had trained under Galvao since she was a child. Herse provided a detailed statement alleging a six‑month long pattern of inappropriate and escalating behavior by Galvao during training sessions. According to her account, Galvao had been inappropriately touching her, making repeated sexualized comments about her body, and would insist he partner with her despite her attempts to train with other similarly sized athletes.

Herse further alleged that Galvao would regularly make sexualized moaning sounds in her ear when he was in top-mount position and, in one incident, licked her ear while positioned very close to her head. I think this is a good time to point out that Galvao is currently 43 years-old and has known Herse since she was 12 years-old.

Additionally, Herse has accused Galvao’s wife, Angelica Galvao, who is both a black belt and a primary figure in the Atos gym of pressuring Herse into silence. When Herse attempted to raise concerns internally, it is alleged that Angelica told her “if it’s wrong, you have to at least act like it’s right,” in what can only be described as an attempt at discouraging Herse from reporting the misconduct.

Following Herse’s accusations being made publicly, other women stated that they had similar experiences. In response, high‑profile Atos athletes publicly severed ties with the organization. The accusations triggered a broader crisis within Atos, leading the headquarters to announce the immediate removal of both Andre and Angelica Galvao from all leadership and operational roles pending a third‑party investigation. Certainly something an organization does when its founder and leadership are accused of such acts (note: this is sarcasm).

In response, Galvao has publicly denied all claims by calling them fake and that they stem from personal grudges and vendettas. Galvao claimed that Atos maintains constant monitoring and provides a safe environment. He also stated that legal action would be taken to defend his name.

As of writing, no criminal charges have been announced however law enforcement reports were claimed to be filed and both internal and external investigations into Galvao’s conduct are ongoing. This situation has, thankfully, raised urgent questions about safeguarding, coach–student power imbalances, and systemic failures within the sport’s organizational culture.

Duty of Care and Why It Matters

In short, Galvao as the coach and owner of Atos Jiu Jitsu violated key duty he was entrusted to uphold: duty of care. As an educational environment, jiu jitsu gyms are expected to uphold and maintain this key concept. At a structural level, duty of care is the bedrock of a safe learning environment. A standard that is typically expected to be upheld in all learning environments, especially ones that provide educational space to minors (though it equally applies to adults too).

Duty of care is commonly described as the obligation to take reasonable steps to protect students from foreseeable harm, a standard derived from tort principles and widely taught to educators as part of negligence awareness and safety practice. In plain terms, and in the context of martial arts, instructors must anticipate typical risks of training (on and off the mats) and act as a reasonably prudent professional would to minimize those risks for adult and youth athletes alike.

While athletics and sports are not a direct one-to-one comparison with a classroom learning environment at a school, education frameworks provide a clear lens for defining what care looks like in youth-serving environments. The U.S. Department of Education, when they’re not being picked apart by corrupt administrations, serves to centralize federal laws and civil-rights guidance aimed at ensuring safe, nondiscriminatory learning conditions. These frameworks set expectations for institutions to protect students’ welfare and provide avenues to report concerns. A quick reminder, the current U.S. administration wants to shut this department and this sort of service down.

In practice, duty of care translates into competent instruction, adequate supervision, safe facilities, risk management, and clear boundaries—elements emphasized in educator-facing safety guidance and professional standards widely used across not only the U.S. but the world.

In youth sport specifically, the U.S. Congress codified a higher bar through the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017. The Act designates the U.S. Center for SafeSport, who are partnered with the International Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Federation, to set abuse-prevention standards, requires prompt reporting of suspected child abuse, and mandates reasonable procedures to limit one‑on‑one interactions between adults and minor athletes—concrete expressions of duty of care in athletic settings.

SafeSport’s Code and its Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policies (MAAPP) lay out these obligations for coaches and clubs by defining prohibited misconduct, education/training requirements, and boundaries in communications and in‑program contact.

A coach’s duty of care is not limited to preventing sexual harm; it extends to injury prevention and medically sound return‑to‑play decisions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s materials for coaches highlight the expectation to foster a culture of safety, teach risk‑reducing techniques, enforce rules and sportsmanship, and respond appropriately to suspected concussions. Actions squarely within a coach’s duty to protect athletes from foreseeable harm. These resources reinforce that aggressive or unsafe coaching practices increase risk, and that prevention, recognition, and timely referral are part of responsible care.

Particularly for adult athletes, duty of care recognizes autonomy and informed consent while still imposing professional obligations on instructors to avoid reckless training, misuse of authority, or discriminatory treatment, consistent with broader (and sometimes federal) commitment to safe and equitable learning environments. Specifically speaking about the U.S. context, laws and SafeSport policy create heightened safeguards, including mandatory reporting, restricted one‑on‑one contact, and structured supervision measures that jiu jitsu programs can adopt wholesale to meet contemporary expectations.

In short, duty of care in the context of jiu jitsu means building systems that anticipate risk and prevent harm such as through competent age‑appropriate instruction, vigilant supervision, safe spaces and equipment, ethical boundaries in coach–athlete relationships, and transparent reporting pathways. These are not merely best practices; they reflect the standard of care educators and youth‑sport leaders are expected to uphold in the United States.

Similar systems have been established, institutionalized, and enacted in other nations as well. Meaning this is not just a “Only U.S. athletes need to concern themselves with this” and makes it a “everyone in the sport needs to know about these standards” situation.

This Already Exists in the Sport

Within the context of jiu jitsu, the IBJJF explicitly partners with the SafeSport and provides the opportunity for athletes, coaches, and affiliated members to complete SafeSport provided training covering mandatory reporting, sexual misconduct awareness, emotional and physical misconduct, and prevention strategies. In fact, prior to beginning my current stint as a kid’s coach I myself used these programs to ensure I was aware of the standards and policies. It’s also worth noting that as an IBJJF member, you are granted these courses cost-free as the expense is built into your membership.

Additionally, the IBJJF published Coach/Parent Code of Conduct outlines clear behavioral expectations for adults during competitions, including:

• Mandatory courtesy toward athletes, referees, parents, and staff

• Prohibition of inappropriate language, gestures, or aggressive behavior

• Required seated position during matches to limit escalation

• Restrictions on physical or verbal interference with officials
  These rules help prevent intimidation, emotional abuse, boundary violations, and power‑based misconduct.

For example, with young competitors in the Pee Wee and Mighty Mite divisions (aka the very young kids divisions) the IBJJF restricts access inside barricade areas at competitions to one approved adult. The Junior and Teen divisions simply do not allow coaches inside the barricade space to reduce pressure and potential misconduct. Now, how often this is enforced is ultimately up to the individuals working at the event but systemically it should be regularly enforced even though in practice that’s not always the case.

Similarly, judo has one of the most mature safeguarding frameworks in Olympic combat sports, providing a model for jiu jitsu to follow. The International Judo Federation’s (IJF) Safeguarding Policy defines harassment and abuse, outlines clear reporting pathways, and specifies investigation and disciplinary responses. It places strong emphasis in outlining what is deemed to be psychological, physical, sexual, and neglect‑based harm and establishes the duty to maintain a non‑violent, respectful environment on coaches.

As part of its Sport and Organisation Rules (SOR), the IJF has a dedicated section titled “Policy for Safeguarding Athletes and Other Participants from Harassment and Abuse,” placing safeguarding alongside other core governance elements such as anti‑doping and disciplinary systems. To fulfill this obligation, the IJF maintains a public Abuse and Harassment reporting portal, offering confidentiality, anonymity, and direct access to safeguarding officers. This mechanism helps ensure transparent, accessible reporting and reduces internal suppression of misconduct.

Furthermore, the IJF’s published policies include documents outlining background checks for officials, risk‑assessment procedures, media guidelines and portrayal‑of‑children rules, and mandatory safeguarding education across its continental and national bodies. These in turn help reinforce duty of care practices at every level of competition and administration within the sport.

This is all to say that across grappling, athlete safeguarding has transitioned from the lax and informal “gym culture” to tangible and enforceable codified and established standards.

However, unlike judo there is no single unifying body similar to the IJF or for jiu jitsu. At best, you have the likes of the IBJJF who, while responding to the allegations against Galvao, proscribed no punishment or rebuke of the conduct of a blackbelt they themselves certified under their structure. Meaning a person they were affiliated with, did not lose their affiliation in any meaningful and established way despite facing numerous sexual harassment allegations including that of alleged grooming of a minor. This is, in my own estimation, the sort of inaction that allows for abusive behavior to exist.

These Systems Need to Be Enforced

Duty of care is ultimately tested not by what a sport says in the wake of a slew of allegations or what it writes in its charter, but by who it empowers in practice. When organizations be it the IBJJF or individual coaches/athletes/gyms, through inaction or an unwillingness to proactively police their learning enviroment, allow coaches or high‑status athletes with credible allegations or established histories of misconduct to continue operating, affiliating, or receiving recognition, they do not create a safe environment. Flat out, they in turn create an environment where the victims are told: the status of the accused outweighs the safety of you the victim.

In late 2025, multiple women publicly alleged sexual assault and boundary violations by ADCC veteran Izaak Michell. He was subsequently removed from Gordon Ryan’s gym (Kingsway), which issued cautionary statements to the community. By January, Texas authorities listed him on a “most wanted” notice for a second‑degree sexual assault warrant and urged the public to provide information that would allow them to make an arrest.

Despite those developments, community posts and coverage documented Michell appearing, apparently welcomed or tolerated,in training environments in his home country (where he has not yet been extradited). That dynamic signaled to many women and minors that even serious allegations and an active warrant do not reliably trigger protective measures across the sport’s ecosystem.

For event organizers, gyms, and federations, the duty of care question should be simple: if credible allegations and an active warrant exist, why is any organization exposing athletes, especially minors, to that risk before an independent resolution?

Because jiu jitsu lacks consistent, centralized discipline, signals such as recognition, affiliation, blackbelt status, and seminar visibility carry enormous weight. When high‑status individuals accused of misconduct continue to operate with institutional tolerance, families often interpret this as indifference from the broader sport.

Conversely, interim safeguards such as event suspensions, removal from leadership roles, independent reporting portals are not prejudgments. They are standard risk controls used in many sports while investigations proceed.

Judo, for example, operates under the SafeSport Code and federal law, with a centralized disciplinary and transparency system. Individuals under investigation who pose risk can be temporarily suspended or declared ineligible, often with no‑contact directives. These mechanisms provide rapid, risk‑based protections and make “gym‑hopping” significantly harder—something that repeatedly endangers athletes within jiu jitsu.

This is precisely why jiu jitsu does not simply need a unifying body. What the sport actually, and truly, needs is the organizations that already hold de facto governing power, particularly the IBJJF, to act like one. The IBJJF has unmatched reach, authority, and influence: it sets the standards for rank certification, regulates competition eligibility, and shapes norms for gym affiliation. That makes it the only entity currently positioned to implement universal safeguarding standards, mandate compliance, and publish public sanctions.

In sports governed by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, centralized governing bodies maintain public disciplinary databases, issue interim suspensions, and prevent individuals found responsible—or credibly accused—of misconduct from quietly resurfacing in new environments. These systems show that athlete safety becomes real policy rather than a patchwork of community outrage.

The IBJJF has taken steps to partially meet these standards, like requiring SafeSport training and background checks for black belts seeking certification or renewal. However, the IBJJF has not implemented core protections considered basic in Olympic‑governed sports: cross‑organization bans, public sanction lists, or a transparent disciplinary process. Jiu jitsu may not be pursuing Olympic status, but its global scale and the vulnerability of minors within the sport create the same ethical obligations regardless.

Crucially, the IBJJF already exercises centralized authority when it chooses to. It bans athletes for doping, and while not every organization respects those bans, their very existence demonstrates the IBJJF’s capacity to enforce universal standards. This simply leaves me with the question: why does the IBJJF choose not to in cases of sexual abuse by coaches?

Simply put, Izaak Michell should be barred from participation, affiliation, or recognition across both IBJJF‑connected environments and non-IBJJF environments (eg. ADCC, WNO, UFC BJJ, etc.). He should be persona non grata at minimum until the sexual assault charges he is facing are resolved. Ideally, he’d be barred for life from any and all gyms and competitions. Similarly, at a minimum Andre Galvão should face suspension pending investigation. These are not punitive leaps, they are standard duty of care measures already available and carried out by the IBJJF as mentioned above.

For jiu jitsu to become a truly safe sport, its existing power structures—not hypothetical new ones—must adopt and enforce coherent, centralized safeguards. Athlete protection must not rely on community outrage or informal networks but operate as standing procedures automatically triggered when allegations arise.

Until the sport’s leading organizing bodies actually start enforcing these already established standards upon gyms, coaches, and athletes, we will simply see what Izaak Michell, Andre Galvao, Lloyd Irvin, Marcel Goncalves, Ricardo de la Riva (and many, many others) have allegedly done continue to repeat itself. Ultimately creating an unsafe environment for children, adults, and the sport itself to persist. Something I think nobody in their right mind wants.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7 FROM THE MORE-DAMNED-THAN-EVER UFCMETA APEX
PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | MAIN CARD 5 PM / 8 PM

The first-ever UFC Apex card happened almost six years ago on May 30, 2020. As a sign of things to come, its main event was the genuinely important Gilbert Burns vs Tyron Woodley, its co-main event was the less important and deeply cursed Augusto Sakai vs Blagoy Ivanov, and its first televised, main-card fight was a tune-up match for Mackenzie Dern. It was strange and alienating and uncomfortable, and UFC brass had multiple interviews and press quotes about its unfortunate but thankfully temporary necessity thanks to the era of COVID.

That era never truly ended, but branding never sleeps. Three and a half years ago the Apex was closed off for an event because Mark Zuckerberg, the Innsmouth fishman at the head of Facebook, had bought it out for the night. One year ago, Dana White joined Facebook/Meta’s board of directors as part of the ongoing mid-life crisis capitalism is very publicly suffering. Last month, the UFC announced that a naming rights deal had been struck and, for the measly price of $100 million, the fight warehouse will be the Meta Apex for the next five years.

Before we move on to fights, I want you to really digest that. The propaganda shellgame of moneyed assholes swapping their riches around has reached the point where The Facebook Guy, whose platform has aided multiple acts of genocide around the entire world, gave one hundred million dollars to The UFC Guy, who has spent years impotently whining about accusations of politicizing the sport while serving as a front for Donald Trump, in exchange for UFC broadcasts showcasing Threads instead of Twitter and, above all, for the incredible honor of having their name on the empty building the UFC uses for the fight cards they care about the least.

Everything is as ridiculous as it can possibly be, and somehow, year after year, we find deeper trenches to fill.

MAIN EVENT: INTERCEPTION
BANTAMWEIGHT: Mario Bautista (16-3, #9) vs Vinicius Oliveira (23-3, #11)

I’m glad I got all of that out of my system in the intro, because for the first time in 2026, I really don’t have anything bad to say about a UFC main event.

It’s heartbreaking how exceptional that is now. Gaethje vs Pimblett was a cynical marketing ploy. Volkanovski vs Lopes was an unbelievably unnecessary rematch. Two weeks from now we get Sean Strickland; the week after that it’s Brandon Moreno fighting just 84 days after getting TKOed. March, as of now, is Max Holloway and Charles Oliveira fighting for a belt that doesn’t exist, Josh Emmett’s career skid running through Kevin Vallejos, Movsar Evloev vs Lerone Murphy in a battle of unwanted contenders, and the attempt to rub the last bits of Israel Adesanya’s relevance off on Joe Pyfer.

We’re fully stuck in a bad era of the sport. The legitimacy is violently surrounded by the bullshit these days and it looks like it will be for quite some time to come. But that’s all the more reason to celebrate the good stuff when we get it. For all the UFC wants big brawls and sloppy knockouts, to me, this is good stuff. This is an extremely sensible fight with a fascinating clash of styles that’s going to answer some very interesting questions about the future of the Bantamweight division.

Ordinarily, when it comes to gritty, grinding grapplers, I pen you essays about how the UFC has tried their best to shove them into the corner. Mario Bautista, somehow, has been an exception. His technique consists largely of one-twos and cage clinching, he hasn’t finished anyone in almost three years, he hasn’t knocked anyone out in six, and while they haven’t strapped the jetpack to him the same way they have some of their more desired contenders, they have, by and large, done right by him. After a seven-fight winning streak they were going to match him up in a top-ten fight against Chito Vera, and when Chito got injured they gave him Patchy Mix, who, at the time, was one of the biggest free agents in the sport.

When Bautista beat him? They gave the low-highlight grappler a top contendership fight. After three years and eight victories, after sharing the cage with out-of-the-company killers like Patchy and greatest-of-all-time candidates like José Aldo, Mario Alberto Bautista, lifelong grappler, was given his shot at the top of the sport. And all he had to do to get it was beat Umar Nurmagomedov, the massively talented Khabib-clan contender who’d come just one round shy of taking Merab Dvalishvili’s world championship.

As you may have surmised: Mario did not win. He put up a good fight and damn near knocked Umar out with a knee in the second round, but Mario couldn’t keep him from recovering, nor could he stop the wrestling. To some extent, I was expecting a full demotion from the loss. Send him down to fight Kyler Phillips or Montel Jackson or whichever Contender Series guy they’ve decided deserves the full power of the UFC’s death star advertising laser this year.

Instead he has Vinicius Oliveira, and that’s kind of perfect.

“Lok Dog” was the kind of guy the UFC wanted to test the waters with before they committed. Unlike a lot of Contender Series folks he’d already established himself on the international stage, having gone from success in Brazil to fighting through Combate in Mexico and somehow wound up holding the bantamweight title out in Abu Dhabi’s UAE Warriors. He threw big punches, he slung fast headkicks, he was a solid counter-grappler and he looked all to hell like a top guy in the making.

But he’d never been undefeated. He lost that Combate fight, he lost back home in Brazil and two fights before the UFC came calling, he lost that UAE championship after a back-and-forth war with Ali Taleb ended with Oliveira unconscious on the canvas. There was no aura of invincibility, no unproven-20-year-old energy--he was a solid fighter with a solid background who’d already experienced the ups and downs of the game. The UFC brought him in hoping he’d be a highlight-reel knockout machine, and in his first appearance he dutifully kneed Bernardo Sopaj’s face off and the company excitedly prepared for years of Twitter clips.

Instead, Vinicius has turned into something much better: A solid goddamn stylist. He’s still unmistakably a wide-swinging striker, he’s still unmistakably hunting for a finish every time he fights, but after getting his bell rung by Taleb he committed to shoring up his game. He’s a wild fighter, but he outlasted a cardio machine in Ricky Simón. He’s a striking stylist, but he outgrappled Said Nurmagomedov. The last time we saw him he overcame a near-knockout in the first round and spent the last ten minutes overpowering and overpressuring Kyler Phillips, gatekeeper to the stars.

Thus: A bidirectional test. Mario Bautista worked his way to the top and fell back down, and the sport needs to see if he can right himself and retain his place in the pack. Vinicius Oliveira’s been punching his way up the ranks, but his last win was the biggest struggle he’s had in the UFC and the world needs to make sure he can hang with the top of the heap. It is simple, it is logical, it is harmonious and beautiful.

Which is probably why it’s in the Apex.

I’ve always been a Bautista booster and I’m trying to balance that a bit here, because an awful lot of his success comes from his ability to pace people with his punches and that’s probably a terrible idea here. It’s been a very long time since Bautista’s last knockout loss, but if Trevin Jones can do it, Vinicius most definitely can. He’s proven himself hard as hell to keep on the mat, though, which means Bautista’s best bet is probably to grind him out in the clinch and deny him the opportunity to use those headkicks he somehow manages to fit into very tiny spaces.

MARIO BAUTISTA BY DECISION because I still think he can do it, but Oliveira’s a very live dog.

CO-MAIN EVENT: DISPLAYING TREASURE IN A BROOM CLOSET
FLYWEIGHT: Amir Albazi (17-2, #6) vs Kyoji Horiguchi (35-5 (1), #8)

Whatever energy I saved by not launching into a moral crusade in the main event will be expended on the offense to heaven itself that is putting Kyoji Horiguchi in the Apex.

C’mon, man. The Apex? We’re in the Apex. You signed Kyoji goddamn Horiguchi last year and just two fights into a new era for the greatest human being to ever live you have him in the Apex. Sean Strickland is in the Toyota Center on the 21st and Lone’er Kavanagh is main eventing the Arena CDMX at the end of the month and Kyoji Horiguchi is in the god damned Apex.

It’s like buying a panther and putting it in a dog crate. It’s like hanging a Basquiat in your bathroom. It’s like signing Kyoji Horiguchi so you can have him fight in the Apex jesus christ what happened to you that you would unapologetically do the things you do to the world.

Across multiple decades and entire eras of the sport Kyoji, somehow, has just five losses, and they are, in order,

• Masakatsu Ueda, a veteran and unsung star of the sport who, at the time, had three times Kyoji’s experience

• Demetrious Johnson, one of a tiny handful of humans in the greatest-mixed-martial-artist-of-all-time conversation

• Kai Asakura, who thumped a Kyoji with a knee injury and who got thumped right back as soon as Kyoji was healthy

• Sergio Pettis, who Kyoji spent eighteen minutes handling until a spinning backfist destroyed him out of nowhere, because Sergio’s really good at that

• Patchy Mix, who, I swear, was once really, really good at fighting

Kyoji was one fight away from being a UFC champion, and in his time away from the company he became a two-division, multi-time champion in both Rizin and Bellator. After finally returning to the UFC last year he drew a genuinely challenging re-debut against Tagir Ulanbekov, a nail-tough fighter who’d made it through all twelve of his years in the sport without ever being stopped, and then he got in the cage with Kyoji Horiguchi and got fuckin’ thrashed. Outstruck, outwrestled, busted open, choked unconscious. It was as solid a return to the spotlight as anyone could have hoped for, and when Kyoji called for a title fight, it felt utterly plausible.

AND NOW WE’RE IN THE APEX.

Amir, I’m sorry, but you are very much the afterthought in this equation, and at this point that feels like a pretty fair assessment of where things are at. Once upon a time you seemed like you had potential as a contender, but then your body, scheduling and fighting style all just kind of fell apart, and if we’re being honest, there wasn’t a lot holding your place in the Flyweight world together in the first place.

That’s not to say Amir Albazi was never good. He was! He hit hard and he had a crushing top game and he was fast to leap on submissions, and that’s a hell of a danger triangle, especially in a division that’s always hurting for punching power. But Amir’s the #6 Flyweight in the world, and that’s based on a sum total of one (1) ranked victory, ever, and that was a split decision over Kai Kara-France almost three years ago, and that decision was widely considered one of the absolute worst of said year, and then Albazi was gone again anyway because his body just cannot handle fighting anymore.

I don’t mean that as an insult, just a statement of unfortunate fact. In recent history Amir Albazi has been making it to the octagon once every 422 days; if you go back to the far more active days of his debut it comes down to a hale and hearty 338. For more than half a decade, Amir has struggled and most often failed to fight more than once a year. The only time he managed to break that streak was 2022. Since then? Six months off before fighting Kara-France, 16 months off before facing Brandon Moreno, and then Amir was booked against Tatsuro Taira last August and had to pull out again. We haven’t seen him since before the last Presidential election, and the Amir Albazi who showed up to fight Brandon Moreno that night looked worn, confused and tired.

And that was already fifteen months ago. That Taira fight he had to pull out of last year? That wasn’t just an injury, that was the UFC and the Nevada State Athletic Commission refusing to medically clear him. This is a man who’s had a broken neck and an irregular heartbeat, and this is a company that regularly lets fighters with visibly broken hands compete on international broadcasts, and they looked at Albazi and said ‘no, this is not worth keeping our main event’ and refused to ever publicly clarify why, and now it’s 2026 and we’re going to let him back in the cage to fight a man that could punch out a horse.

The last time we talked about Amir I discussed the inspirational nature of his return to the sport and the hope that he’d look like his old self. The Amir we got looked visibly compromised, and that was an entire medical crisis ago. There’s a part of me that’s unconvinced this fight is happening at all, but if we make it to the cage, KYOJI HORIGUCHI BY TKO feels almost academic.

MAIN CARD: HEAVY OPPORTUNITIES
HEAVYWEIGHT: Jailton Almeida (22-4, #6) vs Rizvan Kuniev (13-3-1 (1), NR)

We’ve spilled a lot of ink on the Heavyweight division’s ongoing war with the very concept of meaning, and this feels like the struggle finding its logical extreme. Jailton Almeida has been a UFC project for three years. Despite his dogged insistence on committing the cardinal sin of grappling, his background in the Contender Series and his willingness to do more or less whatever the UFC wanted made him a company favorite. But their first attempt at getting him in the top three ended when Curtis Blaydes punched his temple through his opposite ear, and their second attempt this past October ended with Almeida largely outgrappling Volkov and still losing a decision when, despite almost eleven minutes of control time, he managed zero submission attempts and got outstruck 123 to 27. It left him in a tough position: Too good to ignore, but not good enough to make it into contention, and too inactive as a grappler to provide the company the highlights they crave. It’s hard to figure out where you take a fighter from there.

But, boy, it sure wasn’t supposed to be here. Rizvan Kuniev’s had one of the oddest UFC entries I’ve ever seen. He was the champion in Eagle FC back in Russia, he traded the belt for a shot at the Contender Series, he pounded out his opponent but didn’t get a contract, he went to the PFL, beat one of their best Heavyweights in Renan Ferreira only to have it expunged for a failed drug test, and he went right back to the Contender Series, knocked out another man, finally got signed to the UFC proper, and promptly sat on the shelf for half a year. They wanted him to fight Martin Buday, an unranked man on a one-fight winning streak, and when Buday had to pull out they instead booked Kuniev to debut against our last-paragraph partner Curtis Blaydes, the #5 Heavyweight in the company. They wanted that fight so badly they rescheduled it twice to make sure it happened. When Blaydes won a close decision, the UFC decided to sit on Kuniev for another eight months before booking him against Ryan Spann--an unranked man on a one-fight winning streak.

And when Spann pulled out they replaced him with Jailton Almeida, the #6 Heavyweight in the company.

Everything about this feels like the embodiment of the heat death of Heavyweight. They’ve pushed Jailton to the moon for years and now he’s a random replacement fighter. Rizvan’s grinding, low-volume style is everything the UFC hates, and they keep giving him shots at the top of the division anyway. This is a fight that could easily crown a contender one fight away from the Heavyweight championship, and it’s three slots from the top and it’s in the Apex and it’s only happening because Ryan Spann couldn’t make it to the show and we’ve arrived at the point that an unranked man and the #6 Heavyweight in the company are functionally interchangeable.

It’s all fucked, man. Jailton’s striking is still way too loose and I’m not convinced he’s going to be able to stifle a human brick like Kuniev for three rounds. RIZVAN KUNIEV BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Michał Oleksiejczuk (21-9 (1)) vs Marc-André Barriault (17-10 (1))

Some fights are built to bring order to the middle of the pack. Michał Oleksiejczuk is on his best UFC streak in almost five years, by which I mean he has two wins in a row and neither of them were against Sam Alvey. Before that? 1 for 5. Some of those haven’t aged too badly--getting choked out by Caio Borralho is fine and making it to the final bell against Shara Magomedov is better than most have managed--but getting run through in two and a half combined minutes by Michel Pereira and Kevin Holland ain’t so great these days. Oleksiejczuk’s joined his former destroyer by training alongside Caio over at the Fighting Nerds for his last couple fights, and on one hand he’s looked better than he has in years and sent both of his opponents to the dumpster, but on the other hand, those opponents were Sedriques Dumas and Gerald Meerschaert, neither of whom are exactly big striking threats.

So it’s time to test him against someone durable. I said few men made it to a decision against Shara, but as of his last appearance in July, Marc-André Barriault is one of them. It was his highest-profile fight in years, which is probably cold comfort for, like the Oleksiejczuks of seasons past, it still left Barriault 1 for 5. In fact, in 16 total UFC bouts, Barriault has the honor of possessing only one victory over someone who’s still employed by the company, and that man is Eryk Anders, the living avatar of entropy waiting to consume us all when we die. If Michał’s notable for the adjustments and improvements he’s made, Barriault’s notable for his constancy. He joined this company as a gritty pocket brawler with the barest sprinkle of clinch grappling who relied on his chin and his gas tank to outlast his opponents and it’s almost seven years later and by god, he’s still that.

Thank you for your place as an iceberg in the ocean of combat sports. May your thawing be gentle. MICHAŁ OLEKSIEJCZUK BY TKO.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Jean Matsumoto (17-1) vs Farid Basharat (14-0)

Prospect clashes are some of the best fights you can put on. For how often matchmaking is done to specifically raise, lower or test one fighter over another, some of the best moments in the sport come from taking two people on their way up and letting them prove who really belongs in conversations about the future of their weight class. Jean Matsumoto was an undefeated hotshot of a prospect right up until one year ago when he took a short-notice bout with the gatekeeper of gatekeepers, Rob Font, and fell just short of victory. By virtue of a bunch of flying knees and a lot of leg kicks Jean got back to his winning ways last Summer after scraping past Miles Johns, and he wants back in the mix as soon as is humanly possible.

Beating Farid Basharat is an awfully good way to get there. We’ve used the phrase ‘the Basharat brothers’ so many times that it feels as though it’s lost meaning, but as ever, they are sibling prospects, and as ever, you will find Javid another three or four fights down from here because they roll in packs, and unfortunately for him, Farid’s still the only brother left unscathed. It’s been five straight wins and zero career defeats since Farid came off the Contender Series in 2022, and the extremely well-rounded gameplans and exceptionally well-timed wrestling assaults have been good enough that Farid would probably be in the top fifteen already were it not for his problem with persistently existing. As good as Farid is, he’s lost a lot of momentum after fighting just twice in the last two years, and in a division as lively as Bantamweight, you need that speed if you want to succeed.

Matsumoto’s a very live threat to just about anyone in the division and if Farid doesn’t work to neutralize the kicks he’s going to be in for a very long night, but at this point I have faith in the way he uses his weapons. FARID BASHARAT BY DECISION.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Dustin Jacoby (21-9-1) vs Julius Walker (7-1)

Whatever things I say about the nonsensicality of Heavyweight can be doubled for Light Heavyweight, which is funny, because there is, still, more talent in the division. You still have a good five or six fighters that could, at any given moment, become a world champion. But the wild swings and the vacations and the sheer desperation of the whole thing make for some really fucking funny booking. Dustin Jacoby beat a future title contender in Khalil Rountree Jr. back in 2022 and got screwed out of a decision, which sent him down a slump that concluded in being responsible for the Dominick Reyes Resurgence Of 2025 after getting flatlined by 2019’s best prospect in two minutes flat. But now Jacoby’s back on a winning streak, because he knocked out Vitor Petrino, who had just become the only man to get finished by Anthony Smith in the last four years of his career, and Bruno Lopes, who’d only fought in the UFC once.

As his reward, Dustin now gets to fight someone who’s been here twice. Julius “Juice Box” Walker fought an amazing mixture of regional men with losing records and regional contenders with a history of being knocked out by Welterweights and then he got called up to the UFC for an immediate shot at the top 15 as a late replacement against Alonzo Menifield, whom he took to a split decision anyway because this division is only barely real. His second test in the UFC? Raffael Cerqueira, a man who had three separate Contender Series fights fall through before the UFC simply brought him up to the big show where he immediately lost four straight fights and, somehow, he has not yet been released. Julius Walker is the only man in the UFC that failed to finish him, and now he has a shot at the borderline of the rankings.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. DUSTIN JACOBY BY DECISION.

PRELIMS: IN HINDSIGHT I FEEL LIKE THE PHRASE ‘POLISHMEN’ IS INSENSITIVE
WELTERWEIGHT: Alex Morono (24-12 (1)) vs Daniil Donchenko (12-2)

Alex Morono is like a bridge to a past era of mixed martial arts. Morono, himself, isn’t that old--despite feeling as though he’s been around for decades he’s only 35--but god, his record sure is. Donald Cerrone had his first professional combat sports fight in 2003. Anthony Pettis was in World Extreme Cagefighting before Morono ever set foot in a cage. Josh Burkman was ruled out of the second round of The Ultimate Fighter 2 (jesus christ) back in 2005. Morono fought them all, and that history is still his present. He’s 2 for his last 7, and those two victories were over Tim Means, whose first UFC fight dates all the way back to the company’s debut on Fuel TV, the extreme sports channel that brought you the best of programming based around Australian surfing, and Court McGee, who has always existed and will, always, exist. Everyone else has beaten Morono. Ten months ago, Carlos Leal absolutely crushed him. And now he’s a link to the future, as he is here to be dutifully dispatched by Daniil Donchenko, the TUF 33 (jesus christ) winner who’s damn near a -600 favorite because he’s good at punching stuff and Alex Morono is made of dust and dreams.

I’m sorry, brother. I hope you prove them wrong again somehow, but the wind weeps for you. DANIIL DONCHENKO BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Nikolay Veretennikov (13-7) vs Niko Price (16-9)

This fight was not supposed to happen. It was not meant to be. It exists as an evolutionary mistake. In 2023 the UFC signed José Henrique Souza despite his a) getting knocked out by Yusaku Kinoshita on the Contender Series and b) pissing hot for steroids and getting suspended for two years. Souza went off and fought in Brazil and Malta instead of honoring his suspension, so it wasn’t until now that he was legally able to compete in America. The UFC wanted him to fight Eric Nolan, a one-timer who got choked out by Baisangur Susurkaev last August, but Nolan pulled out and was replaced by Nikolay Veretennikov, who’s 1 for 4 in the company and that 1 was a split decision that 75% of the media scored against him. This was still too rich for Souza’s blood so he pulled out and left Nikolay on the card alone, which is how Niko Price, a man who is 3 for his last 10, stepped in, and how José Henrique Souza vs Eric Nolan somehow became Nikolay Veretennikov vs Niko Price. We live in Hell. We live in a soup of meaningless strife and terror. Cars crash every day and sometimes fights come out of the wreckage.

Throw one of your belongings at the floor and decide based on the way it lands. NIKO PRICE BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT: Bruna Brasil (11-5-1) vs Ketlen Souza (15-6)

We were just discussing the middle-of-the-pack issues during Oleksiejczuk/Barriault, but as dark as the tides of Middleweight can be, there’s an unavoidable sort of tragedy about being stuck in the middle of the pack in a division like Women’s Strawweight, where there are barely thirty active fighters at any given time and you can’t actually get to the end of the list without having to deal with folks like Shauna Bannon, Marnic Mann or Shi Ming who are all visibly pretty bad at this, and coincidentally, the women that comprise all of Bruna Brasil’s UFC victories. Ketlen Souza came in with a fair bit of hype as Invicta’s Flyweight champion, but she got her knee torn to shreds by Karine Silva and came back against--hey, Marnic Mann, what’re the odds--and despite a big upset victory over Yazmin Jauregui, Ketlen spent all of 2025 losing split decisions, one to Angela Hill that could have easily gone the other way, one to Piera Rodriguez that should really have been unanimous.

I like Ketlen. I really do. She’s also just pretty small for the division, and doesn’t have the killer grappling or power to overcome the disadvantage. I also, in all fairness, do not think Bruna is great at any of this. As much as I want Ketlen to take it, I am, still, going with BRUNA BRASIL BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Said Nurmagomedov (18-5) vs Javid Basharat (14-2 (1))

Time has not been kind to Said Nurmagomedov. The one and only notable bearer of the name to not be related to the greater clan of wrestlemen, Said was still a fairly solid, borderline-ranked Bantamweight prospect at the end of 2023. He may not have been an undefeated marvel, but 7-2 in the UFC doesn’t suck, and becoming the first man to ever stop Muin Gafurov was a hell of a feather in his cap. But injuries and scheduling issues saw Said sit out the entirety of 2024, and then he spent all of 2025 getting battered about by Vinicius Oliveira and Bryce Mitchell, and now he’s 27 months away from his last win and the silence has become deafening. Javid Basharat isn’t doing much better. He was an undefeated Marvel, and then, like so many others, he hit the skids hard. He had the first non-win of his career after kicking Victor Henry in the dick so hard the fight had to be stopped, for which he blamed Henry and called him a coward who wanted out, and as if punished by the universe itself, Javid spent the next two years getting handily outboxed by Aiemann Zahabi and eyes-rolled-back-in-his-head levels of knocked out by Ricky Simón.

Both of these men were potential contenders and it’s feasible they’re both fighting to keep their jobs. I know the odds are on Javid’s side, but I’m going with SAID NURMAGOMEDOV BY DECISION.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Wang Cong (8-1, #12) vs Eduarda Moura (12-1, #13)

I’ll be honest, this one took me by surprise. The UFC has been carefully managing Wang Cong as a future star since day one. They signed her off the back of her regional victory over Wu Yanan, one of the least successful UFC fighters in history, they got her two extremely favorable fights right off the bat, and for her actual debut as a UFC representative in her native China they matched her up with Gabriella Fernandes, who was 1-2 and arguably should’ve been 0-3. When Fernandes shockingly choked her out, they buried her in the Apex while continuing to put Cong on pay-per-view prelims as though nothing ever happened, and they even got her in the top fifteen by feeding Ariane da Silva to her on a losing streak. They’ve been very, very careful to keep her both thoroughly advantaged and constantly in the spotlight. So it’s really fuckin’ weird that she’s fighting down in the rankings against a decent threat and it’s buried in the Apex. Eduarda Moura’s actually fairly solid. She’s decent at wrestling, she’s got a tough chin, she’s good at slinging the overhand right into small spaces and she isn’t afraid to sit down on her punches. The worst thing she’s done is lose a fight to Denise Gomes, and that was at Strawweight, a class Moura had no business staying in, as evidenced by her getting kicked out of it after missing weight twice in a row.

This probably won’t be a fireworks-factory affair, but it will be legitimately interesting. If Wang’s going to be the postergirl the UFC wants her to be, she has to be able to win fights like these. I think she’s solid enough for it, I’m going with WANG CONG BY DECISION, but this is a legitimate test for her and I’m very curious to see just how it ends.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Muin Gafurov (20-6) vs Jakub Wikłacz (17-3-2)

In this card’s ongoing theme of bafflingly-placed fights, we have this. Muin Gafurov was a fairly exciting signing. He was supposed to join the UFC back in 2019 after jumping ship as a top contender in ONE Championship only to get contract-lawyered right back to Indonesia, he finally made it back in 2023 after a stint as a champion in the Legacy Fighting Alliance, and he then promptly got stomped in his first two UFC bouts and the world kind of forgot about him. He was understandably upset about this, and he took it out on retiring longtime veteran Kang Kyung-ho and ending the undefeated streak of superprospect Rinya Nakamura. Jakub Wikłacz has only been here for about four months, having traded in his Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki championship from his native Poland to fight former best-fighter-outside-the-UFC candidate Patchy Mix, and to the surprise of many, he beat the Bellator champion and sent him packing from the company entirely.

In other words, you’ve got one international contender coming off his biggest win in seven years and one international champion coming off his biggest win of all time, and they’re using that momentum to book them into the second fight from the bottom in the Apex. You are a promotional juggernaut, UFC. MUIN GAFUROV BY TKO.

WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Priscila Cachoeira (13-7) vs Klaudia Syguła (7-2)

KLAUDIA SYGUŁA BY DECISION. The details of this fight are irrelevant. I ask so very little from this sport. I have given up my hopes of mixed martial arts not being an endless font of right-wing propaganda. I have abandoned my dreams of fighters being treated fairly or given acceptable wages. Bit by bit, I am losing the war on simple concepts like ‘it’s actually bad if the rankings don’t matter’ and ‘stop booking people who got knocked out a few weeks ago.’ I live with many terrible things in combat spots, as we do in the world as a whole. I asked for one thing: A beautiful, shining future for Josiane Nunes, the crazy 5’2” Featherweight.

Priscila defeated her.

Priscila must pay.

Welcome to February, the month of romance and pain. After an incredibly slow start to the year, we are picking up at least a little speed. Still no word on Invicta’s relaunch, still another month before Rizin gets their boots on, but we’re up to either three or four UFCs depending on how you feel about broadcast time, the first event of the new-format PFL, and ONE’s still out there, quietly clinging to life.

THIS MONTH’S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS

• UFC 325: Volkanovski vs Lopes 2, technically, February 1

• UFC Fight Night: Bautista vs Oliveira, February 7

• UFC Fight Night: Strickland vs Hernandez, February 21

• UFC Fight Night: Moreno vs Almabayez, February 28

• PFL Dubai: Nurmagomedov vs Davis, February 7

• ONE Fight Night 40: Buntan vs Hemetsberger 2, February 13

IS THERE ANY NEWS

HENRY “SENTORYŪ” MILLER - JULY 16, 1969-JANUARY 29, 2026

Eight years ago, as part of a video game project, I wrote a whole lot of biographies for the veterans of the Pride Fighting Championships. Henry Miller was one of them, and at the time, I had this to say:

Last November, I wrote an ode to Giant Silva, the 7’2” wrestler and fighter, in which I dubbed him the platonic ideal of the freakshow fighter--a fighter whose one and only skill was his stature. While that’s still true, Giant Silva, for all his vulnerabilities, still had exactly one win during his time in Pride. Our subject today is Silva’s victim, the once-upon-a-time sumo oddity Henry “Sentoryū” Miller.

Miller, despite the name, is actually half-Japanese and was in fact born in Tachikawa--his father was a US airman on reserve, and when Miller was six and his father’s duty ended, the family moved back to his home in St. Louis. Miller’s birth in Japan informed the path of the rest of his life: As a child he’d been a big fan of sumo wrestling, and took up amateur wrestling in America on account of it. When he graduated from high school, he took stock of his options and interests, packed up his belongings, moved back to Japan, and embarked on a 15-year mission to become the best sumo in the world.

He...never quite got there. Under the shikona Sentoryū (and, briefly, Kaishinzan) he competed voraciously, known for favoring brute force and grit over finesse, but he struggled to rise in the ranks, being repeatedly promoted and demoted between the middle tiers of sumo. Eventually, after twelve years of constant give and take, he achieved the beginning of his dream: He was promoted to makuuchi, the top division of sumo, and the start of every sumo’s path to the top of the mountain. Unfortunately, makuuchi itself has five ranks, and he never broke out of the first. Equally unfortunately, he was demoted out of makuuchi altogether within a few months. This was the patch on Sentoryū’s career: Everyone admired his grit--at just 5’9” he was one of the smallest sumo wrestlers, and was repeatedly injured from the strain both his competition and his weight put on his body, but he battled back every time and won fans simply for his refusal to quit--but he couldn’t be consistently successful. He was the first person from the mainland US to ever reach makuuchi, but he was also the slowest foreigner ever to get there. Even though his career saw him score victories over numerous up-and-coming stars, including one of the greatest of all time in the future yokozuna Asashoryu, he simply couldn’t climb the ladder. By 2003 he was 34, and injured, and ready for something new.

And there was, indeed, something new afoot. Just two years prior, the former yokozuna (and fellow American) Akebono had retired from sumo and made his way to kickboxing and mixed martial arts. Miller wasn’t yet ready to leave the world of combat sports, and in 2004 announced he’d signed with Pride and wholly intended to be the best heavyweight fighter in the world.

He never quite got there, either. His first fight was the aforementioned Giant Silva battle, in which he gassed out and got submitted--once again, by *Giant Silva*--in four minutes. It wasn’t a good sign, and it set the table for the rest of his career.

Henry Miller was a tough, powerful man. Unfortunately, he was also a 34 year-old man with more than a decade of injuries taking up an entirely new set of combat sports as a 5’9” heavyweight. He was operating at every conceivable disadvantage, and his record reflected it. In nine years of combat sports competition, including twenty-three mixed martial arts bouts and three kickboxing bouts, he won exactly seven times, and only two of those fights were against opponents with more wins than losses--and one of them was Mal Foki, who at 5’7” was the only fighter Miller ever outsized. His sole kickboxing win came was a battle of the boxing sumo against former rival Wakashoyo, who was himself 45, out of shape and 0-5-1. Only one single fight in Sentoryū’s career went to a decision--which meant he was exciting, but also that he’s been knocked out fifteen times.

Ten years after he’d hung up the mawashi, Sentoryu hung his gloves up beside them. He left a 6-16 (1) record in mixed martial arts, and a 1-2 record in kickboxing. He now runs a company that sells display boxes for jewelry. Its website is written in three clashing languages and still has lorem ipsum text in its footer. It is somehow fitting, to me--Miller’s career, while intriguing, is best characterized by its goals all being left tragically incomplete.

I have one disagreement with Carl of eight years ago: I don’t know that I see it as a tragedy anymore.

Sentoryū did everything, man. Maybe he never made it to yokozuna, but despite a late start and no background in the sport he made it to goddamn makuuchi. Maybe he never cracked the Heavyweight rankings in mixed martial arts, but he made it to the damn show. He was enough of an attraction that he fought on Shockwave 2004 alongside Fedor Emelianenko and Takanori Gomi and Ikuhisa Minowa. He made enough of an impression that even as someone who started combat sports well past his prime, even as someone who lost far more than he ever won, even as someone whose time in the spotlight barely lasted three years, people still remembered him.

They didn’t forget when he passed, either. Miller’s battle with lung disease had been documented by his family--in no small part through a gofundme campaign for his medical expenses, because we still live in a deeply unfortunate world--and when he passed he was eulogized, internationally, across the worlds of combat sports and sumo alike.

It’s not enough, just like 56 years was not nearly enough, but however much I parsed his life as a tragedy at the time, in the present, that seems ludicrous. He performed in multiple sports across the world as an outsider to all of them and instead of running from it he wore it so proudly that when he entered makuuchi he wore a goddamn Budweiser kesho-mawashi so he could bring St. Louis with him to Nagoya.

Dying young is a tragedy. But there’s nothing tragic in his career. Failing to win a world championship is nothing in comparison to the life he led. May we all be so fortunate as to end up being so interesting.

The only American B-league left has undergone a shift. 2026 was already going to be a year of change for the Professional Fighters League--no more tournaments, building out the roster of standing champions, giving up on booking Francis Ngannou again--but they got a backstage head-start a full month before their fights began. Early in January their international lead Peter Murray departed, and a week later Donn Davis, CEO of the PFL, rather abruptly left the company after an internal ownership shift that led to venture capitalist firms Knightshead and 885 moving from their previous role as company financiers to holding majority ownership.

On one hand: I don’t think Donn Davis did a particularly great job and, as a person who writes about MMA, I am relieved to keep track of one less executive writing silly things on social media all the time. On the other: Knightshead was founded by former Goldman Sachs poobahs, is tied in with Trump and are best known for helping to buy a bankrupt Hertz so they could debt-market billions into their own pockets, and 885 Capital is fronted by rich investors in Dubai who run AI-replacement customer service platforms.

So, uh. Good luck out there, Dakota Ditcheva.

You know how everyone’s been asking when the UFC would improve fighter pay, now that they’re getting their $1.1 billion a year and all? Good news! They did, in the sense that the base pay hasn’t changed at all and everyone’s still beholden to their whims and their lust for stoppages above all. Performance of the Night bonuses are being doubled up to $100k apiece, and knockouts or submissions will now get $25k rewards. Is it better than paying less money? Absolutely. Could they just pay the fighters real fucking money? Of course not.

WHAT HAPPENED IN JANUARY

There was a grand total of two events in January, and they happened in one twelve-hour period. First you had ONE Fight Night 39: Rambolek vs Dayakaev on the 24th, and it was, in fact, a ONE card. Lumpinee stadium, nine fights, most of the card was either kickboxing or submission grappling including the main and co-main events, you know how this story goes. Bokang Masunyane beat Ryohei Kurosawa and Chihiro Sawada took a decision over Natalie Salcedo and Chase Mann beat Isi Fitikefu after he busted his knee, and at this point, more than the kickboxing, the hardest thing about staying attached to ONE is the degree to which none of its MMA fights really go anywhere. Is Chase Mann getting a shot at Christian Lee? Of course not. There hasn’t been a Welterweight (which is, of course, 185 pounds) title fight in ONE Championship in going on four years.

Fortunately the evening also brought us UFC 324: Gaethje vs Pimblett, their promotional debut as a Paramount streaming show. A card built in large part around trying to get the stars of tomorrow over through the blood of the past was mostly successful, but not where they really wanted it. Down on your early prelims, Ty Miller and Josh Hokit both ate their ready-made meals in a round. On the regular prelims, Alex Perez punched Charles Johnson silly, Nikita Krylov took out Modestas Bukauskas with just three seconds left on the clock, Ateba Gautier won a surprisingly difficult decision over Andrey Pulyaev, and Umar Nurmagomedov beat a Deiveson Figueiredo who was both overweight and seemed to just be checked out. On your main card, Jean Silva won a war with Arnold Allen, Natália Silva got a close but not particularly exciting decision against Rose Namajunas, Waldo Cortes-Acosta beat up Derrick Lewis in the combat sports equivalent of Old Yeller, and Sean O’Malley won an incredibly close match with Song Yadong. The main event represented the UFC’s attempt to get any form of gold on Paddy Pimblett, as he met Justin Gaethje for the Interim Lightweight Championship, and Gaethje beat his face closed and took a wide decision.

WHAT OCCUPIED BOTH SUPERPOSITIONS IN TIME AT ONCE

Taking place in January and February simultaneously thanks to the magic of Australia, we had UFC 325: Volkanovski vs Lopes 2. Before the event even started we got an early entrant for funniest moment of the year when the Road to UFC’s Flyweight final got scrapped after Aaron Tau got caught trying to cheat at the weigh-in and turned out to be 4 pounds over. Three of your four early prelims were the other finals, with Lawrence Lui winning a close split at Bantamweight, Keiichiro Nakamura scoring a third-round knockout at Featherweight, and Dom Mar Fan running the table at Lightweight, and the top-off was Kaan Ofli getting a, uh, questionable majority decision over Yizha. On your regular prelims, Jonathan Micallef overcame some early adversity to choke out Oban Elliott in the second, Jacob Malkoun won a decision over a barely-mobile Torrez Finney, Cameron Rowston knocked out Cody Brundage in two, and Billy Elekana choked out Junior Tafa after eight minutes. Up top, Quillan Salkilld managed to neck crank Jamie Mullarkey, Tallison Teixeira won just the saddest, gassiest decision in the world against Tai Tuivasa, Maurício Ruffy knocked out Rafael Fiziev, and Benoît Saint Denis pounded out Dan Hooker in two rounds. Your main event saw Alexander Volkanovski defending the Featherweight title against Diego Lopes, a rematch of their first fight from all of nine months prior. The first time around, Volk won a unanimous decision with two 49-46s and a 48-47; this time it was two 49-46s and a 50-45. Please stop doing unnecessary rematches. I am begging you.

WHAT’S COMING IN FEBRUARY

February kicks off alongside the PFL’s year. No more tournaments, no more leagues, we’re just a fighting organization now, and by god, we need more champions. PFL Dubai: Nurmagomedov vs Davis on February 7 will force me to write even more title profiles. The undercard is a mixture of known-quantity matchups like Robin Wilkinson vs Luke Trainer and Denise Kielholtz vs Antonia Silvaneide right alongside regionally-appropriate appeal fights like Makkasharip Zaynukov vs Amin Ayoub. Your miain card has Pouya Rahmani vs Karl Williams, Abdoul Abdouraguimov vs Kendly St. Louis and 2025 Featherweight finalist Jesus Pinedo vs Salamat Isbulaev, your co-main event will see the PFL Welterweight title inaugurated in a match between Ramazan Kuramagomedov and Shamil Musaev, and your main event has Usman Nurmagomedov defending the Lightweight title against Alfie Davis.

But let that not get in the way of the UFCMeta Apex. That day also brings us UFC Fight Night: Bautista vs Oliveira, a night of matches featuring people who should not be in the fucking Apex. Bruna Brasil vs Ketlen Souza! Said Nurmagomedov vs Javid Basharat! Wang Cong vs Eduarda Moura! Jean Matsumoto vs Farid Basharat! Rizvan Kuniev vs Jailton Almeida! Amir Albazi vs Kyoji fucking Horiguchi! All of this in a warehouse full of nothing, main-evented by Mario Bautista vs Vinicius Oliveira.

There’s no UFC on the week of the 13th, but there is ONE Fight Night 40: Buntan vs Hemetsberger and at a certain point, I dunno what’s left to say. Do you want to see Ben Tynan vs Ryugo Takeuchi? Here’s your chance. You have it. Be proud. Adrian Lee vs Shozo Isojima is way over it and half the card and the main bouts are all kickboxing and by god, I just want ONE to pull the trigger and become an all-combat-sports-except-MMA organization already because they’re way better at it than they are at MMA and Xiong Jingnan needs to be set free while she still has time.

On the 21st, it’s UFC Fight Night: Strickland vs Hernandez. It’s fucking bonkers that, somehow, this is the road card and Bautista vs Oliveira isn’t, because you’ve got a pretty solid main event in Sean Strickland and Anthony Hernandez, and everything down from that is, like, Serghei Spivac vs Ante Delija. Zach Reese vs Michel Pereira is a main card fight. Geoff Neal vs Uroš Medić is a main card fight. Nora Cornolle vs Joselyne Edwards, of course, is on the prelims.

And then on February 28 we’re down to Mexico for UFC Fight Night: Moreno vs Almabayev and it’s market saturation time again, baby. Sofia Montengro vs Ernesta Kareckaitė, Cristian Quiñonez vs Kris Moutinho, Ailín Pérez vs Macy Chiasson, Daniel Zellhuber vs King Green, Marlon Vera vs David Martínez, Édgar Cháirez vs Felipe Bunes, we are booking every goddamn regionally relevant fighter we can. The main event has Brandon Moreno trying to stay in the top ten against Asu Almabayev.

CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Tom Aspinall - 15-3 (1), Either 1, 2 or 0 Defenses Depending On How You Look At It

You know, once upon a time, the UFC would’ve killed for a Tom Aspinall. Entire years of UFC events were spent desperately trying to get a Dan Hardy or Darren Till or Jimi Manuwa into championship pictures so they could cash in on UK superstardom. And somehow, Tom Aspinall just fell into their lap. They didn’t go out of their way to softball him, they didn’t put a ton of effort into marketing him, they just let him mulch everyone in his path. In 2025, Tallison Teixeira has a main event in just his second UFC bout: In 2022 Tom Aspinall had to notch five straight stoppages to get his first crack at the top of the card against Curtis Blaydes, and it ended with his knee imploding fifteen seconds into the fight. When he lost that fight, Francis Ngannou was the reigning UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World. By the time Tom returned in the Summer of 2023, it belonged to Jon fucking Jones. Within one fight Aspinall was a top contender again, and with Jon comically scheduled to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who hadn’t fought in two and a half years, Aspinall was left in a holding pattern--until Jon injured himself in training. With barely two weeks to prepare, Tom Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich for an interim championship. Sergei was the most devastating knockout artist in the Heavyweight division: Tom knocked him out in sixty-nine seconds. Not only did it give him gold, it gave him a golden ticket. The sole purpose of an interim champion is to one day reunify the belts, and that meant Tom had a shot at Jon Jones, one of the biggest fighters in the history of the sport. All he had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Tom waited so fucking long the UFC made him defend his interim title in a rematch with Blaydes--which he won easily, knocking him out in 60 seconds--on July 27, 2024. Four months later, Jon Jones returned and had his fight with Stipe, who by that point had been effectively retired for almost four years. Unsurprisingly, Jon won. Equally unsurprisingly, Jon and the UFC refused to commit to fighting Aspinall. Jones reportedly held the UFC up for a huge payday, and when they shockingly agreed, he changed his mind. In the end, the most obvious pair of conclusions happened: On June 21st, during the press conference after Fight Night Baku, Dana White announced Jon was retiring and Tom was being promoted to Undisputed Champion; an hour later, coincidentally, news broke that Jon was being summoned for arraignment in July on charges of leaving the scene of an accident after drunkenly crashing another car and leaving another heavily-inebriated half-naked woman behind in it and also threatening the police over the phone when they called him. It is the only way the Jon Jones story could possibly have ended. Tom Aspinall was an interim champion for 588 days, and he made his first undisputed one against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 26--and, because this division is fucking cursed, it ended in a No Contest after Gane poked him in both of his eyes at once. The UFC has decided this is mostly Tom’s fault, which has nothing at all to do with Tom’s dad talking about how he shouldn’t sign a new contract. A rematch has been vowed, but Tom needs literal eye surgery to regain his sight. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get an interim bout. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they strip him because He Just Didn’t Want To Fight.

Light Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

Alex Pereira - 13-3, 0 Defenses

Marketing has helpfully corrected its error from earlier this year. Two things are indisputable: Alex Pereira has always been one of the UFC’s favored agents, and Alex Pereira is a hell of a fighter. When the UFC brought Pereira in as a 3-1 rookie back in 2021, it was a transparent attempt to fast-track him to title contention based entirely on his storied rivalry with then-white-hot company star Israel Adesanya back when they were both kickboxers. It was blunt, it was obvious, and it totally worked, thanks in no small part to Pereira getting placed in title contention after just three fights, only one of which was against a ranked opponent, and zero of which came against anyone known for their wrestling. It also paid off, as Pereira shocked the world by punching Izzy out in the fifth round. The UFC, seeing gold, booked an instant rematch, and Izzy completed the story by dropping Pereira in the second round. Rather than a rubber match, the rivals buried the hatchet--mostly because Pereira was incredibly sick of the deathly weight cut it took to reach the 185-pound limit. He went up to Light Heavyweight, he was jetpacked into contention there, too, and within two fights he was a two-division champion. Over the entirety of his title reign, there was an extremely clear #1 contender, and it was Magomed Ankalaev, and the UFC moved mountains to keep him away from their meal ticket. That, too, paid off: Pereira’s year-and-a-half-long title reign made him a star. Eventually, unfortunately, they ran out of options and put the two together, and Ankalaev fulfilled the prophecy of MMA still being a sport sometimes by taking home a decision and Pereira’s belt. The UFC, knowing what side of their bread contains butterin light of Pereira’s accomplishments as a champion, signed an immediate rematch. Pereira claimed he was injured beforehand and would make short work of Ankalaev on his second attempt, and, sure enough, on October 4 at UFC 320, he walked right through him, dropping him and pounding him out in just eighty seconds. It arose shortly after that this time Ankalaev was badly injured, but unsurprisingly, neither Pereira nor the UFC have any interest in a rubber match. As it turns out, Pereira doesn’t seem to have much interest in defending the 205-pound title at all. The second he won the belt he went about trying to manifest his next fight: A Heavyweight clash with Jon Jones at the UFC’s White House card in July. In other words: Fuck you, Light Heavyweight division.

Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Khamzat Chimaev - 15-0, 0 Defenses

Yeah, this was probably inevitable. When Khamzat Chimaev showed up in the UFC in the middle of the Fight Island pandemic era and wrecked two people in ten days at two different weight classes, the world was prepared to believe he was special. When he ended Gerald Meerschaert with one punch less than two months later, all doubt was cast aside. The fighters, the audience, and the UFC itself were all true believers in the championship future that lay ahead for Khamzat Chimaev. Khamzat, in response, retired from mixed martial arts. As it turns out, fighting in the middle of a COVID pandemic makes it more likely you’re going to get COVID. Who’dve thunk? After a year, some prodding from Dana White and reportedly a lot more personal prodding from Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator in charge of Khamzat’s native Chechen Republic, Khamzat returned to the sport a year later. His dominance continued unabated, but his schedule never recovered--in fact, it worsened. After a particularly unfortunate 2022 episode involving Khamzat torpedoing his own pay-per-view main event against Nate Diaz after missing weight by almost ten pounds and very nearly cancelling the event altogether, he instead wound up strangling Kevin Holland, taking another year off, moving permanently to Middleweight, and adopting a new schedule whereby he fought only once every twelve months, and every time he appeared, something bizarre would happen. In the first episode of New Khamzat he showed up in 2023 for what was supposed to be a long-awaited showdown with Paulo Costa, but Costa, as he is wont to do, pulled out and resulted in Welterweight champion Kamaru Usman stepping in with just days to prepare. Even weirder: He gave Khamzat the closest fight he’d ever had. One judge scored the fight a damn draw. Khamzat’s struggle with a career Welterweight gave a lot of folks pause when, one year later, he returned to face Middleweight kingpin Robert Whittaker. Rob was universally respected as one of the best 185-pound fighters in UFC history, and while he’d lost, he’d lost only to the best and never easily. Khamzat steamrolled him in three and a half minutes. He face-cranked him so hard it snapped a previous palate injury and left Rob’s bottom teeth floating in his mouth. By the time Khamzat came back in 2025 for his long-awaited shot at the belt, Dricus du Plessis had etched his spot in the record books as one of just five men to ever defend the Middleweight championship multiple times. He’d beaten everyone the UFC put in front of him, and he was still a betting underdog. The conventional wisdom was Khamzat would choke Dricus out in the first two rounds or Dricus would drag him through a difficult back half of the bout. As it turned out: Everyone was wrong. Khamzat did hand out one of the most one-sided championship victories in UFC history, but rather than destroying Dricus, he just outwrestled him for five straight rounds. He didn’t engage on the feet, he didn’t land much in the way of heavy ground-and-pound, and he isn’t even credited with a single submission attempt. Khamzat landed 529 strikes and only 37 of them were considered significant. But Khamzat won, unquestionably and easily, and now he has the belt everyone long assumed he’d get. It looks like he’ll be defending the belt against Nassourdine Imavov, but not until after Ramadan.

Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Islam Makhachev - 28-1, 0 Defenses

The prophecy has been fulfilled. Khabib Nurmagomedov was considered by many to be the greatest Lightweight of all time, but in the later stages of his career he began to repeatedly reference his lifetime friend and training partner Islam Makhachev as not just his successor, but the man who would break the mold he’d left behind. And the fanbase was more than willing to buy another Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov protege coming in and wrecking shop--until he got knocked out by Adriano Martins. Khabib’s aura of invulnerability came from the simple, so-obvious-more-people-should-try-it factor of simply never losing a damn fight. When Islam got torched in under two minutes by a man that couldn’t beat Donald Cerrone, that aura vanished. A lot of folks still thought he could be a champion, but most felt the greatest-of-all-time lane was closed to him. It turns out there’s another way to regain that sense of unbeatable awe, though: Just don’t lose for so goddamn long people forget it ever happened. In the ten full years since that Martins bout, Islam has not lost a single fight. Most of the time, he hasn’t even lost a round. He worked his way up the Lightweight ladder and began to rack up incredible achievements. He tore through top prospects with virtually no effort, he choked out one of the best MMA grapplers ever in Charles Oliveira, he outlasted and later knocked out one of the two men with a claim to the all-time Featherweight crown in Alexander Volkanovski, he choked out Dustin Poirier and he broke the Lightweight title defense record after stomping Renato Moicano. And then he traded in his record-breaking reign to challenge for Welterweight gold. Jumping divisions is always difficult, but the 15-pound leap from Lightweight to Welterweight is a mountain, and no Lightweight champion had ever managed it. Even BJ Penn, the canonical first man to hold gold at both, had to do it in reverse: He failed at both of his attempts to win Lightweight gold and shocked the world by abruptly taking it at Welterweight instead, and it would be five more years before he finally got his shit together and won a title in the division that made him famous. His subsequent attempts all ended in defeat, half because Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre were both great and half because BJ was just a Lightweight. Even though Islam was Islam and widely agreed to be a monster in the cage, Jack Della Maddalena had won the Welterweight title with some of the cleanest boxing the UFC had seen, and his championship victory over wrestler Belal Muhammad had people convinced that Islam, at best, would struggle. They met in the main event of UFC 322 on November 15, 2025, and there was absolutely no struggle. Islam kicked Jack’s leg to pieces, landed some surprisingly big punches, and took the fight to the ground almost at will, and by the time the fight ended, it felt like Jack never had a chance. The shadow has been stepped out of. Islam Makhachev is a two-division champion. And now he has a brand new horde of contenders beating down his door.

Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Ilia Topuria - 17-0, 0 Defenses

One of the most exciting things about following mixed martial arts is picking which prospects you really, truly believe in. There are hundreds of fighters across history that you will enjoy watching, and you may have some hopes for their future, but you don’t necessarily expect the world from them. When Ilia Topuria showed up in the UFC in 2020, if you were paying attention, you knew he was going to be special. The combination of wrestling, grappling and absolutely murderous striking was almost immediately visible, but what really set him apart was the unshakable confidence with which he used it. Even when he went up to 155 pounds on short notice and almost got knocked out by Jai Herbert he survived the onslaught, recovered, came right back at him as though he was utterly unfazed and destroyed Herbert seconds later. That was the truly exceptional danger of Ilia Topuria: His belief in his technique was so absurdly complete that it came across as absurdly silly arrogance and it made huge swaths of the audience disdain him and then he’d somehow always find a way to just go do the damn thing anyway. He outgrappled Ryan Hall. He submitted Bryce Mitchell. He beat Josh Emmett so badly he got a 50-42 scorecard out of it. And on February 17, 2024, he ended Alexander Volkanovski’s historic, nearly-four-year reign as the king of Featherweight by knocking him out in two rounds. When Ilia followed that up by saying he was going to become the first man to ever knock out Max Holloway--a thing Volkanovski, Dustin Poirier, José Aldo and Conor McGregor failed to do--even with his title victory, the audience was still particularly skeptical. He did it anyway. Once again, Ilia walked into a fight with supreme confidence, and once again, it ended with his opponent on the floor, this time in three rounds. Ilia Topuria had knocked out the two greatest Featherweights of the generation and seemed poised for a longer title reign than either of them. And then he quit the division. One of those first overconfident boasts of his had been the desire to move up to Lightweight and knock out Islam Makhachev to become a double champion. The MMA world thought he was talking about a far-away future, but he wanted it and he wanted it now. Unfortunately, so did Islam. Right as Ilia vacated the Featherweight title to move up to Lightweight, Islam vacated the Lightweight title to move up to Welterweight. So Ilia was left to fight for his destiny against Charles Oliveira instead. Oliveira’s always been incredibly tough and dangerous, and he hadn’t been knocked out in almost eight years, and even then it wasn’t unconsciousness but rather because a Paul Felder elbow had broken part of his face. That streak ended on June 28, 2025 when Ilia Topuria punched him limp in two and a half minutes. The UFC may not do double-champions anymore out of sheer promotional frustration, but in any rational sense, Ilia is the king of Featherweight and Lightweight, which gives him a horde of contenders like Arman Tsarukyan, Justin Gaethje, Dan Hooker and Mateusz Gamrot. So he appears to be fighting Paddy Pimblett next. If you ask Ilia, he’s just killing time until Islam wins the Welterweight title, because his destiny is to take his 5’7” frame all the way up to Welterweight so he can kill the king and be the first ever three-division champion in UFC history. Does it sound aggressively silly and arrogant? Of course it does. Do you feel comfortable ruling it out? Then you haven’t been paying attention. Ilia is, however, dealing with some personal issues related to his divorce, so he’s going to be out of action until the Spring, which means the UFC made an interim title bout between Justin Gaethje and Paddy Pimblett for UFC 324 on January 24. Yes, really. How’d that one wind up going, you ask?

Interim Lightweight Champion

Justin Gaethje - 27-5, 0 Defenses

One of the foundational subjective mixed martial arts questions, right alongside ‘who’s the pound-for-pound best’ and ‘what if Cro-Cop ducked that kick,’ is ‘Who’s the best fighter to never win a championship?’ There are different answers for every generation, and one of the complicating factors is the inevitable debate over whether interim titles count. Was Carlos Condit a UFC champion? What about Colby Covington or Yair Rodríguez? It’s still an incredible achievement, but it’s just not quite real the way an undisputed title is. And I cannot imagine what sort of a backhanded career accomplishment it is to be the only person in UFC history to win their division’s interim title twice. Justin Gaethje has been right on the edge of the top for so long he’s got two half-championships in his closet. Back in 2020 he fought Tony Ferguson, then arguably the scariest Lightweight in the world, and beat him so horrifically that his career never recovered, and that netted Gaethje his first interim belt, which he promptly lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov in the latter’s retirement bout. Two years later, Gaethje got his second shot at the undisputed title against Charles Oliveira and he wound up strangled in three and a half minutes. Three and a half years after that, Gaethje was still right there at the precipice of the top, Ilia Topuria needed a break from the sport, and the UFC needed an aging veteran to propel their marketing star Paddy Pimblett to the top, and at UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, they threw Paddy’s big party and Justin crashed it. The UFC will tell you the fight was close, and it was in the sense that it went the whole way and one judge only gave Justin three rounds, but Paddy got brutally beaten and dropped repeatedly. Once again, Justin Gaethje is the interim champion. It just remains to be seen what the hell they’ll do now.

Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Alexander Volkanovski - 28-4, 1 Defense

And just like that, 2024 never happened. For eleven years Alexander Volkanovski was the best Featherweight on the planet, and most of that time was simply waiting for everyone else to notice. He was short and he won by decisions a lot and the world was entirely into Max Holloway so he skated under the radar right up until the moment he finally beat Max. And that wasn’t enough to convince people, so Volkanovski beat him again. And that somehow made the world doubt him even more, so he beat Max a third time. By 2023 Volk was second only to all-time great José Aldo in Featherweight title defenses--and he’d beaten Aldo in a fight, and his only actual loss was an all-timer of an effort against Islam Makhachev that still stands as the closest Islam has come to losing his title as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so it was very, very easy to accept Alexander Volkanovski as the greatest Featherweight on the planet. And then he took a rematch with Islam with only one week to prepare and got knocked out in three minutes, and then he came back less than four months later and got flattened by Ilia Topuria, and in the space of two fights the audience went from celebrating him as the best around to calling for his retirement. Volkanovski took an entire year off to heal and rebuild, which was enough time for Ilia to get bored and vacate the belt to go chase Lightweight greatness, and the Topuria/Volkanovski rematch became Volkanovski vs Diego Lopes at UFC 314 on April 12 to fill the vacant throne instead. It was somehow both close and clear. Lopes gained steam in the middle stanza of the bout and at one point dropped Volk, but Volk got right back up and resumed punching him in the face, and by the end of the bout he’d outlanded him more than two to one. The judges sided with him, the audience sided with him, and Alexander Volkanovski became not just one of the rare few to win back a UFC title, but the first man over 35 to ever win a UFC belt in the sub-170 weight classes typically reserved for young lions. His logical next contender should’ve been Movsar Evloev, but the UFC was busy trying to get him to fight an unranked, debuting Aaron Pico, thus clearing the way for a rematch with Yair Rodríguez in Guadalajara for Noche UFC 3 in September. Except the Arena Guadalajara wasn’t done yet, so Noche UFC 3 got moved to the most Mexican of places, Las Vegas, in October, and Alex’s manager said he had an eye injury that needs time to heal, so he took the rest of 2025 off. Good news, though: That left time for the UFC to get new contenders going. Lerone Murphy wound up fighting and knocking out Pico! Aljamain Sterling beat Brian Ortega! Hell, Movsar Evloev is still right there! The UFC looked at all of them and gave them all the finger. At UFC 325 on January 31, fresh off his title victory over Diego Lopes, Alexander Volkanovski had his first title defense against Diego Lopes. Unsurprisingly, the guy who beat Diego Lopes beat Diego Lopes again. Rumor has it the UFC’s going to have Evloev and Murphy fight in March, and presumably the winner’s got next.

Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Petr Yan - 20-5, 0 Defenses

Petr Yan’s road to the top has been incredibly circuitous. When Yan initially won the Bantamweight title back in 2020, no one was particularly surprised. He’d been one of the best in the world for years, he’d put together a six-fight winning streak on his road to the title shot, and the UFC had fed aging legend Urijah Faber to him in an attempt to make him a known quantity. Felling an even greater legend in José Aldo and taking the belt felt like an entirely expected passing of the torch, and a long reign as the division’s standardbearer seemed all but assured. And then, as they so often do, things went wrong. In quite possibly the most infamous title change in UFC history, Yan became the first champion to ever lose his title by disqualification after drilling Aljamain Sterling in the face with an illegal knee. Yan’s team cried foul and the world turned on Sterling, but when they had their rematch a year later, Sterling beat him by decision and that was that. But it was a split decision, and it was close, so the UFC gave Yan another theoretical title eliminator with Sean O’Malley, and this time the world was almost unanimously convinced Yan won--except for two of the three judges, who split in O’Malley’s favor. To top it off, Yan’s attempt to stay in the contendership conversation ran into the brick wall that was the rising Merab Dvalishvili, who handed him the most one-sided loss of his entire life. In the space of two years, Petr Yan went from being perceived as a generational champion to 1 for his last 5 and seemingly eliminated from contendership. After a year off to cope with injuries, reassess his career and figure out how to turn things around, Yan proceeded to take the path that most commonly leads to success: Just fucking beating everyone. He battered Song Yadong, he outpunched Deiveson Figueiredo, he won an exceedingly weirdly-booked matchup with Marcus McGhee, and suddenly, he was on a winning streak and right back in contendership. It might have taken him longer to get an actual title fight were it not for Merab Dvalishvili being a crazy person. Merab was on the greatest championship run the division had ever seen, and after clearing out most of his to contenders and recording a blistering three defenses in a single year, he announced his intention to break a UFC record and cement himself as the greatest 135-pounder of all time by recording a fourth--just two months after the last one--and Petr Yan was available and ready. The world saw the fight as a foregone conclusion, given how one-sided their first match had been, and the world was wrong. Yan put on the best performance of his career, not just battering Merab but outwrestling him, and in one of the best career comebacks we’ve seen, almost five years after he’d given it away, Petr Yan got his title back. He’s on top of the world again, and in all likelihood, the rubber match with Merab will be next.

Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Van - 16-2, 0 Defenses

It would be disrespectful as hell to Joshua Van to say that no one saw this coming, as many people perceived it as a possibility, but I don’t think anyone saw it coming like this. Van was the Flyweight champion of the Fury Fighting Championships when the UFC came calling, as a 21 year-old regional titleholder with a penchant for collecting knockouts despite fighting at 125 pounds so thoroughly ticks all of their boxes that Van couldn’t have been a more perfect fit without also having a history of racist tweets, and his Contender Series debut was set for August of 2023. But the UFC needed someone to fill in against Zhalgas Zhumagulov, so Van got called up to the big show early and proceeded to justify their faith by beating Zhalgas, and then beating the man he was originally slated to Contend against, and then facing off with Legacy Fighting Alliance champ Felipe Bunes and handing him the first TKO loss of his entire career. In the space of six months, Van went from a little-known regional fighter to a borderline-ranked Flyweight in the UFC. And then he got atomized by Charles Johnson. It was the second loss of Van’s career, the first time he’d ever been knocked out, and the snapping of an eight-fight winning streak, and in many cases, that would’ve permanently ended his momentum. But Van was smart enough to learn from his mistakes, and the UFC was invested enough in him to bring him back up to speed with a gentle hand, and eleven months later he was on a four-fight winning streak again and had successfully made his way to the top ten after knocking out Bruno Silva, which left him in the perfect position to take advantage of an abrupt opportunity. Top contender Brandon Royval had just lost his opponent and needed a replacement, and Van was game to fight for the second time in three weeks if it meant a shot at the belt. It was a close bout, and if Van hadn’t knocked Royval down at the end of the third round he may well have lost, but he did, so he didn’t, and suddenly the prospect was next in line for the title. All but one month of Joshua Van’s UFC career took place during Alexandre Pantoja’s reign as the Flyweight king. His streak was monstrous and he was a sizable favorite coming into his defense against Van, but many were waiting to see if Van’s boxing could defuse Pantoja’s aggression. As it turns out: We’re gonna have to wait a bit longer. Twenty-six seconds into the bout Pantoja busted his own arm on the mat after a head kick gone awry. So Van’s the champion, but it’s under some real weird circumstances, and it means a number of people are immediately gunning for him. Tatsuro Taira just pounded Brandon Moreno out to make himself a top contender, Manel Kape just knocked Brandon Royval silly to leapfrog him, Kyoji Horiguchi just returned to the UFC and put himself at worst one win away from his own shot at the top, and the second Alexandre Pantoja is healthy, a rematch is essentially obligatory. Van’s the champion and he earned it, but boy, he’s got an awful lot of people to beat if he wants to keep it.

Women’s Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Kayla Harrison - 19-1, 0 Defenses

Every once in awhile the inevitable turns out to actually be inevitable. Ronda Rousey parlayed a 2008 bronze medal in Judo into mixed martial arts stardom; Kayla Harrison took the gold medal in 2012 and 2016. The world was already asking her about MMA before the second. The UFC made a play for her, but there was a problem: By the standards of female fighters Kayla was huge. Ronda had competed at 70 kg in the Olympics, which translated to about 154 pounds, well within the range of weight cutting for the insane standards of combat sports and Women’s Bantamweight. Kayla competed at 78 kg, which was almost 172 pounds. Even at a twenty-pound weight cut, her division simply did not exist in major mixed martial arts organizations. So she had to find one that would build it. The Professional Fighters League needed star power, and Kayla was their gal. They founded the first Women’s Lightweight division in a major American organization, and it was populated mostly by Bantamweights and Featherweights who were trying the best they could. For four straight years, Kayla was their recurring, undefeated champion. She won the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, and in 2022 she made it to the finals and looked poised to take it for a third time, as her only competition was Larissa Pacheco, whom she’d already beaten twice. In a massive upset, Larissa took a decision off of her. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it was also more or less fine, because Kayla was more or less done with the PFL. She took one more fight against Aspen Ladd as a one-off, but her future was with the UFC. Even with her loss to Pacheco, the world was sure she was a future UFC champion--as long as she could stomach the weight cut. And it did, visibly, kill her! But she made it. She choked out Holly Holm in her debut, she took a decision over Ketlen Vieira in a title eliminator, and all she had to do after that was wait. Julianna Peña was a +500 underdog in her own title defense against Kayla, and that turned out to be just about right. On June 7, 2025, at UFC 316, Kayla achieved the inevitable, ragdolled Peña and tapped her out in just two rounds. She’s the best in the world and she’s going to get her shot at the superfight everyone wanted in the first place, as Amanda Nunes is coming out of retirement to face her later this year--actually, this got delayed so much it’s only now finally booked for UFC 324 on January 24, 2026--maybe never? A couple weeks before the superfight Kayla had to pull out for apparently fairly major neck surgery. No word on when she’ll be back or what on Earth happens now.

Women’s Flyweight, 125 lbs

Valentina Shevchenko - 26-4-1, 2 Defenses

After almost two years of suffering, we have gone back to the start. At the end of 2022 Valentina Shevchenko was so thoroughly ensconced as The Greatest Women’s Flyweight that a sizable segment of the fanbase had built an honest-to-god antipathy for her over it. Sure, she won, all the time, and sure, her only losses in almost a decade and a half came to the greatest of all time in Amanda Nunes, and sure, Shevchenko arguably won their second fight, but familiarity breeds contempt, and after watching the purported greatest struggle with a split decision to Taila Santos that could easily have gone the other way, too, a big chunk of the mixed martial world was ready to move on from Val. And then, unexpectedly, it did. Valentina was a -900 favorite when Alexa Grasso shocked the world, choked her out, and took her title away on March 4, 2023. An instant rematch was obligatory, given Val’s long history on top, so half a year later they ran it back at Noche UFC in 2023, and, awkwardly, it ended in a draw. If the rematch had been obligatory, the threematch was mandatory, but a hand injury on Val’s part and the UFC’s desire to put an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter behind their promotion meant a full twelve months passed before they got back in the cage. That’s a long goddamn time, and it left a lot of air, and that air was filled by doubt. Alexa won the first fight, after all--but she was on her way to losing a decision before Valentina made a costly mistake, threw one of her trademark nowhere-close-to-landing spinning back kicks, and got immediately jumped on and choked out for her troubles. Alexa didn’t lose the second fight--but based on the scorecards, she should have, and would have, were it not for one judge handing her a completely indefensible 10-8 in the final round. When the third fight came on September 14, 2024, it was seen as Alexa’s chance to cement her legacy: Either she was the superior fighter and the herald of a new generation for Women’s Flyweight, or the whole thing was just a weird episode. Unfortunately for Alexa, it was the latter. Valentina dominated her. She outstruck her and outwrestled her with almost comical ease, the fight was a complete shutout, and despite their series being now tied at 1-1-1, no one has any doubts about the winner, nor any desire to see them fight again. Once again, much to the internet’s chagrin, Valentina Shevchenko is a champion. And--only two years late--she defended her title against Manon Fiorot at UFC 315. It was close, it was contentious, and it was also a fight the audience does not want to see again. Her next fight was a long-awaited champion vs champion affair against Zhang Weili at UFC 322 on November 15, 2025. After years of watching Zhang dominate her competition, the world felt she had genuine double-champ potential and could be the woman to unseat Valentina. As it turned out: Not even close. Val dominated her in every aspect of the game, Zhang got completely shut out, and her Flyweight hopes are dead in the water. Valentina has multiple title defenses again and is now tied with Amanda Nunes and Anderson Silva for the fourth-most wins in title fights in UFC history. We’ll have to see who they give to her next, but Natália Silva feels like a safe bet.

Women’s Strawweight, 115 lbs

Mackenzie Dern - 16-5, 0 Defenses

On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Mackenzie Dern signed with the UFC as a 5-0 fighter all the way back in 2018 and they’ve been trying to get a belt on her ever since. She came into mixed martial arts with a pre-existing pedigree as one of the more decorated women in the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Gi championships, no-gi championships, pan-Am championships, Asian open championships, world championships, ADCC championships, she took them all. And the UFC marketed her as a grappling champion who was bringing some of the best submission offense in the sport to the Strawweight division! But they also marketed her as an extremely conventionally attractive woman who frequently wore bathing suits. It was one of the touchiest things to comment on with her career: Where other women would have to struggle for their matchmaking and featured spots, Mackenzie’s opportunities kept coming, and they were almost always on the main broadcast and, on multiple occasions, in the main event slots women almost never received. And she needed them, because despite being legitimately quite good, she just wasn’t great. She could make it into the top fifteen, and sometimes even brush the top ten, but every time they tried to get Mackenzie into title contention, she’d falter. It was Amanda Ribas in 2019, it was Marina Rodriguez in 2021, and between 2022 and 2024, Mackenzie had the worst run of her life, winning only one out of four bouts, getting shut down by Yan Xiaonan and Amanda Lemos, and taking the first stoppage loss of her career after being knocked out by Jéssica Andrade. She managed to get her way back up the ladder again by outgrappling Loopy Godinez and submitting a struggling Amanda Ribas in a six-years-belated rematch, but with so many losses to top contenders, her path to the title still seemed closed. Then a funny thing happened: Zhang Weili gave up the Strawweight belt to move up to Flyweight and challenge Valentina Shevchenko. Suddenly, the door was wide open. And conveniently, the UFC had booked all the women who beat Mackenzie into other matches, leaving Mackenzie with just one contender left--and it was Virna Jandiroba, a career grappler whom Mackenzie had already beaten back in 2020. The two met at UFC 321 on October 25, and after seven years of effort, the UFC finally got its way. Mackenzie beat Virna again, fair and square, in a close and hard-fought but ultimately clear decision. She is, at last, the Strawweight Champion of the World. And she’s in the exceptionally weird position of being a newly-minted champion that has very recently lost to several of her own top contenders. If Zhang Weili fails to beat Valentina Shevchenko, it’s very likely the UFC will try to pressure her back down to 115 for a money match with Mackenzie, in which case Dern would almost certainly be a big underdog in her own first defense. If not, at this point, it’s either a rematch with Yan Xiaonan, a grappling match with Tatiana Suarez, or the UFC stops pretending entirely and has Mackenzie beat Contender Series women until she turns a profit.

NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs

Ilkhom Nazimov - 13-3, 0 Defenses

After four and a half years we finally have the second-ever Rizin Lightweight Champion, and it feels a little bit like he came out of nowhere. Up until the 2025 New Year’s event, most folks had only seen one Ilkhom Nazimov fight. He’d been operating out in the Russian regional scene, which has the unfortunate crossover of being a) low-visibility and b) notoriously tough, and no matter how good you are, there just isn’t going to be a lot of international broadcast attention on the Tyumen Extreme Sports Expo. Nazimov didn’t get his first real taste of the spotlight until he made it to UAE Warriors, one of the biggest leagues in the middle east; unfortunately, that spotlight included him getting knocked out in eight seconds. Despite the loss, Rizin was in need of locally-appealing talent for their 2023 foray into Azerbaijan--for the folks who aren’t into flags out there, Nazimov’s representing Uzbekistan--and Nazimov was present, ready, and more than capable of beating “The Crazy Cameroonian” Jaures Dea. It was a good win, but it was also on Rizin’s Landmark series, the lesser-advertised prospect showcases. He’d get pulled up to the main show long enough to pound out Sora Yamamoto, but demoted back down to Landmark duty for a win over Sugaru Nii. Those three wins were enough to get him booked for 2025’s New Year’s special--but against the man they call Blackpanther Beynoah, a 5-3 Lightweight. It wasn’t until DEEP champion and Japanese prospect Shunta Nomura had to pull out of his championship bout with Roberto de Souza that Nazimov got his shot at the belt. Given Souza’s years of dominance as the only man to hold the belt in Rizin’s history, Nazimov’s status as a relative unknown and the short-notice nature of his move up the card, the odds were both figuratively and literally against him. He intercepted a de Souza takedown with a knee and knocked him cold in thirteen seconds. However unknown he was last week, he’s one of the most visible Lightweights in the world now.

Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Razhabali Shaydullaev - 17-0, 2 Defenses

I asked how long the second reign of Kleber Koike Erbst would last, and as it turns out, the answer was sixty-two seconds. Razhabali Shaydullaev’s rise through the sport has been impressively meteoric. Four years ago he was a rookie fighting on Batyr Bashy cards in Kyrgyzstan as a predominantly grappling-based fighter. Three years ago he was disposing of journeymen in the developmental leagues of Russia’s Absolute Championship Akhmat. Two years ago he was choking out top contenders in South Korea’s Road FC. One year ago he got signed to Rizin. In just six months he choked out a DEEP champion, submitted a Bellator champion and smashed through a K-1 Kickboxing champion with virtually no resistance. He was the favorite against Erbst, but few thought it would be an easy night, with Erbst having been finished only once in his entire career, and even that was an armbar all the way back in 2009 when he was still a rookie. Shaydullaev, as he has been doing for the entirety of his run thus far, destroyed Erbst. He walked through him and flattened him in just barely over a minute. Rizin’s got another gaijin champion, and given how good he’s looked, they may be stuck with him for awhile--or, worse, they might lose him to the UFC sooner than later. With Mikuru Asakura’s victory over Chihiro Suzuki on the same night he’s the logical next contender, but that would just be stupid, so instead it was Shaydullaev making his first defense against Viktor Kolesnik at Rizin 51 on September 28: He knocked Kolesnik out in just thirty-three seconds. His successful murders got him the main event of 2025’s Japanese New Year’s MMA special, where Rizin secretly hoped their big national star Mikuru Asakura would get the job done; Shaydullaev chain-suplexed him, grounded him, and laid an unconscionable amount of ground and pound on him in one of those Japan-likes-to-let-its-heroes-die moments before the ref finally called the fight in just shy of three minutes. Shaydullaev’s the best guy in the company, and now there’s a question of what’s left for him to do.

Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Danny Sabatello - 17-4-1, 0 Defenses

When Naoki Inoue won Rizin’s Bantamweight title I wrote that Rizin was one step closer to its dream of an all-Japanese championship roster, and it’s fitting that as gaijin once again take over the majority of the championship belts in the biggest organization in Japan, Danny goddamn Sabatello is one of the men to do it. Sabatello has been dogged by a reputation as a grinding wrestler without a ton to offer since 2020, when he got the call to compete on Dana White’s Contender Series, won, and was notably not offered a contract on the grounds of Boring Grappler. He made the move to late-stage Bellator instead, where he attempted to establish himself as their own personal Chael Sonnen: An indefatigable wrestling machine whose mouth ran just as hard as his double-legs. But it never quite caught on. The talk seemed a bit forced, the wrestling wasn’t that fun to watch, and all his 1980s wrestling promos about the bums in Bellator’s Bantamweight Grand Prix ended with an elimination at the hands of Raufeon Stots. Sabatello swore he’d won and that he’d get revenge; instead he ended his Bellator tenure getting choked out by Magomed Magomedov, decisioned again by Stots, and losing out on a shot at the PFL after going to a draw with Lazaro Dayron, who would’ve won the decision were it not for a point deduction. It was a bit of a shock when Sabatello signed with Rizin in 2025, but it seemed to have paid off when he scored his first knockout in six years during his debut against Shinobu Ota and swore he’d reinvent himself as Japan’s new American superstar. Then he went back to wrestling. It was still enough to get him his shot at Inoue’s belt at 2025’s New Year’s special, and despite the common wisdom of judging favoritism, a very close split decision went Danny’s way. It took three years longer than he intended, but Danny Sabatello is holding gold. Now we see if he can, in fact, become Big In Japan.

Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Hiromasa Ougikubo - 30-8-2, 0 Defenses

It’s been an incredibly long road to gold for Hiromasa Ougikubo. He was a teenager when he made his professional debut all the way back in 2006, and even at 19, he was notable for the tough, gritty way he handled his grappling. Within a year he was a Shooto rookie tournament winner, within a dozen fights he was a regional champion, and a year later, he was Shooto’s Bantamweight World Champion. And then he immediately lost it after getting choked out by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Having faced a level of force he didn’t feel he could contend with, he dropped down to Flyweight, where he was an immediate success, winning the Vale Tudo Japan tournament and, ultimately, the 125-pound Shooto title. That win got him called over to America for the most talent-rich season of The Ultimate Fighter ever, 2016’s Tournament of Champions, where he distinguished himself as one of the best fighters in the house and even beat a young Alexandre Pantoja on his way to the finals. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get past Tim Elliott. He returned to Japan, where, in his absence, Rizin had been reborn in the ashes of Pride FC, and as one of Japan’s best fighters, he got immediately called to the show--where he was immediately defeated by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Ougikubo went back up to Bantamweight and fought his way to a title shot at company star Kai Asakura, but Asakura lanced him with a knee and ended his title hopes again. Undeterred, Hiromasa entered Rizin’s 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix and stormed the bracket, winning four fights in a year and two in the same night, including the sweet revenge of a championship final where he defeated Asakura and staked his claim as the best Bantamweight in Japan. And then South Korean Kim Soo-chul beat him. So Ougikubo dropped back down to Flyweight for 2022’s massive Bellator vs Rizin supercard--where he was, for the third time, beaten by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Someone should find out if that dude’s any good at fighting. Ougikubo still got his shot at Rizin’s Bantamweight title, but Juan Archuleta beat him, and for the first time in seventeen years of fighting, Ougikubo found himself on a three-fight losing streak. But Horiguchi, Rizin’s Flyweight champion, left the company to return to the UFC, and with the throne empty, Ougikubo wanted one more shot. He went back down to 125 pounds, he entered the 2025 Flyweight Grand Prix, he ran the table one more time, and at the 2025 New Year’s Special he faced and defeated Yuki Motoya to win the tournament and, with it, the vacant belt. It took several tries and almost twenty years, but by god, Hiromasa Ougikubo is the world champion.

Rizin Women’s Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs

Seika Izawa - 18-0, 3 Defenses

All hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan’s best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don’t care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP’s strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women’s fighters in history on Rizin’s New Year’s Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin’s atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin’s talent is open to her--but that also means she’s got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin’s Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out, shockingly. It took more than an entire year, but Izawa finally had a title defense against the 8-4 grappler Claire Lopez, and Izawa scored the fastest championship victory in Rizin history, choking her out in just barely one minute. Seika scored one more win on New Year’s Eve, choking out Miyuu Yamamoto in her retirement bout, and while it was an honor, it does sort of emphasize the problem with Seika’s position. She’s unquestionably the best Atomweight in the world, but the last real top fighter she faced was more than a year ago. Will Rizin bring her real competition, or are they trying to simply build a star? And what IS real competition at Atomweight? She choked out Si Yoon Park at DEEP JEWELS 44 to add yet another win and belt to her credit, but the Rizin title wasn’t on the line, so she’s still only got the one defense. She was booked for Rizin 48 on September 29th, and once again instead of a top contender it was Kanna Asakura, and once again, it was a non-title match. Three months later, Rizin booked her for their New Year’s Eve supershow--against Lucia Apdelgarim, a 2-3 kickboxer who’d never beaten an MMA fighter with a single win. Seika submitted her easily and requested international competition, and in their eternal mockery of me, Rizin instead booked her to defend her title against the 3-0 Yu-jin Shin, who fights a weight class and a half up. Shockingly Shin did not make the Atomweight limit, so when Seika beat her easily it was a non-title affair. She had her first actual title defense in two years on November 2, where she beat DEEP’s Saori Oshima, and she shot for a third in very short order, by defending against striking star RENA on the 2025 New Year’s Eve special. It was by far Seika’s toughest fight, with RENA flooring her on a left hook and very nearly knocking her out in the first round, but Seika fought her way back, got RENA down, mauled and ultimately choked her out in the second.

ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Oumar Kane - 7-1, 0 Defenses

The triple championship days are over, and we can go back to appreciating ONE’s Heavyweight division for just how silly it really is. Oumar Kane’s origins are very serious: He grew up near Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and established himself as an undefeated star of Laamb, better known as Senegalese wrestling, a particularly harsh form of the sport that takes place on sand or turf and is fought in tiny shorts. As a giant 6’4” muscle monster with a wrestling background, Kane was an internationally visible talent, and ONE picked him up just one fight into his MMA career and promoted him as an undefeated monster of African wrestling. And it was true! For two fights. In his third bout with ONE, “Reug Reug” lost his undefeated streak in 2021 after gassing just two rounds in against Kirill Grishenko, but the actual ending of the fight was a bizarre sequence involving Grishenko throwing a punch right at the bell that appeared to graze Kane’s chin, only for Oumar to motion that he had been illegally punched in the throat after the bell and collapse onto the mat. After replays showed the punch barely connecting, the fight was ruled a TKO, and Oumar was accused of pulling a soccer dive. He spent three years building a three-fight winning streak--including a kickboxing match with “Boucher Ketchup” Mamadou Kamara, who is not a fighter but an influencer, and who fought exactly the way that sounds--and eventually that led him to a November 9, 2024 showdown with triple champ Anatoly Malykhin. The resulting fight was, to be gentle, pretty dreadful. Malykhin didn’t know how to get in on Kane, Kane repeatedly backed himself into a corner to focus on countering, and outside of the first round and a bit of the fifth, very little actually happened. But a takedown in the first round, a yellow card on Malykhin’s part for grabbing the ropes and a flash knockdown in the fifth were enough for Kane to win the title by split decision. “Reug Reug” is the champion. ONE was trying to position Marcus “Buchecha” Almeida as the top contender, but given that Kane beat him to get his title shot in the first place--and, uh, Buchecha left the company after the fight--and they don’t have any other fucking Heavyweights except, like, Kirill Grishenko--unsurprisingly, ONE decided to just book a rematch an entire year later. Kane vs Malykhin 2 was scheduled for ONE 173 on November 16, 2025, but Reug Reug managed to get concussed in a car accident and the fight had to be postponed until an indefinite future date.

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs

Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses

For the second time in as many title reigns, ONE has managed to put a ton of hype behind a champion only to squash them prematurely. Anatoly Malykhin is one of the most successful marketing campaigns ONE ever ran: An undefeated, heavy-punching Russian Heavyweight with a 100% finishing rate. He knocked out everyone he faced, he carried ONE’s Heavyweight division as an interim champion while standing champion Arjan Bhullar was having contract issues, and when Bhullar finally re-entered the fold, Malykhin destroyed him with ease. But ONE had greater hopes for Malykhin as their spearhead for real international notoriety: They would make him the first three-division champion in the history of mixed martial arts. And it’d be real easy, because the other two belts were held by one guy. Reinier de Ridder had been their superstar double-champion, but his relationship with ONE had soured, and they cashed in by having de Ridder face Malykhin, twice, at both his weight classes. Malykhin destroyed him and became the first-ever 265, 225 and 205-pound champion the sport has ever seen--admittedly easier when you consider 225 is not a division that exists in almost any other federation on Earth. But he did it! And then they organized his first-ever title defense by having him put the Heavyweight belt on the line against Oumar “Reug Reug” Kane, and he lost a split decision, and now he is a lowly two-belt schmuck. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Malykhin now, given that the last 205-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s bout against de Ridder, and the last 225-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s 2022 bout with de Ridder. He was hoping to get the Heavyweight title back at ONE 173, but with Reug Reug injured, Malykhin’s playing the waiting game.

ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 0 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 1 Defense

It took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE’S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE’s repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y’know, that clearly did not happen. ONE held an interim title fight between Alibeg Rasulov and Ok Rae Yoon to welcome him back--but that didn’t exactly happen either, as Rasulov failed hydration tests, became ineligible to win the title, then won the fight anyway. Lee vs Rasulov was scheduled for October. And then November. It finally happened on December 7, 2024--and it ended in a No Contest after two rounds thanks to Christian unintentionally gouging Rasulov’s eye. They ran it back almost a full year later at ONE 173 on November 16, and this time Lee knocked him out in the second round, marking Lee’s first win in three years.

ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs

Tang Kai - 19-4, 1 Defense

Tang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China’s WBK (after investigating, we THINK it’s World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz “Ong Bak” Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai’s weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai’s Dragon Gym and Phuket’s legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It’s worked out quite well: He hasn’t lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China’s Rebel FC got ONE’s attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he’s held for two years. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. His position hasn’t improved much, either. He was supposed to defend his title against Akbar Abdullaev on January 10, and Abdullaev pounded him out in the fifth round, but he also missed weight by a pound and a half and thus was ineligible for the championship. So, hey: Still a world champion! You just got knocked out a little bit. It’s fine.

ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs

Engh-Orgil Baatarkhuu - 14-3, 0 Defenses

By god, ONE had an MMA title change hands in 2025. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is one of the precious few success stories for ONE’s feeder system. He was a 5-2 champion in the small (but competitive!) regional scene in his native Mongolia, which put him on ONE’s talent-scouting radar for their Warriors of the Steppe tournament in 2022. Enkh won two fights in six days to earn his contract with ONE, where he quickly discovered that no matter where you go in the wide world of sports, being a grappler-type Pokemon makes companies less invested in promoting you. Enkh went 6-1 across two years--8-1, if you count those aforementioned tournament wins--and finished most of his opponents, but title contention eluded him in no small part thanks to ONE’s turn away from mixed martial arts as a whole. It wasn’t until December 6 that Enkh finally got his long-belated shot at Fabricio Andrade’s Bantamweight title, and the first round and a half looked pretty thoroughly one-sided in Andrade’s favor, as most had figured it would be given the gap in Enkh’s striking game, and Andrade battered him to a near-stoppage on a couple occasions. But Enkh, as it turns out, is tough as shit. He weathered the storm and used his grit, his power and his wrestling to turn the tables, and towards the end of the fourth round, an exhausted Andrade gave up the ghost and got himself strangled. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is ONE’s Bantamweight champion, and his very first act as a champion was to call for a cross-class title match with Tang Kai, because weight classes aren’t real.

ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs

Yuya Wakamatsu - 20-6, 1 Defense

After two years of solitude, ONE’s Flyweight title has a home again, and it is to one of the men most denied it. Yuya Wakamatsu was a Pancrase standout in Japan for years before the rest of the world knew his name, but even there, he couldn’t get over the hump, winning their Flyweight Neo-Blood Tournament in 2016 only to get knocked out by standing champion Senzo Ikeda when he challenged for the title itself. But ONE’s aggressive expansion in the late 2010s brought in a lot of Japanese talent, including both Wakamatsu and Ikeda, and fittingly, both lost their first two fights and were promptly forgotten by most of the audience. But where his nemesis retired in fairly short order, Wakamatsu kept grinding and ultimately built up a five-fight winning streak, which was more than enough to justify a shot at then-champion Adriano Moraes--which he lost. And then he missed weight and got knocked out. And then he won, but missed weight again. ONE was decidedly unhappy with him, but he got his weight cut under control and returned to his winning ways, and when Demetrious Johnson retired and abdicated the belt, ONE needed an answer. On March 23, 2025, Wakamatsu and Moraes had a rematch three years in the making, and this time, Wakamatsu made it count by pounding Moraes out in a single round. After a decade in the sport and three at-bats, Yuya Wakamatsu finally has his championship belt. His first defense was a champion vs champion match against Joshua Pacio at ONE 173 on November 16, because ONE needs to fire their bullets as soon as they have them. Yuya punched him out in six minutes.

ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Pacio - 23-5, 1 Defense

It’s been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. “The Passion” stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they’d become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE’s lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE’s ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE’s tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and was out for an entire year. On February 20th, 2025, Pacio and Brooks finally fought again and it was weird, but definitive. Jarred Brooks seemingly exhausted himself after a round and Pacio pounded him for the entire second round, which eventually elicited a mercy stoppage from the ref. ONE has only one 125-pound champion again. So he, of course, challenged for the 135-pound title next. Pacio vs Wakamatsu happened at ONE 173 on November 16 and ended in Pacio getting smashed in six minutes.

ONE Women’s Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Xiong Jing Nan - 19-2, 7 Defenses

Xiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She’d enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China’s Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn’t one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE’s women’s MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan’s belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee’s belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE’s best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. An entire 364 days later, she had her next fight: A special rules match, with MMA gloves but only punches and no takedowns or clinching allowed, against Muay Thai champion Nat “Wondergirl” Jaroonsak. Half a year later her next fight was finally announced, and it was, once, defending her title against ONE’s new postergirl in Stamp Fairtex as the company attempts, once again, to make a double champ at Xiong Jing Nan’s expense, and with Stamp out injured ONE went back to radio silence. It took half a year for Xiong to get rebooked--and it was a non-title fight against Bo Meng at 115 pounds. Xiong won, and once again, what the hell are we doing.

ONE Women’s Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs

Denice Zamboanga - 12-2, 0 Defenses

Denice Zamboanga, to be clear, is not the problem with ONE’s women’s divisions. She’s a good fighter. She’s been trucking along in ONE since 2009, she’s proven herself repeatedly as a solid all-around competitor. She’s tough, she’s talented, she’s never been finished. She’s also never beaten a top fighter. She’s fought 0-0 rookies, she’s beaten journeywomen on losing streaks--in a dozen fights with ONE, she’s only beaten someone coming off a victory at all twice. She was also notably defeated by Seo Hee Ham, the top Atomweight contender and former Rizin champion, twice in a row. It was consequently a bit of a surprise to Ham when ONE announced an interim title fight to make up for Stamp’s injury absence and she wasn’t in it. Instead of her, the #1 contender whose only loss in ONE was to Stamp herself, it would be Denice Zamboanga, the woman she beat, against Alyona Rassohyna, a woman she also beat and who, as a bonus, had not fought in ONE since September of 2021--when she lost to Stamp Fairtex. This was all supposed to end in a unification match with Stamp at ONE 173 on August 1, but in early May, ONE announced that Stamp had reinjured her knee and was going to miss at least the rest of 2025. With the awareness that it would have been close to two and a half years between title fights, Stamp ‘voluntarily relinquished’ her title. This wound up being even more infuriating when ONE failed to rebook Denice for so long that upon finally scheduling her again, they chose ONE 173 on November 16, where Stamp Fairtex, who is now healthy, will be fighting a completely unrelated kickboxing match. Denice will face Ayaka Miura. Rather: Denice was going to face Ayaka Miura, but at the end of August she announced medical issues will prevent her from fighting. So they made an interim title fight for Stamp’s return against a non-#1 contender, and then they stripped Stamp for being unable to compete, and then they didn’t schedule the next championship fight until the card where Stamp was making her return anyway, and now Stamp is healthy and fighting but the Atomweight champion isn’t. Stamp lost and Denice has yet to be rebooked. Just fucking stop already.

Invicta Bantamweight Championship, 135 lbs

Jennifer Maia - 23-10-1, 0 Defenses

It did not take Jennifer Maia long to find her way back home to Invicta after the UFC cut her in 2023, and it only took a year for her to reclaim gold in the company she left behind. This is, in fact, Maia’s third stint with Invicta: The first time around was back in 2013, when Invicta was barely a year old and Maia was only a couple years and nine fights into her career, and it saw Maia distinguishing herself as a hot prospect but failing to get past the top ranks. She came back in 2016 as a more seasoned fighter and captured its Flyweight championship, but, as is the fate of all regional champions, she traded the belt for a ticket to the UFC. Her half-decade in the big show was by no means bad--she even fought Valentina Shevchenko for the UFC’s 125-pound title--but she still couldn’t crack the top of the mountain, and eventually, the UFC got tired of her derailing prospects and let her go. It only took two fights for Maia to dethrone Talita Bernardo and gain her second Invicta gold. Hopefully she sticks around this time.

Invicta Atomweight Championship, 105 lbs

Elisandra Ferreira - 9-2, 1 Defense

The only major Atomweight division in America is back, and as happens so often, it belongs to Brazil. Elisandra “Lili” Ferreira started competing as an amateur at 19, lost all of her amateur fights, and proceeded to turn pro anyway, because giving up sucks. She spent the first third of her professional career fighting at Strawweight simply because Atomweight opportunities are few and farbetween, but she made the turn to the lower weight class in 2021 and never looked back, and boy, it’s worked out for her. With one exception--a loss to Anastasia Nikolakakos, maybe the best Atomweight on this side of the globe--Ferreira’s cleaned house on the division. She made the jump to Invicta in 2023, and a year and a half later she’s 4-0 and the new bannerwoman for its most unique weight class, thanks to a hard-fought decision over Andressa Romero on September 20, 2024. Invicta’s 2024 comeback has reclaimed its first lost title; now we just have to see who they line up to test Ferreira over the next year of its renaissance. Her first at-bat came against Ana Palacios at Invicta FC 61 on April 4, and Ferreira earned a near-shutout on the scorecards.

PFL Heavyweight Championship, 265 lbs

Vadim Nemkov - 19-2 (1), 0 Defenses

When the PFL announced that it was going to crown a standing Heavyweight champion, they had a raft of interesting options. Oleg Popov, their 2025 tournament champion, had a strong argument. Denis Goltsov, 2024 champion and the only man in almost ten years to beat Popov, could’ve called dibs. Hell, the PFL still technically has Francis Ngannou, the best Heavyweight on the planet, under contract. They, of course, did not choose any of those men. They chose Renan Ferreira, the 2023 tournament champion whose only fight in almost two years was a TKO loss to Ngannou, and Vadim Nemkov, Bellator’s best Light Heavyweight. Nemkov, a Fedor protégé, hadn’t lost since 2016, when he got himself punched out by Jiří Procházka and narrowly edged out by Karl Albrektsson, and it’s a testament to both his skills and the world’s dim view of the Heavyweight division that when the PFL acquired Bellator and Nemkov announced he was leaving 205 for the 265-pound world, instead of the expected fretting about how a 6’1” man would contend in the world of the big boys, more or less everyone said “Yeah, that’s fine.” And lo: It was. Nemkov choked out 2021 PFL champ Bruno Cappelozza, and then he choked out the ever-pained Timothy Johnson, and when he fought Renan Ferreira at PFL Champions Series 4 on December 13, 2025, shockingly, he choked him out, too. Nemkov’s now the only major Heavyweight champion in American MMA outside of the UFC. Hopefully it pays off.

PFL Light Heavyweight Championship, 205 lbs

Corey Anderson - 20-6 (1), 0 Defenses

One of the best Light Heavyweights in the world isn’t in the UFC, and they have only themselves to blame. Corey Anderson was the precise kind of fighter the UFC wanted when they first got ahold of him in 2014: Big, young, athletic, talented, undefeated. He had all the makings of a future champion, and his victory on The Ultimate Fighter 19 (jesus christ) cemented him as a prospect to watch. Unfortunately, he had also barely been in the sport for a year and only had four professional fights to his name. In short order he’d suffered his first loss, and a couple years later, a pair of back-to-back knockouts in 2017 sent him to the realm of afterthoughts. But a recommitment to his wrestling style, an extremely well-aged victory over Glover Teixeira, and a devastating knockout over Johnny Walker got Anderson back in the title picture, and in 2020, he fought Jan Błachowicz to determine the #1 contender to the soon-to-be-vacated belt. They’d done battle once, five years prior, and Corey had won a clear decision. This time, Jan flattened him in three minutes. Despite his top-ten ranking and the four consecutive fights he’d just won, the UFC decided to dump Corey, sending him from main event to unemployment in a week. Corey went straight to Bellator and proceeded to become one of its best stars, and he would have become the first man in America to beat Vadim Nemkov had they not banged their heads together and ended the fight prematurely. Corey lost the rematch, but he became the last man to hold Bellator’s Light Heavyweight title after beating Karl Moore, and on October 3, Corey had a champion vs champion match against the PFL’s 205-pound tournament champion, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov. Corey had pounded him out in Bellator four years prior, and while he didn’t get the stoppage in the present, he did get the win, and in so doing he became the inaugural PFL Light Heavyweight Champion. What that actually means going forward, we’ll have to see.

PFL Middleweight Championship, 185 lbs

Costello van Steenis - 17-3, 0 Defenses

For years, the Professional Fighters League has threatened to crown standing champions. Did they carry through any of their major tournament winners? Nope. Did they bring out their holdout Bellator champions? Not exactly! Did they at least make a big hubbub about finally going through with it? Of course not. Instead, just five days before PFL Champions Series 2, their promotional debut in South Africa, they abruptly announced that Bellator champ Johnny Eblen was suddenly the first-ever PFL Middleweight Champion, and his match with Costello van Steenis was the first-ever defense of the title. Costello, himself, was a Bellator veteran who’d been absorbed in the PFL buyout, but he’d always played second fiddle in the organization, unable to get through the John Salters and Douglas Limas of the world, and thus said world was mostly overlooking him as a challenger. The first three rounds of Eblen gradually grinding him into dust bore out that expectation, but then a funny thing happened: The inexhaustible wrestler got tired. Eblen found himself punched up by van Steenis in the fourth round, and he seemed to be pulling it together again in the fifth, but right before the bell could ring van Steenis managed to take his back and sink in a choke, and with just seven seconds separating him from an almost-certain decision victory, Eblen passed out. Costello van Steenis is the first man to truly hold a standing PFL Championship, and what that means from here is anyone’s guess, given that the PFL still doesn’t seem to have any idea how any of this is going to work.

PFL Lightweight Championship, 155 lbs

Usman Nurmagomedov - 20-0 (1), 0 Defenses

The Nurmagomedov family is trying to run the sport, and Usman is their B-league beachhead, but that assault has proven to be an awful lot rockier than the rest. As the kid brother of Umar and the cousin of Khabib, Usman had great expectations thrust upon him very early in his career, and he dealt with them the way regional talents with great camps traditionally do: Squashing severely overmatched competition until you get a contract from one of the big companies. Bellator won the Usman bidding war and brought him over in 2021, and he proved to be one of the breakout stars of their final days, blitzing his way up the Lightweight ranks, knocking off several contenders and ultimately beating Patricky Pitbull to win the 155-pound championship and securing his reign by retiring former star and UFC champ Benson Henderson. It was 2023, and even though Bellator’s upcoming death was clear, Usman was a name and widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world. Unfortunately, then, things got weird. He was a massive, -2200 favorite to beat Brent Primus in the waning days of Bellator, and he did--and it became the first non-win of his career after failing a drug test for something that was never disclosed. He carried Bellator’s title over into its new life as a colony of the PFL, and he immediately ran into controversy after barely scraping a majority decision off of Irish superprospect Paul Hughes. The world wanted a rematch for the inaugural PFL Lightweight Championship fight, and on October 3, at the PFL’s big Dubai show, they got it--and this time, it waws even closer, with media scorecards split right down the middle. This, by itself, is not that unusual, nor is one fighter winning a controversial decision unusual. It is unusual when the decision is not only unanimous, but one judge scores the entire fight as a 50-45 shut-out. So Usman’s last two wins were dubious, and his future as part of the PFL depends on how they treat their own championship, but for now, he is the damn champion.

PFL Women’s Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Cris Cyborg - 29-2 (1), 1 Defense

Are you noticing how all of the inaugural PFL champions are just Bellator’s champions? Funny, that. Cris Cyborg is the greatest Women’s Featherweight of all time, and we all just kind of have to deal with that, because Women’s Featherweight has only barely ever existed. Strikeforce set the standard back in 2006 because Gina Carano was one of their biggest stars, and that star lasted right up until 2009, when they attempted to put a belt on her and failed because Cris Cyborg punched the shit out of her. In the following sixteen years Cyborg’s only lost one mixed martial arts fight, and it took Amanda Nunes, the greatest Women’s mixed martial artist of all time, to do it. Aside from that one loss, she’s run the table. She was the Strikeforce Featherweight Champion until it closed, and then she was Invicta’s Featherweight Champion until they let the UFC have her, and then she was the UFC’s Featherweight Champion until Amanda dropped her, and Cyborg promptly went to Bellator and won their title, too. When the PFL brought her over in the Bellator buyout, they set her up for an interpromotional superfight against Larissa Pacheco, a two-time PFL tournament winner and the only woman who’d ever beaten Kayla Harrison. On one hand, Pacheco’s one of just six women to ever make it to the final bell with Cyborg. On the other, she lost 4-1. In the ultimate act of promotional cowardice, the PFL promoted Cyborg to champion status three days before her appearance at the PFL Champions Series on December 13, 2025, meaning her fight with Sara Collins was, technically, a title defense. It was as one-sided as you’d expect. In theory, this is great! The biggest female fighter outside the UFC has a belt and the PFL is bringing back a division the UFC threw in the garbage. In practice, Cyborg didn’t even get out of her post-fight interview without noting that after her next fight she’s going to retire from MMA in favor of focusing on her boxing career. So welcome back, Women’s Featherweight. I hope you still exist by 2027.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 31/SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1 FROM THE QUDOS BANK ARENA IN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

Hey, remember when I said there was only one event this month? That’s because the UFC’s press material initially listed this as happening on February 1, because that’s true in Australia, where it is taking place, even though for 90% of the market it’s airing on the 31st of January. I thought about trying to clarify this at the time and decided I didn’t want to put more effort into it than the UFC does.

The year started with an attempt to substitute the old for the marketing-friendly new, and by god, we’re gonna do it again. The first three straight months of 2026 are essentially one great big attempt to let the new age roll over the old guard, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say the rest of the year isn’t going to be too different, and we’re starting with one of the worst examples in recent memory.

(If you do not recognize the recurring title joke on this card, you need to spend 300 hours playing Warframe.)

MAIN EVENT: BEGIN AGAIN
FEATHERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Alexander Volkanovski (27-4, Champion) vs Diego Lopes (27-7, #2)

When I started writing these things, the point was talking about the whole body of a fight. Not just the breakdown of two fighters and how they’ll match up against each other, but the context surrounding the fight--how we got here, why the fight’s happening, what brought both fighters to this point, what the fight means for mixed martial arts. Recently, more and more, the answer is just ‘the UFC wants the guy they want,’ and it fucking sucks.

I wrote that about Merab Dvalishvili’s rematch with Sean O’Malley this past June. But it wasn’t the first self-quote I went looking for. That was a full year prior, when I had to talk about nihilistic rematches during Alex Pereira vs Jiří Procházka 2. While looking for that quote, though, I realized I’d already touched on it another year back, when I had to explain how Amanda Nunes vs Irene Aldana was actually supposed to be Julianna Peña getting a third bite at the apple.

And, hell, we could get an entire book’s worth of impotent complaining out of Colby Covington getting three title shots across four years and just five fights.

The point is: Nothing about this is new. Not the shortchanging of standing champions, not the devaluing of contendership, not even the refusal to acknowledge top contenders. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. If there’s a difference in the modern age, it’s the incredible combination of the speed with which the UFC is currently doing it and the shamelessness with which they do--or don’t--talk about it. Diego Lopes fought Alexander Volkanovski for the Featherweight championship nine months ago, he lost a clear, unanimous decision, and somehow he’s here, again, and we’re going to digress a moment in discussing why.

You may notice the “#2” next to Diego’s name up there. The #1 contender is Movsar Evloev. He’s an exceptionally talented grappler on a genuinely impressive nine-fight winning streak, which is hard to do in any division and damn near impossible at Featherweight, and that streak includes former top contender Arnold Allen, former world champion Aljamain Sterling, and, funnily enough, Diego Lopes. He also hasn’t notched a finish since his days in Russia’s M-1 back in 2018. The UFC has so much respect for Movsar that they spent most of 2025 trying to match him up against Aaron Pico, a former Bellator competitor who’d never fought in the UFC before, in what they swore would earn him a title shot with a victory.

Movsar, possibly unsurprisingly, didn’t make it to the fight. Instead, the honor went to the now-#4-ranked Lerone Murphy. Murphy’s the kind of guy the UFC spent years searching for: An undefeated Brit with a preference for striking and the ability to outwork anyone in front of him. Murphy sailed into the UFC in 2019, suffered a split draw, and spent the next five years never, ever losing again _{(with the possible exception of a hometown decision against Gabriel Santos)}. He beat lifetime gatekeepers like Edson Barboza and Dan Ige and even a former title contender in Josh Emmett. But he, too, hadn’t notched a knockout in four years. So hey, the UFC said: Take the Aaron Pico fight. It’ll get you a title shot if you win!

Murphy didn’t just take the fight, he took Pico’s head, knocking him cold in three and a half minutes. So there you fuckin’ go! You’ve got two men on nine-fight winning streaks, and one of them already beat Diego Lopes and the other not only represents the nation you are constantly trying to win over and not only proved himself a good company man who’d take an unbelievably risky fight on short notice, but he even got one of those precious knockouts of yours in the process in a fight you already said would be for contendership. We’re done now, right? One of these two men obviously gets the next shot, right?

Funny story: Alexander Volkanovski thought so, too. In multiple interviews and even a video on his own Youtube channel Volk’s discussed his attempts to fight Evloev and Murphy and how, mysteriously, they kept not happening. He wanted Evloev last Summer: The UFC tried to book the Pico fight instead. He wanted Murphy in December: The UFC said it was a no-go. He wanted either of them here, in his home country, and the UFC made it clear that the only way they would book him on the Australia card was if he fought Diego Lopes again.

Remember that Dvalishvili/O’Malley quote from earlier? There’s another half to it:

What else is there to discuss here other than the gross business of this fight? There’s no Sean O’Malley redemption story, there’s no intervening fight where he climbed back to the summit, there’s no chance to show off how he’s learned and changed his approach since their first fight. There isn’t even much to talk about with Merab! He beat Umar Nurmagomedov, and it was very funny, and now he’s doing this rematch because it’s what the company wants and it’s the way he’ll make the most money.

This is all the way they’ll make the most money.

And christ, that’s boring.

As it was then, so it is now. Alexander Volkanovski hasn’t fought since the first Lopes match last April--the most there is to talk about with him is his having turned 37, which would mean a lot more if that first fight hadn’t been, y’know, nine months ago. I’m sure his kids have been precocious and I’m sure his garden has been turning out nicely.

Diego got his first shot for beating Brian Ortega, a former contender turned 1-for-his-last-5 tragedy who kept asking the UFC to let him leave the weight class and got denied right up until the fight where the weight cut put him in the hospital. Diego lost that shot. After that he had one fight, and it was with the #10-ranked Jean Silva, another massive promotional favorite, and it was, and this may shock you, a Diego Lopes fight. He grappled in the first round and did a great job and then he engaged in a big, fun, sloppy brawl and beat Jean to the knockout with a spinning elbow.

That’s it. That’s the whole story of the space between these bouts. Diego’s back in contendership thanks to beating on the lowest-ranked member of the top ten possible and, realistically, the UFC is pinning all of their hopes for this fight on the idea that Volk’s slowing down and Diego managed to drop him in the second round of their first matchup. Sure, Volk promptly took the fight over and won it, but what if, this time, he doesn’t? And if he does, well, sure, we’ve had second breakfast, but maybe he’ll get it done for fucking elevenses.

And what’s so goddamn galling about this is, if the UFC actually had faith in Lopes, there was an incredibly easy way to make this fight mean something: Have him fight Movsar.

Movsar’s the #1 contender and Diego’s only non-Volkanovski-shaped loss during his time with the company. If you’re going to make Movsar jump through more hoops--which you shouldn’t, but, obviously, that ship has sailed--make it the best, clearest jump possible. They fought once, Movsar beat him, and Diego jumped past him to a title match anyway. Now he wants another shot and, conveniently, he has a score to settle with the man in his way. It’s the simplest thing in the fucking world and it would solve four different problems at once.

Unless, of course, you’re deathly afraid the guy you want will just get grappled again.

But, of course, we are in the publicly-acknowledging-that-contendership-doesn’t-matter era of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, so we’re just here again. Diego’s the guy and if he loses they’ll let him fight Kevin Vallejos for another title shot, and if he loses that one he’ll have a barnburner of a title eliminator with David Onama to get back on top, and if he loses that one, then by god, Rob Font, it’s time to come up to Featherweight for your chance at gold. We will keep doing this until Alexander Volkanovski is finally old enough that he can no longer dodge punches.

I do not think that will be tonight. ALEXANDER VOLKANOVSKI BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: BEGIN AGAIN
LIGHTWEIGHT: Dan Hooker (24-13, #6) vs Benoît Saint Denis (16-3 (1), #8)

Boy, if I’m mad at the way the UFC’s burning down its own contendership structure, I assure you, it’s got nothing on the disregard we have now for fighters.

Two matchups fell off last week’s card in the 24 hours leading up to showtime. The first was Ricky Turcios vs Cameron Smotherman, which got scratched when, seconds after stepping off the scale at the weigh-ins, Smotherman passed out in mid-stride and collapsed facefirst on the stage; the second was Alexander Hernandez vs Michael Johnson, which got pulled when someone on the inside leaked that Hernandez supposedly had a hand injury so bad the UFC had prepared a backup in case he pulled out, and the subsequent change in betting odds led to the match being hastily scrapped for fear of further regulatory attention after their last several years of betting scandals.

To be clear: They were perfectly fine with letting a badly injured fighter proceed to his fight, they just didn’t want the attention from the scandal when it got out.

And Dana White shook off the idea that the weight cut played a role in Smotherman’s collapse and said, and I swear to god this is a real quote,

If doctors don’t know how it happened, how the fuck do I know how it happened, you know what I mean? Could be nerves. It could be a million things. People faint at weddings, you know.

I say all of this because 70 days ago Dan Hooker fought Arman Tsarukyan and got completely mauled and after being hit 69 times he left the fight looking like this.

70 days. Arguably the best Lightweight on the planet punched half his face shut and he’s fighting in a top ten bout 70 days later.

I am old enough to remember the long, long-ago days of mid-2023, when the UFC contracted Jesse Butler for a fight 63 days after he was completely flatlined by Jim Miller, which was so egregious that, despite the fight taking place 1,830 miles away in Nashville, the Nevada State Athletic Commission had to call the UFC and say “dude what the fuck are you doing can you please at least try to be subtle” until management begrudgingly sighed and returned Butler’s gurney to the TBI ward of his local hospital.

I miss 90-day no-contact policies. I miss pretending fighters get to be people. I am especially nervy about it because there’s a good chance Dan Hooker is about to get brutally fucked up for the second time in three months.

Dan is a very accomplished fighter with a lot of good wins, but he’s established himself for two particular specialties: Violent brawling and getting taken down a bunch. Dustin Poirier took Hooker down. Yair Rodríguez took Hooker down. Jalin Turner took Hooker down. None of these men are wrestlers. Hooker excels when he can keep people brawling at range or scrambling instead of controlling him on the floor, and we have repeatedly seen that if you’re an Arnold Allen or an Arman Tsarukyan or even a Mateusz Gamrot who can swarm him, he’s going to have a very, very hard time with you.

Benoît Saint Denis is not quite in that upper echelon of fighters, but the UFC wants him to be, and that’s particularly funny because we’re barely a year removed from the attempt to end the Saint Denis experiment. At the start of 2024 BSD was one of their favorite prospects: A heavy-punching, power-grappling finishing machine that had torn his way up the Lightweight ladder. He strangled Ismael Bonfim, he smashed Thiago Moisés, he kicked Matt Frevola’s head off. He was in the top fifteen, he was growing as a crowd favorite, he’d earned his way there holistically and it seemed like a sure thing that, by the end of the year, he’d be in title contention.

But the UFC didn’t want to wait. They threw him ten slots up into a title eliminator with Dustin Poirier, one of the best Lightweights in the sport’s history, and Poirier stopped him in a round and a half. Eager to reclaim his glory, they had Benoît main event a Fight Night in Paris in September against Renato Moicano, and Moicano mauled him so badly the fight had to be stopped after the second round because he couldn’t see anymore. His coronation year turned into his trip to the back of the line, and instead of a welcoming hero, Paris got a terminally blackpilled too-online guy ranting about von Mises and the need to kill Democracy.

And the company knew it, because they immediately flipped around and prepared to use him to prop up their new toy. Joel Álvarez was the hot new prospect and they wanted Benoît to legitimize him before he fell out of the ranks completely. But Joel broke his hand, so instead, BSD got no less than Kyle “Killshot” Prepolec, an 18-8 regional fighter and former UFC washout who happened to be available, whom he unsurprisingly demolished. They tried again a few months later, pitting BSD against the next big Lightweight striking monster, Mauricio Ruffy, who was a sizable favorite, and, somewhat more surprisingly, Benoît exposed his complete lack of grappling defense by mauling him on the floor in two rounds.

So management decided to roll the dice again and give BSD another shot at the top ten against the living enigma of inconsistent contendership that is Beneil Dariush, a man who can dominate Mateusz Gamrot or Renato Moicano one minute and get lit up by Alexander Hernandez the next.

Benoît knocked him out with one punch in sixteen seconds.

Hey! We got our prospect back. And we just tried to get Dan Hooker to rid us of the top Lightweight contender we completely fucking loathe and he failed, so fuck him. Hey, Dan, do you want to fight without having to fly across the world again? Good! Get back in the cage with one of maybe three people in the entire Lightweight division who can out-brawl you and pray he doesn’t decide to just shoot power doubles and bust open the stuff on your face that hasn’t even fully healed yet.

If it was not clear: BENOÎT SAINT DENIS BY TKO. Even if Hooker hadn’t been run over by a truck five fortnights ago I would still think this is a bad matchup for him. Saint Denis is good at a lot of the things Hooker’s bad at and he’s shown a real resistance to getting overwhelmed the way Hooker does to people when he’s at his best. Dan’s one of the toughest motherfuckers I’ve ever seen in the sport, but sometimes that costs more than it earns.

MAIN CARD: BEGIN AGAIN
LIGHTWEIGHT Rafael Fiziev (13-4, #9) vs Mauricio Ruffy (12-2, #14)

Rafael Fiziev is having a real tough time shaking his luck. 2023 was supposed to be the year he went from an exciting kickboxing prospect to a top five contender: Instead he got narrowly defeated by Justin Gaethje and blew out his knee fighting Mateusz Gamrot. After a year and a half on the shelf he got to come back--as a short-notice replacement against, once again, Justin Gaethje. Another, even clearer loss got him sent down into the prospect-testing mines, but the UFC’s attempt to trade him out for Ignacio Bahamondes this past June failed when Fiziev reminded everyone that there are, in fact, levels to this shit. Despite giving up half a foot in height and nearly as much in reach, Fiziev bullied Bahamondes and shut him out. And he got a top contendership match for it, and was scheduled to face Charles Oliveira in what could easily have gotten him to the title or at least a title eliminator--except his hand was busted and he couldn’t make it to the fight.

So now he’s defending his spot halfway down in the rankings against a bigger, younger, more-hyped striker again. Sorry, Fizzy. Mauricio Ruffy was one of the four big threats of the Fighting Nerds superteam, and arguably the most-composed knockout machine they had to offer. After smashing Jamie Mullarkey and wheelkicking King Green to death (and having a surprisingly gritty brawl with James Llontop inbetween that no one really talks about), the world saw him as a big favorite against Benoît Saint Denis back in September. Instead, the Nerds collapsed. Carlos Prates got eaten up by Ian Machado Garry, Caio Borralho couldn’t handle Nassourdine Imavov, Jean Silva lost a war with Diego Lopes, and Mauricio Ruffy got taken down and tapped out by BSD. The answer? Get him another top ten-ranked fight and for the love of god, make it someone who doesn’t wrestle quite so much. He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s scarier and takedowns have always been more of a side dish for Fiziev so by all rights Ruffy should rout him and marketing should celebrate and everything should go back where they wanted it to be.

Anyway, RAFAEL FIZIEV BY DECISION because I think he’s just better at this.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Tai Tuivasa (14-8, #12) vs Tallison Teixeira (8-1, #15)

There’s a specific sort of tragic romanticism that comes from a fighter’s complete collapse, and it’s rare that you get to see it truly happen. Lots of fighters lose, lots of fighters slide, but very few are permitted to fall apart at length within the spotlight of the sport. You only get a BJ Penn or a Tony Ferguson every once in a blue moon--someone who snaps over from hanging in there with the best in the world to getting demolished, over and over, by progressively worse opponents. Tai Tuivasa is in that conversation. At the start of 2022 he was a successful Heavyweight knockout machine fighting for the division’s #1 spot. He’s lost all five of his subsequent fights, and each time the opponent has been a bit worse than the last, and each time Tai’s only looked more depressing. Getting squashed by Sergei Pavlovich is understandable. Getting squashed by Marcin Tybura is a bit rough. Getting outstruck 3:1 by Jairzinho Rozenstruik (and escaping with a split decision because of a scorecard so astonishingly terrible that judge Howie Booth got fired in mid-card) means you can’t even do the one thing you’re good at anymore. Tai’s been off the grid for a year and a half trying to figure out how to right his ship.

And the UFC wants to steer it into prospect testing, and honestly, as much as I complain about the company’s desire to feed marketable names to their more affordable stars, this is an extremely rational fight for Tai’s return. Make no mistake, this is still one of Those kinds of fights. Tallison Teixeira is a UFC marketing project through and through. They had him on the Contender Series in his sixth professional fight, they were trying to book him again just a few months later, they fed him an easily digestible dinner in Justin Tafa for his debut, and having gotten him one single UFC win, they had him main eventing for the first time against Derrick Lewis in an attempt to rocketpack him into both the top ten and the public consciousness. And it failed. Miserably. Lewis walked through him and blasted him to the floor in thirty-five seconds. Tallison says it was an early stoppage, but he also only got back to his feet by climbing the cage wall like a mid-nineties child in a Discovery Zone, so I can only sympathize so much. Is this an only slightly lessened attempt to get Teixeira a leg up again like they wanted to six months ago? Totally.

But it’s also a good choice. Heavyweight’s bad, y’all. I complained about Tallison getting to #15 after beating Justin goddamn Tafa, but here’s the thing: Who the hell else is there? Marcus Buchecha? Sean Sharaf? Rizvan Kuniev is 0-1 in the company and he’s fighting Jailton goddamn Almeida next week. There are barely even thirty active Heavyweights in the entire company. Things have fallen far enough that Teixeira fighting here is practical, and if Tai still wants to stick around, Teixeira is the kind of guy he needs to be capable of beating. I’m not convinced he has the gas, and I think this is almost certainly going to be an execution, but I’m gonna let my heart have this one anyway. TAI TUIVASA BY TKO when he, too, walks through fire and separates Teixeira’s jaw from his face.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Quillan Salkilld (10-1) vs Jamie Mullarkey (18-8)

Speaking of marketing prospects: Hi, Quillan. The UFC thinks they’ve got something in Mr. Salkilld, and I was initially skeptical, but after watching him flatline the genuinely tough Nasrat Haqparast with a headkick last October, I’m coming around. Quillan’s big, he’s tough, he’s very good at making his punches and kicks flow together, and most importantly, the UFC has carefully swerved him around all of the good grapplers on the southern end of the Lightweight division, which means they want him up top, and by god, they might get it. Would I like to see him fight a Grant Dawson or Rafa García or, at least, a Chase Hooper? Sure. Is it fun to watch him style on guys? Completely.

Jamie Mullarkey, I’m sorry, but you are here for the styling. In numerous prior writeups we’ve talked about how “tough” is one of the worst reputations to have as a fighter, because if people have had multiple occasions to witness your toughness, it means you’ve gotten your ass kicked enough for it to be notable. What’s in second place? Being Fun. “They’re so fun to watch!” is one of the biggest backhanded compliments in the sport, because it means you don’t have enough wins for anyone to remember them, you don’t have enough career highlights for anyone to bear them in mind, and you aren’t dominant enough in your fights to keep your opponents out of them. Your career is a succession of opportunities to make other people look good.

Quillan’s a -850 favorite. Nasrat Haqparast, the man Quillan destroyed in his last fight, obliterated Mullarkey in a minute and a half just three fights ago. The math on the UFC’s expectations is not hard to parse, and they’re probably going to get what they want. QUILLAN SALKILLD BY TKO.

PRELIMS: BEGIN AGAIN
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Junior Tafa (6-4) vs Billy Elekana (9-2)

Outside of acts of bigotry or an interest in their longterm health, I am very, very rarely the kind of person that calls for fighters to no longer be employed. Opportunities are few and farbetween, this sport is cruel, cold and uncaring, and I want people to be able to make a living doing it. All of that being said: It’s fucking hilarious that Junior Tafa is still here. His only wins in three years of attempts came over Parker Porter and Sean Sharaf, who have a combined UFC record of 1-5 in just as long. Marcos Rogério de Lima destroyed him and got fired for it. Valter Walker destroyed him and Junior strode across the ring and slapped him in the fucking face and, somehow, didn’t get fired for it. Junior dropped to 205 last July in an attempt to reinvigorate his career and promptly got dogwalked by Tuco Tokkos, which was Tuco’s only win under a UFC banner in four attempts. But he’s a local, so by god, we can’t go to Australia and not include a Tafa brother. Billy Elekana, by contrast, is just here. He was a short-notice fill-in so Bogdan Guskov could kill a man at the start of 2025, and since then he’s gotten to beat no less than the 0-for-his-last-3 Ibo Aslan and Contender Series winner Kevin Christian, whose defining feature is being very tall.

Elekana’s boilerplate as hell and that’s probably enough. BILLY ELEKANA BY SUBMISSION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Cam Rowston (13-3) vs Cody Brundage (11-7-1 (1))

I wrote this last February:

There’s no mystery about this. Cody Brundage is one of the UFC’s reliable hands for losing fights. They didn’t really want him in the first place--he got picked up on a late-replacement contract back in 2021--and since then he’s been their personal Barry Horowitz. Rodolfo Vieira lost again? Call Cody Brundage. Sedriques Dumas fucked up his debut? Call Cody Brundage. Bo Nickal needs an opponent? Cody god damned Brundage.

Cam “Battle Giraffe” Rowston is yet another 6’3” Australian knockout machine, he just had a solid debut destroying a fellow burly wrestleboxer in Andre Petroski, and the UFC wants him to pick up another win for his hometown fans, so guess what, motherfuckers: It’s Brundage time again. The last two years of Cody’s fights are now a beautiful 1-1-1 (1), his only victory in that time was a knockout over the what-am-I-still-doing-here Julian Marquez, and the UFC wants him back here so he can get violently faceplanted for everyone’s collective amusement.

If Brundage can get in on Rowston and just wrestle him at length, he’s got a chance. He’s almost certainly not going to do that. CAM ROWSTON BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Jacob Malkoun (8-3) vs Torrez Finney (11-0)

Now, this right here? This fight is magic. Absolute magic. I have devoted so many words over so many events to the UFC’s tendency to put together fights for the benefit of someone they care about, but this is the incredibly rare case of a fight put together specifically because the UFC just doesn’t give a shit about either of these guys. This is a “go play in the corner” fight. Jacob Malkoun is a nondescript Australian wrestler whose only finish in the last six years came after Andre Petroski knocked himself out headbutting Malkoun’s hip. Torrez Finney had to win two Contender Series matches (one of which was against Cam Rowston!) because the UFC was insufficiently excited by him, and when he finally got to the big show he beat Robert Valentin by decision in a fight that saw Torrez land four significant strikes, which maths out to roughly one-quarter of a strike per minute. These men are the platonic ideal of everything the company hates, and they have been sent out to this island to die.

It’s beautiful and I love everything about it. TORREZ FINNEY BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Jonathan Micallef (8-1) vs Oban Elliott (12-3)

Guess what: It’s a rerun! This fight was supposed to take place back in September, but Oban Elliott got sick during fight week. Rather than rebooking either man into new fights they just waited to give this another shot, so enjoy a writeup from yesteryear.

It’s nice to have little things I’m looking forward to. The last time we saw Jonathan Miccallef he was kicking the absolute shit out of Kevin Jousset’s legs, ribs and head at varying rhythms and patterns, and ultimately bruised him up enough that the UFC, as they are wont to do, let Jousset go despite being a perfectly solid talent. Oban Elliott has long been one of the better Cage Warriors prospects in the UFC, but a combination of bad luck and a bunch of decision victories souring the matchmakers on him led to his being stuck treading water and awaiting a matchup that could move him somewhere. Unfortunately, he got it in the form of a preliminary headliner against Seokhyeon Ko at UFC Baku this past June, and it ended with Ko shutting him out in both striking and wrestling. Oban’s eight-fight streak is gone, and he’s fighting off a loss for the first time in four years.

It’s secretly one of the most interesting fights on the card. Miccallef’s sharp as hell and the beating he put on Jousset was very fun, but he also flagged by the third round. Elliott doesn’t get all that tired and he’s a better wrestler than Jousset was. I’m still leaning towards JONATHAN MICCALLEF BY DECISION but this could be close.

EARLY PRELIMS: DID YOU EVEN KNOW ROAD TO UFC 4 HAPPENED
FEATHERWEIGHT: Kaan Ofli (12-4-1) vs Yizha (26-5)

I chose to believe in Kaan Ofli, despite coming in second on The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ) and getting bullied by Muhammad Naimov when they signed him anyway, and my foolishly unwavering faith was rewarded. Once upon a time Ricardo Ramos looked like a serious prospect, but that time was at least six years before his meeting with Kaan last October, which saw Ofli nab him, backpack him, and choke him out in under a round. You’re on the board, buddy, which means you’re now doing better than half your graduating class. Yizha, admittedly, slightly less so. The UFC had him in their sights for years, but he lost the first Road to UFC tournament, repeatedly postponed his victory in the second, and celebrated by getting completely dominated in his promotional debut with Gabriel Santos. But he came back with a knockout win over no less than Westin Wilson, the guy known mainly for dealing with Jean Silva punching him by just bending over, covering his head and not moving, which, in fairness, buddy, I probably would’ve done that too.

This is a tough one. Yizha’s got a big reach advantage, but Ofli’s just as tall and probably stronger; Ofli’s got better chokes, but he’s had a lot of trouble controlling people. So we’re sticking with faith. KAAN OFLI BY DECISION.

ROAD TO UFC 4 LIGHTWEIGHT FINAL: Dom Mar Fan (8-2) vs Sangwook Kim (13-3)

It’s kind of amazing that Road to UFC is still happening, and if you asked, I’d bet there are people within the UFC that are completely unaware of it. The technically-global-but-90%-pan-Asian talent tournament started in 2022 as a not-so-subtle attempt to challenge ONE Championship’s growing influence in the market, and not even four years later the experiment has outlasted ONE bothering to promote MMA at all, and the UFC seems a little tired of it, too. This used to be a bigger deal, and now they barely even advertise that it’s happening, and then you get to the bottom of an Australian card and you have four tournament finals because, coincidentally, there’s someone representing Australia or New Zealand in every final. At 155 pounds, that man is Dom “Street Buddha” Mar Fan, a grappling stylist whose two career losses somehow both came to Quillan Salkilld, and his opponent Sangwook Kim is the former Welterweight champion of South Korea’s Angel’s Fighting Championship who’s getting his second chance after coming up short in Road to UFC 2. They’re both far more likely to work on the floor, but Kim’s a bit grittier and willing to take punishment.

But he takes that punishment because he has pretty porous defense. Also, he pushes his punches way too much. Gonna call it DOM MAR FAN BY DECISION.

ROAD TO UFC 4 FEATHERWEIGHT FINAL: Keiichiro Nakamura (7-1) vs Sebastian Szalay (10-1)

I have watched a fair bit of tape on both of these men, and I can say, without a doubt, that they definitively exist. Sebastian Szalay throws punches and, sometimes, kicks. Keiichiro Nakamura has been hit by strikes, and has, on occasion, landed his own. They’ve both gotten some attention for success in their regional homes, but Szalay’s was over guys like Dimps Gillies, who lost to no less than Blood Diamond, if you remember him, and Keiichiro was winning brawls with the 21-19-3 Yusuke Kagiyama, a man with a no-shit, honest-to-god loss to the icon of perseverance himself, the 16-112 Jay Ellis. Both men got a little attention for getting knockouts during the tournament, but Nakamura’s was a tough back-and-forth affair and Szalay’s was a forty-seven-second lamping against a man who ran facefirst into his hand.

Neither competitor is setting my world on fire, but I’ll say KEIICHIRO NAKAMURA BY TKO because my decisionmaking coin came up heads.

ROAD TO UFC 4 BANTAMWEIGHT FINAL: Sulangrangbo (10-3) vs Lawrence Lui (7-1)

This is the only one of these four finals with lopsided betting odds, and after studying up, that’s probably real, real accurate. Sulangrangbo is the living ideal of a marketing prospect: Striking stylist above all, tall for the class, already decently established in his native China, and a dozen-plus deep into his career despite just turning 20 last year. Lawrence Lui is more of a family hire, as yet another prospect from Auckland’s City Kickboxing team, the same one that gave us Israel Adesanya, Kai Kara-France and Dan Hooker, but he was stuck fighting 2-2 guys in his small pond until the shot at this tournament came along. Lui’s style, like a lot of his fellow City Kickboxers, is controlled striking that veers too deeply into brawling, and even with his successes it’s gotten him smacked upside the head a lot; Sulangrangbo’s talents lay in staying right at the end of punching range, actually using head movement (imagine that!) to dip in and out of danger, and being really, really good at sneaking right hands into small windows of opportunity.

SULANGRANGBO BY TKO when one of those hands gets the job done.

ROAD TO UFC 4 FLYWEIGHT FINAL: Aaron Tau (11-1) vs Namsrai Batbayar (9-1)

Aaron Tau, like Lawrence Lui, is another CKB trainee, and the UFC’s already tried to get him once. He traded in his undefeated streak for a shot at the Contender Series in 2024, but he couldn’t get past Elijah Smith, who’s now a pretty respectable 2-0 in the company. Tau instead dropped from Bantamweight to Flyweight, went back to work, and wound up winning two fun brawls to make it to this final. Namsrai Batbayar, on the other hand, is this year’s underdog story. He was an unknown and generally unrated wrestler before getting picked as an opponent for Shooto standout Wataru Yamauchi in the tournament’s first round, and, surprisingly, Batbayar smashed him in six minutes. This made him an even bigger underdog to his semifinal opponent, the 13-1 Chinese prodigy Agulali, which made it very satisfying when Batbayar choked him out in one round.

I’m too big a fan of the story to let it go, and as tough as Tau’s pocket brawling is, I think it’s going to cost him. NAMSRAI BATBAYAR BY SUBMISSION.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 24 FROM THE T-MOBILE ARENA IN LAS VEGAS
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM

Every year I find myself wanting to use the annual December-to-January UFC void to think about the sport, its future and my perspective on it, and every year I make a bunch of notes on editorials I want to write before things come back, and every year I wind up not finishing any of them because taking a few precious weeks off from writing about newly signed Contender Series Winner Robert “Bob” McJohnson and his astonishing 3-0 professional record against people who coincidentally all came from the same boxercise class winds up being what keeps me sane.

But I do want to actually publish editorials this year, and I’m going to cheat-start by using this section to write a shortened version of one of my drafts, which is named “everyweightclasssucks.txt,” because as we officially begin the mixed martial year, this is how the UFC’s divisions look:

• Heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall is out indefinitely awaiting eye surgery after the #1 contender gouged him, which the UFC has repeatedly publicly decreed was Tom’s fault, and barring a miracle we’re getting either our second title stripping in three years or our third interim title in four

• Light Heavyweight champion Alex Pereira, who is 1-1 with the #1 contender, has been very public about his disinterest in defending his title vs fighting at Heavyweight, preferably against Jon Jones and at the White House, which is understandable because his other option is Carlos Ulberg, who earned his contendership after defeating hot young prospect Dominick Reyes

• Middleweight champion Khamzat Chimaev doesn’t want to fight until after Ramadan, which means he’s on track to continue his once-per-nine-to-twelve-months fight schedule, except he, too, is perpetually calling out Alex Pereira, and his top contender, Nassourdine Imavov, can best be described as a man who, unquestionably, exists

• Welterweight champion Islam Makhachev is great and presiding over indisputably the most exciting division in the UFC right now, which makes it real weird that the UFC seems to be real interested in having him fight Kamaru Usman instead, who is one of the best to ever do it and is also 1-3 in the last 4 years and about to turn 39

• Lightweight champion Ilia Topuria is an absolutely generational star in mixed martial arts, which makes it real unfortunate that he’s on an indefinite hiatus while he deals with his divorce, wants to fight Islam more than his contenders, and wants to retire in a couple fights; in his stead we’re getting a Paddy Pimblett interim title fight because everything’s the worst

• Featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski got crushed by Topuria, then went right back into the title picture after Topuria left the division and won back his belt beating Diego Lopes, which is great, because between Movsar Evloev and Lerone Murphy there are multiple great options; the UFC is ignoring both of them to have a Diego Lopes rematch instead

• Bantamweight champion Petr Yan just upset the apple cart by winning his rematch with Merab Dvalishvili in one of the best contendership performances we’ve seen in years, but they will almost assuredly need to have a rubber match, and if Yan wins again his next contender will be the winner of Sean O’Malley vs Song Yadong, either of which would, also, be a rematch

• Flyweight champion Joshua Van shocked the world by beating one of the best 125ers of all time in Alexandre Pantoja, but he did it after Pantoja busted his own arm 26 seconds in, meaning that, too, will need a rematch, which sure does suck for Manel Kape and Tatsuro Taira, who could really use a shot

• Women’s Bantamweight champion Kayla Harrison was supposed to fight Amanda Nunes tonight, but instead she’s getting neck surgery and may be out another half-year, and the UFC was so disinterested in this division that they didn’t bother with a backup, and god dammit, we’re going to get another Julianna Peña title fight, aren’t we

• Women’s Flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko just cemented her status as a hall-of-famer by absolutely destroying Zhang Weili in a cross-class bout, but Val already beat #1 contender Manon Fiorot, and even though Natália Silva and Erin Blanchfield have both earned title shots the UFC is giving Rose Namajunas and Maycee Barber contendership shots instead, because fuck you, that’s why

• Women’s Strawweight champion Mackenzie Dern got astroturfed all the way to the belt and is now an underdog to all of her top contenders, particularly the ones who already beat her in the recent past, and coincidentally, they’re fighting lower-class contenders while the UFC waits to see if Weili is coming back

• The BMF title is not, has never been, and never will be real

That’s the picture we’re taking into 2026. With the possible exception of Welterweight, we are entering a year where the top of every single division is at best spinning its wheels and at worst openly busted. The matchmaking has metastasized to the point that multiple #1 contenders are being publicly shit on by the company and yet we’re about to spend an essay talking about a Paddy Pimblett championship match, and then next week we have to talk about the Diego Lopes rematch, and looming on the horizon, five months away, is the spectre of the UFC going to the White House, manifesting all of their sins at once, and disproving the existence of God when the Earth fails to swallow them whole.

Happy New Year. May we somehow collectively survive to the next.

MAIN EVENT: THAT’S RIGHT, THE SQUARE HOLE
INTERIM LIGHTWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Justin Gaethje (26-5, #4) vs Paddy Pimblett (23-3, #5)

I questioned my desire to write that whole long-ass introductory essay, and then I remembered this was the first fight we have to talk about this year and got mad all over again. But I also just finished complaining, at length, so we’re going to break with the format a bit and embrace the dark art of devil’s advocacy. Let me first present the case for Justin Gaethje vs. Paddy Pimblett.

Because, hey: It’s Justin Gaethje! He’s neat! He leg kicks real good and sometimes he punches people too! He’s fun to watch and he knocks people out! Remember when he beat Dustin Poirier? That was neat! He’s a trained wrestler but he’s only completed one takedown in almost a decade in the UFC because he’s just so dedicated to the brawling arts! He’s shared the cage with four separate world champions and sure, he lost to all of them, but by god, isn’t it time he got to be one himself?

And Paddy Pimblett! You can say what you will about the man, and his questionable opposition, and his robbery-of-the-year decision over Jared Gordon, and his ability to get repeatedly banned by pre-crisis Twitter by somehow being too bigoted for Twitter, and his capacity for talking endless rafts of shit only to cry foul when any of it is returned as though Michael Bisping himself had reincarnated into the body of a Millennial, but no one can deny that Paddy Pimblett is British and has a haircut.

Anytime the UFC fails to successfully market a fighter like Francis Ngannou or Sean Brady or Norma goddamn Dumont, please remember that Paddy Pimblett got pushed all the way to the top on the back of a pageboy.

Damn near everyone who writes, podcasts or complains to their friends about mixed martial arts has already done their two minutes on Paddy Pimblett’s road to the title, but as someone who does all three of those things, I’m obligated to do it, too. Here is the complete history of Paddy Pimblett, UFC contender:

• Makes his debut by knocking out Luigi Vendramini, who was cut after the fight for being 1-3

• Chokes out Rodrigo Vargas, who was cut right after the fight for being 1-3

• Submits Jordan Leavitt, who was a much greater 2-2 thanks to a coinflip split over the 3-3 (1) Trey Ogden

• Very clearly loses to the 9-7 (1) Jared Gordon, but inexplicably wins a unanimous decision anyway

• Beats Tony Ferguson, a one-time contender who was now 7 fights into an unprecedented 8-fight losing streak; Pimblett distinguishes himself as the only man in the last three years of Ferguson’s UFC career who failed to finish him

• Submits King Green, who is going on 40, 13-11-1 (1), and somehow ranked despite being on a one-fight win streak

• Smashes Michael Chandler, who is going on 40, 2-5 in the UFC, and who has only one UFC win in the last 5 years, over, once again, Tony Ferguson

That’s Paddy. Here’s the thing, though: People love Justin Gaethje. His fighting style and his hard-nosed attitude had a sizable fanbase behind him all the way back in 2014 in the World Series of Fighting. He deserves it, right?

For sake of fairness, let’s give him the same window of evaluation we gave Pimblett. Here’s the Justin Gaethje story since 2021:

• Came back from a 12-month layoff and almost got knocked out by Michael Chandler, but rallied back to win a great, all-action fight

• Almost won the Lightweight title from Charles Oliveira, only for Oliveira to come back, outpunch him and choke him out in three and a half minutes

• Took 10 months off, then scraped a close decision from Rafael Fiziev

• Avenged a 2018 loss by knocking out Dustin Poirier, who was entering his retirement arc

• Took 9 months off, then got dominated by Max Holloway and was famously faceplanted at the last second

• Took 11 months off, then got another close decision off of Rafael Fiziev, again

See? He’s great! He’s amazing. Except for, y’know, the constant layoffs and the guys who beat him but aren’t here. None of them are here. Charles Oliveira and Max Holloway both destroyed Justin--recently!--and instead of fighting for the Lightweight championship of the world, they’re fighting each other in March for the BMF Championship, a totally legitimate belt that definitely wasn’t made up to try to sell The Rock’s shitty shoes.

And, hey: How about Arman Tsarukyan? You know, the #1 contender? The guy who beat Charles Oliveira and then got put on the UFC’s shitlist for fucking up a pay-per-view to the point that Dana White openly insults him at press conferences and talks about how the rankings don’t matter?

Because, y’know. They don’t. They super, super don’t.

When Paddy fought King Green, Green was ranked #15 and Paddy wasn’t ranked at all. Nine months later, Paddy fought Michael Chandler, who was somehow ranked #7 despite having only beaten the ghost of Tony Ferguson in the last two presidential terms, and Paddy was #12. It’s been nine more months, Paddy hasn’t fought again, and now he’s #5 and fighting for an interim title and de facto top contender status, while Arman Tsarukyan, who’s taken out world champions and just demolished Dan Hooker, is laughed at during media events.

I have so many friends who’ve fallen off watching the UFC, and while much of it comes down to their odious nature as a company and a fully-functioning force for evil, a solid part of it is the degree to which absolutely nothing matters anymore. There’s an entire generation of MMA fans who grew up watching a sport sold entirely around the idea that technique matters more than force, wins matter more than press, and fighters were well-rounded people instead of the asshole caricatures cagefighting brought to mind. And, obviously, the UFC fell short of all of those goals on a number of occasions, but that was still The Brand.

It’s 2026, the UFC is so mainstream it’s trying to hold an event at the fucking White House, there are now multiple fighters who praise the Nazis, the commentary team has a moment in nearly every event where they discuss how technique is less important to mixed martial arts than being fun, and the president of the company uses its press events to discuss how totally unimportant the rankings are as opposed to what really matters: Whether or not the executives like you.

And all of this comes on the heels of the biggest media deal the UFC’s ever gotten, and the best prices its consumers have ever seen. No more cable, no more pay-per-view, just give the Ellison family $90-140 a year and you can watch all the UFC you want.

Which we’re inaugurating with a Paddy Pimblett title fight.

Look: Paddy isn’t a bad fighter. He’s got a chin, he’s a big pain in the ass on the floor, and most fascinatingly, he’s managed to manifest the long-forgotten Diaz Brothers hypnosis that makes everyone fight you like an idiot. Are you King Green and your entire career has been built on evasive, defensively-sound striking? Better dive headfirst at the submission artist. Are you Michael Chandler and your entire career is owed to swinging haymakers? What if, instead of trying to punch the grappler with pressure issues, you spent the whole fight trying to take him down?

As much as the objective facts of their careers, that’s why people focus on Paddy’s strength of schedule. Laughing off Tony, Mikey and The King is easy enough as it stands, but aging fighters on losing streaks tend to, y’know, fall the fuck apart on their own merits. Did Paddy Pimblett disarm Michael Chandler and force him away from his own strengths?

Or was it his 39th birthday being a week and a half away?

I hate that we’re here. I hate that if Paddy destroys Justin Gaethje we can have this conversation all over again in eight more months. He, too, is turning 38 this year; he, too, is considering retirement; he, too, is winless over non-retired fighters not named Rafael Fiziev across almost five full years. We could do it again. We could make the argument that 24-3 interim Lightweight champion Paddy Pimblett still doesn’t have a great test in the octagon.

Except for, y’know, the time he lost.

JUSTIN GAETHJE BY TKO. We need you to pull this one out, buddy. 2026 is already a shitshow and we aren’t even done with January yet. I am choosing to believe you can start this one out on the right foot by not getting taken down by Paddy goddamn Pimblett.

CO-MAIN EVENT: OPPORTUNITY COST
BANTAMWEIGHT: Sean O’Malley (18-3, #3) vs Song Yadong (22-8-1 (1), #5)

God, cast me back to a week ago when this was still Kayla Harrison vs Amanda Nunes so all I had to complain about was the hilarity of Kayla Harrison vs Amanda Nunes co-main eventing under Paddy Pimblett.

Okay. We’re fine. Hey, everyone, you wanna read another essay about favoritism?

Sean O’Malley, man. At this point I feel like everyone knows the Sean O’Malley story: Hand-picked off the Contender Series as The Future Of The Sport, marketed more heavily than goddamn near anyone in the UFC, given matchmaking so favorable that his break into ranked fights came against a career Flyweight, earned a title eliminator by eye-gouging his way to a No Contest, won a robbery decision in said eliminator and got to sit out almost an entire year while Aljamain Sterling fought championship fights every four months so O’Malley could feast on his injured corpse, passed on #1 contender Merab Dvalishvili to instead defend his belt against Marlon Vera, who was on a one-fight win streak and probably should’ve lost that one too, defended against Merab and got torn apart, got an immediate rematch with Merab anyway and got choked the fuck out.

So: It’s 2026. Your chosen fighter is on the first losing streak of his life. He hasn’t won a fight in two years and he hasn’t beaten a top contender in almost three. Merab, the bane of his existence, is at least temporarily out of the title picture. Do you give Sean a rebuilding fight? Do you finally run the Cory Sandhagen match people have wanted for years? Do you risk putting him against Umar Nurmagomedov?

Why the Hell would you do that when you have a shorter, stockier fighter he can outrange all night?

Song Yadong has crawled through several miles of crap to get this opportunity. Divisions tend to build strong filters by way of genuinely tough, talented gatekeepers who are distinctly unlikely to make it to the top, but weed out all the fighters who aren’t even good enough to get past them. Song Yadong fought them all. He knocked out the painfully underrated Julio Arce, he punched Marlon Moraes out of the UFC, he stopped Ricky Simón, he dominated Chris Gutierrez. Song stayed competitive with Cory Sandhagen until his eyebrow was falling off of his skull. Song took a round off Petr Yan.

And then, last February, he fought Henry Cejudo and it got real, real weird.

It wasn’t a bad fight. It was, if anything, turning into a real good one, with Song busting Cejudo up and stuffing his wrestling while Cejudo snuck right hands in quite a bit more than Song would’ve liked. But Song managed to give him the full Moe by poking him in both eyes at once (after kicking him in the balls a minute earlier!), and in one of the weirdest rule snaggles I’ve ever seen, despite Cejudo telling his corner, the referee and a ring doctor that he couldn’t see, the fight was allowed to progress to a fourth round--and the second the round started the referee waved off the fight, allowing it to go to a technical decision instead of a No Contest, because, obviously, that’s the important thing.

Song won, and beating Henry Cejudo isn’t nothing, but beating him by what was essentially a referee’s call--especially after getting away with a cup check and an eyepoke without a point deduction--feels like shit. Speaking as someone who’s wanted to see Song get another shot at the top for years, I cannot help resenting that he’s getting it because mixed martial arts doesn’t know or care what its own rules are.

But then, that’s the way this goes. Raoni Barcelos beat Payton Talbott only for Talbott to get a ranked fight, Umar Nurmagomedov got a title eliminator for beating a debuting Bekzat Almakhan, Aiemann Zahabi is on a seven-fight winning streak and has yet to even sniff a rebooking, and Marlon Vera is in the top ten because he knocked out a retiring Dominick Cruz three and a half years ago. When you live in an age of rancid opportunism it’s hard to keep complaining about the smell.

That nihilism might be fueled by my suspicion that we’re gonna see SEAN O’MALLEY BY DECISION here. I would love it if Song managed to cut the distance, pressure O’Malley into the cage and just rough him up for three straight rounds, and I do think that’s his best path to victory, but as much as I enjoy him, as big a fan as I am, I just watched him go 60/40 in a striking match with Henry Cejudo, who is a) not a great boxer and b) had the shortest reach on the entire male UFC roster. I am not a fan of O’Malley, but he’s very, very good at using his range and crossing motherfuckers up. It’s mostly pressure games and heavy counterstriking that have given him trouble, and as much as I want Song to find a big right counter out of nowhere, I just don’t see it happening.

MAIN CARD: LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN
HEAVYWEIGHT: Waldo Cortes-Acosta (16-2, #5) vs Derrick Lewis (29-12 (1), #8)

Salsa Boy is getting the fastest do-over in UFC history. Waldo’s been one of the UFC’s heirs apparent for some time now, but it’s easy to forget that he was supposed to be in the main event already. After a five-fight winning streak that included Heavyweight all-timers like Łukasz Brzeski, Robelis Despaigne, Ryan Spann and a 45 year-old Andrei Arlovski, the UFC tried to pull the trigger on Waldo by giving him a showdown with knockout machine and #3-ranked Sergei Pavlovich this past August. On the plus side: Waldo took a bunch of punches to the face from one of the hardest hitters in the company and made it to a decision. On the minus: He was never remotely close to winning said decision. But then Waldo knocked out Ante Delija--after getting poked in the eye--and came back three weeks later to take out Shamil Gaziev, and now they’re talking about a title shot for him if he wins here, because beating the #9, #11 and #8 people means you deserve it more than the #3 guy who already easily defeated you.

Derrick Lewis is almost 41, he’s already quasi-retired twice, he hyped up fight week by saying the UFC has been giving him peptide PEDs and he hasn’t beaten a top ten opponent in almost five years. He’s slow and he gets tired and the UFC has been feeding him to younger, hungrier contenders for years. Before Tai Tuivasa started his historically relevant five-fight losing streak, he knocked out Derrick Lewis. He got picked apart by Ciryl Gane, he got flatlined by Sergei Pavlovich, he got ragdolled by Serghei Spivac and Jailton Almeida. Every part of the Derrick Lewis career arc leads to him losing this fight. All of which is moot, because Derrick Lewis is going to win. Waldo’s younger, hungrier, bigger and faster, and Derrick Lewis is going to win. Waldo spent his last three fights showing off his durability, his hand speed and his ability to fuck people up before they can touch him, and Derrick Lewis is going to win.

Waldo is going to hit him, and he’s going to hurt him, and then DERRICK LEWIS IS GOING TO WIN. Call it a TKO.

WOMEN’S FLYWEIGHT: Natália Silva (19-5-1, #2) vs Rose Namajunas (14-7, #6)

It’s amazing how opportunities can also be the absolute definition of a fighter getting done dirty. Natália Silva is, unquestionably, the top contender at Women’s Flyweight. She hasn’t lost since her regional years back in 2017, she’s 7-0 in the UFC, she’s got really well-timed kicks that frustrate the shit out of everyone she fights and her long path to the title means she’s knocked off multiple former world champions. It was already stretching credibility when Natália, then on a five-fight streak, got matched up with Jéssica Andrade, who had just finished four straight fights at Strawweight, but whatever: Andrade was the known quantity and she was the lesser-known contender, and beating Andrade got her in the conversation. This past May the UFC gave her both the biggest opportunity and the biggest test of her career as the woman picked to welcome Alexa Grasso back down to Earth after her title trilogy with Valentina Shevchenko, arguably the best woman in mixed martial arts. Natália passed with flying colors. Absolutely dominated a woman who’d been holding the world championship just one fight ago. So we’re done, right? Seeing as Manon Fiorot already lost, there’s no person BUT Natália to put at the top, right?

Funny story: I went through my back catalog of Rose Namajunas fights looking for a quote to use about the UFC’s dogged refusal to stop trying to trampoline her to the top at 125 pounds, and I gave up because there were too many to pick from. We’re goddamn near two and a half years into this experiment. After Rose’s disastrous title loss to Carla Esparza and subsequent move up to Flyweight the UFC threw her into an immediate bout with Manon, who was, at the time, #2. When Rose lost she got one rebuilding fight, and then they tried to book a top prospect fight against Maycee Barber, and when that fell apart and Rose beat up Tracy Cortez instead, they gave her another shot at the top against the #3-ranked Erin Blanchfield. When she lost--again--they gave her another rebuilding fight with the not-even-top-ten Miranda Maverick, and having won that fight? Congratulations, Rose Namajunas, welcome to your third top contendership fight. They absolutely will not stop. Erin Blanchfield has beaten everyone in the division other than Manon Fiorot, including Rose Namajunas, and her last fight was against the #8 woman in the division, and Rose is 3 for her last 6 and on a one-fight winning streak and she’s fighting in a de facto title eliminator.

NATÁLIA SILVA BY DECISION. This entire card is one big attempt to jetpack previously tarnished fighters the UFC really wants to give another chance.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Arnold Allen (20-3, #6) vs Jean Silva (16-3, #10)

WHAT DID I JUST SAY. FUCK.

The UFC was invested in Arnold Allen once upon a time. He ticks the boxes: British, pretty funny, good at fighting, never goddamn loses. The only thing holding him back was his schedule, which saw him appearing so painfully infrequently that if you go just eight fights back from the present he was sharing the cage with Gilbert Melendez, who won his first championship belt twenty-two years ago. But quality is quality, and Allen proved himself so worthy of a shot at the top of the division that, even if it took him ten fights to get there, he got a contendership bout with Max Holloway himself. Allen lost. It was not close. But that’s okay: Losing to Max Holloway is pretty fuckin’ normal, and with Max leaving the division anyway, the doors were wide open for Allen. And then he lost his next fight to Movsar Evloev, and for the UFC, that is unforgivable. For failing to stop their most-hated wrestler, Allen has been busted down to rehab duty. First it was Giga Chikadze, who, coincidentally, was also the #10-ranked man. What does Allen get for his victory?

He gets to give Jean Silva another shot at contendership. The UFC wants Jean. They need Jean. They’re so fucking invested in Jean and his crazy-man striking and his knockout power that after he destroyed Holocaust enthusiast Bryce Mitchell, who was just barely borderline ranked, they shot Jean all the way up to main eventing their annual marketing clusterfuck, Noche UFC, against the #2-ranked Diego Lopes. It was a real win-win situation for the company: The fight was guaranteed to be full of fireworks, both men were well-loved by the audience, and either eventuality would give the UFC a solid contender. What they didn’t count on was Lopes just fucking crushing him. He spent almost the entire first round one-sidedly mauling Jean on the mat, and when Jean tried to chase Lopes down in the second round, his addiction to the brawling arts caught up with him in the form of a spinning elbow upside the dome. For the first time in his career, Silva got stopped. You could go a lot of directions from there. Steve Garcia, Josh Emmett, Patrício Pitbull--there are a bunch of big-swinging fighters adjacent to Jean in the rankings.

But none of those would satisfy the UFC’s desire to leapfrog him to the top again. There’s a commonality in all of Jean’s big knockouts: He gets people to break from their gameplans. He hurts them and plays with them and then either they get into his range and get picked off or he swarms them until a big hit gets through. His faith in his capacity to produce panic cost him against Lopes, and I think it’ll cost him here. Allen isn’t the biggest puncher or the best wrestler, but he’s got the kind of composure that saw him through five rounds with Max Holloway without cracking, and while Jean’s always going to be the kind of guy that can turn things around with one big punch, I think ARNOLD ALLEN BY DECISION is the call here.

PRELIMS: LESS IMPORTANT THAN JEAN SILVA, I GUESS
BANTAMWEIGHT: Umar Nurmagomedov (19-1, #2) vs Deiveson Figueiredo (25-5-1, #6)

That’s right, baby. This is a prelim fight. Umar Nurmagomedov is a top contender whose only career loss was in a title fight against Merab Dvalishvili--whom he took two rounds from--and Deiveson Figueiredo is a former Flyweight champion, and they’re less worthy of a main card slot than Jean Silva and Waldo Cortes-Acosta. It’s funny how you have to change the math on this, too. Up to this point in UFC history the counter-argument regarding card placement complaints has always centered around the need to get people through the door on the prelims so they shell out cash for the pay-per-view. Well, guess what, fuckers: We live in the future now. It’s all just one bucket, which is also how we’re going to end up with numbered events headlined by DWCS guys pretty goddamn soon. For now? We have Umar, who just recovered from the Merab loss by dominating a strong contender in Mario Bautista, and we have Deiveson, who just recovered from Cory Sandhagen shredding his knee to pieces by winning one of the most uneventful, everyone-sucks-here fights of the year against Montel Jackson. For how similar their situations were, it’s hard to ignore the difference in the resolutions. Umar flagged against an aggressive grappler and proved in his comeback that he could handle another one without losing his composure. Deiveson got torn apart by two bigger, stronger, younger fighters, and then he fought someone who barely engaged with him and beat him by, somehow, hitting him even less.

It wasn’t a great look and it would’ve been an even worse sign if people hadn’t been so distracted by whatever the fuck Montel was doing. UMAR NURMAGOMEDOV BY DECISION.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ateba Gautier (9-1) vs Andrey Pulyaev (10-3)

Sometimes, when a fight gets booked that’s so seemingly obvious that its betting lines are in the quadruple digits, I feel like my write-up should just be pictures of cows frolicking in a meadow. My assembled friends: This is not difficult. The UFC has plans for Ateba Gautier. He’s their big new knockout guy and they know he’s barely fought real competition, which is why they’re slow-rolling the shit out of him. José Medina was an unproven rookie-crusher on a losing streak. Robert Valentin was a TUF runner-up--on a losing streak. The repeatedly knocked-out Ozzy Diaz was next in line, and when he got injured, instead of pulling any of the roster’s more experienced fighters, they brought in regional fighter Tre’ston Vines. And after all of that? After three straight UFC knockout victories? Ateba gets Andrey Pulyaev, who is 1-1 in the company, got thoroughly dominated by Christian Leroy Duncan just one fight ago, and scored his first victory over the winless Nick Klein back in August.

It’s not subtle and it’s not sneaky. ATEBA GAUTIER BY TKO.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Nikita Krylov (30-11, #13) vs Modestas Bukauskas (19-6, NR)

Times are tough for Nikita Krylov. Once upon a time, this man was considered a future champion. He had all the tools: Long kicks and punches, good bread-and-butter grappling, a solid chin and, most importantly, enough of a good head on his shoulders to voluntarily step away from the UFC back in 2016 to go home, mature as both a person and a fighter, and come back ready to take over the world. By the standards of professional fighters, that’s downright brilliant. It also failed miserably. Since his return to the spotlight he’s 5-6. He spent the entirety of 2025 getting knocked out twice--and the second time was barely three months after the first, which is just irresponsible. By contrast: The mainstream MMA audience has never expected shit from Modestas Bukauskas, which is pretty cruel. He was a Cage Warriors champion, he was a solid prospect, and to this day, 3/4 of the people who recognize his name will probably know it from seeing Khalil Rountree Jr. kick his kneecap in half. Now, somehow, Modestas is not only back, he’s 6-1 in his new run at the top. Sure, some of those 6 are Tyson Pedro and Raffael Cerqueira and the biggest feather in the Bukauskas cap is retiring a Paul Craig who was 1 for his last 8 dating back to a submission over, hilariously enough, Nikita Krylov, but Light Heavyweight ain’t what it used to be and a streak is a streak.

I don’t think Modestas has the power or grappling to put Nikita in danger the way a lot of his other opponents have. I do think Nikita’s deteriorated enough that he won’t be able to stop him from pecking away for three rounds. MODESTAS BUKAUSKAS BY DECISION.

EARLY PRELIMS: SUMMON UP YOUR INNERG
FLYWEIGHT: Alex Perez (25-10, #11) vs Charles Johnson (18-7, #13)

This might well be the single most foregone conclusion pick of my entire writing tenure. I’ve written more about Alex Perez’s tendency to miss fights than compete in them, with a still-record-setting twelve cancellations in the last five and a half years. The good news is, starting in 2024, Perez finally fixed his luck and stated showing up semi-regularly again! The bad news is he’s lost in almost every one of those appearances. Perez is now a very rough 1-5 over the past half-decade, and over the last year and a half he’s managed to get his knee destroyed by Tatsuro Taira and his throat throttled by Asu Almabayev. Charles Johnson’s entire 13-fight UFC career has taken place in the time it took Perez to record five fights. It’s been up and down, but Johnson’s highs have been very high, and while destroying Lone’er Kavanagh in his last jaunt has a place of honor in that conversation, nothing has aged as well as his mid-2024 knockout over now-champ Joshua Van. He’s got a window of opportunity to make a claim at the top of the division, and he wants to make the most of it before it gets drowned in the contendership conversation.

Alex is still real hard to knock out, though. CHARLES JOHNSON BY DECISION feels more likely.

LIGHTWEIGHT: Michael Johnson (24-19) vs Alexander Hernandez (18-8)

God, this combination of names. This fight could have happened damn near a decade ago, and coincidentally, that’s the last time Michael Johnson was on the kind of winning streak he’s currently enjoying. Even in his prime he could be a hot-and-cold fighter--the kind of dude that could beat Tony Ferguson or knock out Dustin Poirier one day and lose to Artem Lobov the next--but you cannot fault the man for persistence. For nine years, Johnson went 5 for 16. He got knocked out, he got submitted, and he went from sharing the cage with guys like Khabib Nurmagomedov to scraping by Marc Diakiese. But he hung the fuck in there, and now he’s staring down 40 and the Contender Series has definitely not had any kind of chilling effect on the overall roster and suddenly Michael Johnson’s on a three-fight winning streak for the first time since Obama was in office. And, hell, Alexander Hernandez isn’t too far behind. He was the most exciting Lighweight prospect of 2018, he was on the fast track to title contention, and then he spent six years getting repeatedly stopped while failing to ever record a single back-to-back victory. Now he, too, is riding four straight wins and knocking on the edge of the rankings, and all he has to do to justify his resurgence is beat up another deeply unpredictable veteran.

It’s so hard to predict Michael Johnson’s fights. He still shows flashes of brilliance and his two good rounds against Daniel Zellhuber last July were two of the best he’s put on in years, and by contrast, Hernandez’s last appearance against Diego Ferreira saw Diego exchanging pretty cleanly with him right until Hernandez dropped him, but I just don’t think Johnson’s going to be able to threaten Hernandez with speed and range the way he needs to. ALEXANDER HERNANDEZ BY TKO.

HEAVYWEIGHT: Josh Hokit (7-0) vs Denzel Freeman (7-1)

Josh Hokit is an indistinguishable wrestling prospect who got less attention for his fighting than he did for cutting the increasingly boring yet obligatory bigot promo about wanting to beat up trans people after his DWCS win. This is it. The future of Heavyweight is Shithead Gimmick #451 and Guy Whose Last Fight Was Against A 41 Year-Old Who Was 7-9-1.

Denzel’s professional loss came to a man who fights at Light Heavyweight and, even funnier, his sole amateur loss back in 2016 was to former Bellator Middleweight Champion Johnny Eblen. When you watch their tape there’s a lot of talk about how promising they are as the next generation of Heavyweight fighters. Denzel just turned 34.

Fun fact: Josh Hokit’s debut opponent hasn’t been booked again and Denzel Freeman’s debut opponent was cut four days later. But it wasn’t for losing! No, better: After Marek Bujło lost against Freeman the UFC wanted him to sign a contract for this fight against Hokit, and when Bujło said no on account of his foot was broken and he couldn’t even spar yet let alone agree to a fight 8 weeks away, the UFC fired him. If you’re keeping score, threatening to violently assault women is a net positive, but asking not to be booked when you only have one functioning foot is a promotional red line they simply dare not cross.

Hokit’s athletic and talented and he’ll probably storm this fight too. I am not yet so forced to emotionally invest myself in his role in the Heavyweight division’s future that I have to stop myself from picking against him on emotional principle and the hope that constantly winning fights in 6 minutes is bad for your future. DENZEL FREEMAN BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Ricky Turcios (12-5) vs Cameron Smotherman (12-6)

I believed in Ricky Turcios once. I saw him win The Ultimate Fighter 29 (jesus christ), by which I mean I did not watch a second of the show but did see him take the final, and hey, Brady Hiestand was pretty good, beating him was a solid accomplishment, there’s a lot of promise in them there hills. It’s been four and a half years, Ricky is 1-3, his only win came against the 0-3 Kevin Natividad, and it was a razor-close split decision that almost doomed him. Now, three years later, he’s right back in the shit and fighting in the legally obligatory first loser-leaves-town matchup of the year. Cameron Smotherman was a late replacement signing for the company--coincidentally because the aforementioned Hiestand couldn’t make it--and outside of that upset victory over Jake Hadley in his debut, his tenure has been equally unfortunate. Serhey Sidey outpowered and outwrestled him last May, Ricky Simón outclassed him in June, and just like that, in the space of six weeks, Smotherman took two straight losses and has to consider the threat of getting cut off a third.

That said: I think he’ll be fine here. I still want to believe in Ricky. I still want to pick him. But my faith cannot endure. CAMERON SMOTHERMAN BY DECISION.

WELTERWEIGHT: Adam Fugitt (10-5) vs Ty Miller (6-0 (1))

Ty Miller is getting a solid amount of hype after his Contender Series win, and it makes me wonder if someday we’ll excavate the wreckage of modern civilization and find out half of social media was just people getting paid minimum wage to pretend to care about things. I understand why the UFC wants him: He doesn’t worry a lot about his defense, he doesn’t really try to grapple, he just walks either forward or backward while throwing 1-2s and as a Welterweight with a 77.5” reach, which is more than about half the Heavyweight roster, that works just fine. Sure, that DWCS fight saw him getting repeatedly lit up by a man he had half a foot of range on, but that’s not a problem until it becomes one, and Adam Fugitt, whose UFC history is dotted with persistent struggles with smaller strikers, seems real unlikely to be the man who’ll make it count.

But I’m pretty sure I’ve picked 90% favorites on this card and that’s fucking boring, so what the hell. ADAM FUGITT BY TKO. Welcome to 2026. We’re gonna make it, somehow.

Another year has come, and another year is now in the books. 2025 was, for the most part, a pretty active year for me both as a writer covering jiu jitsu, and my own participation in the sport. A goal of mine this year was to cover the sport a bit more, writing more not just the educational and training aspects but also the professional side of competition at the upper echelons.

To this end, I feel like I accomplished this goal and now, as has been the tradition of my writing, it’s time to share some personal thoughts, perspectives, and lessons I’ve learned during the year regarding this stupid hobby of aggressively hugging someone on the ground I love so much.

“Professional” Jiu Jitsu Barely Exists

I’m going to quote , who I write & podcast with over at , regarding how “professional” jiu jitsu is treated and viewed by the audience.

I think what’s going on with spectator graps is that you get places like reddit where there’s a circle jerk of people going OH MY GOD BJJ CAN BE THE BIGGEST THING IN THE WORLD and then when someone like One creates some belts and tries to market it, nobody watches except for the people from that reddit, where 95% of them pirate it.

In short, the whole idea of a professional competition scene for jiu jitsu is more or less, as Neal put it, held up by duct tape, spit, and a lot of hope. And even though people say they want it, they ultimately don’t care enough about it at the end of the day.

I don’t think any of the athletes are to blame for this, as the sport has some fantastic competitors and athletes who do their jobs very well. The real issue, as I see it, are the organizations who are meant to be putting on these events. At present we have UFC BJJ, ONE Championship, Who’s Number One, AIGA Global League, Polaris, BJJ Clubes, and probably a few more being the more notable, what I would call, Tier 1 organizations.

That’s cool, but there’s just one problem I genuinely have with this. None of them really seem to know how to make me invested in watching.

ONE has put together some cool matches, but their grappling is an after thought of the after thought that is their MMA division. Meaning, they barely care about it.

AIGA Global League is inconsistent with its information available in English but has done a decent job making their content available easily.

Polaris has done a good job at putting together decent events, but they’re typically only UK centered competitors because they can’t compete with the deep pockets of the UFC or WNO.

Speaking of WNO, they still seem to think that Gordon Ryan and his crew of tail riders are THE people the sport needs to focus on, rather than say finding a variety of stars. Also adding to it, I just hate FloSports’ trying to swindle money from people by tricking them into buying a year long subscription on FloGrappling because they hid the monthly option available on other FloSports sign up portals (FloRugby etc), despite it all being interlinked so having a FloCheerleading subscription also entitles me to FloGrappling content. So fuck them for that alone.

BJJ Clubes is neat as it’s a more dedicated team sport and also features the gi unlike the other organizations. However, it also faces the Polaris problem but focused around Brazil athletes only.

Oh and the mentioned UFC BJJ is not all that great either. Excusing the rather bland production value, and the fact its only on YouTube, it’s hard to ever know when they’re on because even the UFC barely puts much effort into marketing it, despite having the UFC to promote it through. But there’s also the fact that they allegedly stole the format from CJI, allegedly have been artificially boosting their viewer numbers to avoid how embarrassingly low their views are, and how nobody at their organization seems to know how to market anything about their athletes to get viewers invested. That last one is a UFC/TKO wide issue and not uniquely a flaw of UFC BJJ.

So, in short, none of these organizations seem to be doing the whole “running a proper professional organization” very well at all. I don’t think “professional” jiu jitsu exists given its current form. Sure there’s money floating around but the actual professionalism in terms of organization, athlete behavior (which I didn’t get into but holy shit can the ‘pro athletes’ please stop putting out insanely bigoted shit for five minutes?), and so on are sub par. Professional esports, which has its own organizational issues as a venture, is better ran and also brings in better money than professional jiu jitsu. And I’m not saying this because I recently was watching professional StarCraft on Korean TV while on vacation, but that thought did come up while doing so.

Craig Jones is Saving “Professional” Jiu Jitsu

Of all the people involved in the “pro” scene for jiu jitsu, I think it’s safe to say the only person actively organizing to make things better ran is Craig Jones.

Two years ago he bucked the misconception that a more streamlined, well paid, and athlete (rather than organizer) focused event was not possible. Doing so right at the same time as the ADCC World Championships, often assumed to be the height of those very things, for good measure as well.

This year CJI 2 did well in continuing that, though it did stumble at times during the production but in general it was still a better product overall and more professionally ran. While the ending match did lead to some “controversy” that was mostly fueled by a terminally online dude who also has had issues with Craig Jones and the B-Team guys ever since the Danaher Death Squad broke up. So that’s a big block of salt you have to account for.

When I said Craig is saving “professional” jiu jitsu, it’s mostly because he’s calling out the shoddy and unprofessional antics of the people involved. He was instrumental in boosting the awareness of the dodgy UFC BJJ viewership numbers, he had a debate with Mikey Musumeci covering professionalism as well as re-investment back into the jiu jitsu community (which the UFC seems to not bother with), and has actively pushed for better pay for the athletes since they are ultimately what is making people want to tune in. Not a bald wife beater who is chumming it up with a tech guy whose company, at best, accidentally allowed for a genocide to be orchestrated on their platform that also suppresses information regarding another genocide occurring. I’ll take the dude who makes jokes about doing cocaine over that personally.

Craig is, self-admittedly, rough around the edges as a personality. However its hard to deny he isn’t actively trying to push athletes and organizations towards a more professional structure as a whole. With a promise of CJI 3 occurring in 2026, it’s at least good to know there is one person who understands the value that professional athletes should be held to, and actively is pushing for the industry as a whole to move there.

This is all not including the fact he has been active in calling out horrendous behavior by athletes directly and taking aim at those who are active in sweeping that stuff under the carpet.

So yes, Craig is probably the lone guy trying to fix the professional aspect of this sport. A task that I would best describe as a sisyphean.

My Interest in the Pro Scene However..

This is all a round about way of talking about how my interest in the professional scene has waned over the past twelve months.

I spoke a lot about how I generally prefer team oriented competitions like CJI 2, Quintet, Polaris Squads, and BJJ Clubes. There’s something more holistic in the story telling of the competition that they provide that individual competitions don’t necessarily hit for me.

Throughout this year I put a lot of effort towards highlighting those events and only focusing on them. And for the most part they were quite entertaining. However, going back to that quote by Neal, that’s all it really amounted to from my end as a writer. A lot of hype, good matches, but then no follow through. In baseball or football, we get the next match the next week. In jiu jitsu the next match may take three to four months depending on the organizer’s schedule not matching with the athlete’s. Which is a bit…disheartening? Irritating?

I think the athletes generally due deserve their due to make money doing the sport, but as mentioned the professional organizations are sporadically active which makes it frustrating. Followed by the fact the stakes for each competition are not always clear or apparently other than “wants to win this one” which, again, sort of is on the organizer to do a better job at selling.

Which is a long round about way of saying that for 2026 my coverage of the “professional” scene will be zero. I’m simply not enjoying doing the write ups and coverage of the upcoming events compared to simply training and thinking about the meta stuff related to the hobby of grappling. I won’t shy away from talking about competition related topics, and do plan to put some pieces out covering my perspective on that subject, but I don’t think the stuff you see in my write up for Quintet will returning any time soon.

Global Grappling Day 2025

Finally in 2025 my long overdue participation in the Tap Cancer Out Global Grappling Day occurred. If you weren’t privy to some of the posts I made about it, it is in short a marathon style event where you are meant to raise money for Tap Cancer Out, a 501(c) charity in the USA, who help fund raise and provide funding support for a slew of cancer charities and support organizations.

This year I was able to raise $505 USD with the goal being a modest $400 USD. To save a long winded write up, I just want to say this whole event made me feel…fulfilled as a person. I really am happy that we were able to raise the funds we did, and also the support I received from training partners, friends, and family really helped me feel less cynical about things.

As promised there will be an episode of the Punchsport Pagoda podcast soon with a few of the other members to talk about this event as well as the need for more community oriented social causes and similar activities within jiu jitsu itself. It may take a bit due to the holidays but we will be getting that out as soon as we can.

Final Thoughts

This year was, in general, a fantastic year for me personally, professionally, and in terms of writing here and I am very much appreciative of everyone who has been involved with all of it. It just ruled.

Here’s to the new year.

In the midst of this idea being slapped together, we quickly decided to put together a webpage so we could more easily write to our hearts content on a sport’s genre we all deeply loved to talk about. The name was “Fight Island” and this was mostly built on a meme made out of the UFC’s desperate attempt to ignore a global pandemic, at risk of their own selves and well everyone else they ever would come in contact with. Something we all gleefully mocked as idiotic and insanely selfish at the time. “We’re going to do all of our international fights on this island.” said Dana White, and by god they were gonna build the infrastructure to do it, come hell or high water.

We all imagined how hilarious the idea of an island in some indescript location was home to a mass of fighters all specialized in their own fighting style. Pretty much the opening plot to the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie was what we all imagined.

In reality, it was a building on the UAE’s Yas Island, a sports focused entertainment center. So, we were kind of off on that one. Either way, we loved the visual concept of Fight Island so much that it was stuck in our heads long enough for us to eagerly adopted the name for the our collective writings.

Now, you may have noticed we decided to use a name already in use (and more importantly filed as a trademark under the USPTO). That, really, didn’t stop us. We just decided to keep it until basically we received a cease and desist and then we’d shift to a new name.

Good news, we didn’t get an angry letter from the UFC about us using the Fight Island name while yammering about combat sports. But we have decided to drop Fight Island as our name. Really, this was inevitably going to have to happen and we just decided to rip the band aid off now rather than later.

The new name of the site, as you may notice, is Punchsport Pagoda. This is meaningful name for us for two main reasons. First, the name is from our beloved subforum for combat sports discussion on Something Awful. A web forum that is important to us because, well, that’s where we all met talking about the wacky and wild world of fake sports and professional wrestling.

Second, the name is pretty clever and unique and gives us a quick and simple name that’s relatively easy to remember. Plus the alliteration helps. In fact, you may have noticed we were already using the name for our podcast, so again that just helps too.

Nothing really else is changing. Just this name and a quick URL change which shouldn’t affect anything on the reader’s end. We just wanted to explain why it happened and why the new name works for us.

Thanks.