SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14 FROM MADISON SQUARE GARDEN IN NEW YORK CITY
EARLY PRELIMS 2 PM PST / 5 PM EST | PRELIMS 4 PM / 7 PM | MAIN CARD 6 PM / 9 PM
This has been a long time coming.
MAIN EVENT: THE END, PART ONE
HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Ciryl Gane (14-2 (1), Champion) vs Josh Hokit (10-0, #4)
Three and a half years ago, the UFC released Francis Ngannou and history ended.
The UFC heavyweight championship is the oldest extant major championship in mixed martial arts. The lineage of numerous mixed martial arts organizations run through it, from Strikeforce to Pride to Pancrase and even the ancient days of the Lumax Cup. For all of the numerous travails of the heavyweight division, it has existed as the sport's most enduring standard; a living link not just to the origins of the sport, but the offshoots it created around the world.
At the start of this year the UFC dumped it in the trash because Francis Ngannou wanted healthcare and a boxing match.
Not long afterward, I revisited that list. I spent more time than I really should have going down the world’s Heavyweight MMA titles and figuring out just how much of the sport’s history the UFC World Heavyweight Championship encompassed. I topped out around here:
Every major American Heavyweight title before 2023, including Strikeforce, Bellator, EliteXC, the International Fight League, the World Series of Fighting and, just for fun, Tachi Palace Fights
Every major Japanese Heavyweight title, including Pride, Pancrase, DREAM, and Fighting Network RINGS
Every major UK Heavyweight title, including Cage Warriors, Cage Rage and Cage Contender (not really great at naming things, the UK)
Every major Brazilian Heavyweight title, including Jungle Fight and the International Vale Tudo Championship
Almost every major Russian Heavyweight title, including M-1 Global and AMC Fight Nights
And that doesn’t even cover the whole thing. BAMMA’s UK Heavyweight title belongs to the UFC at 205 pounds. The original, 1997 Shooto World Heavyweight Championship made its way from the big boy division in Japan to retiring in the UFC with Georges St-Pierre at Middleweight. Canada, South Africa, the 1997 Lumax Cup which was held in Japan on puzzle mats in front of a few dozen people in folding chairs--all of it flowed into the UFC.
There’s an inherent urge in branding to resist anything that makes your product feel old. Things need to be fresh and young and sexy and, most importantly, free of the expectations of history. Just as the UFC has gone out of its way to erode the idea that veteran fighters or ranked matchmaking matter half as much as hype, Meta’s LLM robots or how cheap someone’s contract happens to be, they have eroded the idea that titles, their holders or their histories hold any meaning whatsoever.
Just last week, no less than UFC Heavyweight Champion Ciryl Gane said the division is, in fact, the best it’s ever been.
So: Let’s take their word for it. Let’s divorce all of that history from the equation and evaluate how awesome things are here and now, with no expectations. Let’s look at the total, unabridged history of the New UFC Heavyweight Championship.
On January 14, 2023, Francis Ngannou announces he’s failed to come to terms on a contract with the UFC and leaves the organization as its undisputed champion. Immediately afterward the UFC announces Jon Jones, who has never fought at Heavyweight before, will face Ciryl Gane, the man Ngannou beat by a clear, unanimous decision, for the belt. Jones wins. It will be 623 days before he fights again, and when he returns to the cage he does not face interim champion and undisputed top contender Tom Aspinall, but rather, Stipe Miocic, who has not competed in more than three and a half years, when Ngannou knocked him out. Stipe is now in his forties. Jones beats him, Stipe retires, and after another half-year of waiting, rather than fight Aspinall, Jones retires too.
Tom Aspinall has been busy. He won the interim title in November of 2023 by knocking out Sergei Pavlovich on short notice, and had the dubious honor of becoming the second-ever interim Heavyweight champ to have to defend his title, beating Curtis Blaydes in the Summer of 2024. When Jones retires Aspinall is promoted to Undisputed status, and having wasted almost two full years of his life chasing Jones around, his first-ever fight as the real, honest to god champion is booked against Ciryl Gane--who, since losing to Jones, had one borderline top-ten victory and a split decision win over top contender Alexander Volkov that was decried as the worst decision of the entire year--and in October 2025, for the first time in its life, the new UFC Heavyweight Championship is defended in a match between the champion and his #1 contender.
The fight ends in a No Contest after four and a half minutes when Gane pokes Aspinall in both of his eyes at once. The UFC immediately begins to blame Tom, with Dana White using press conferences to unsubtly accuse him of trying to escape the fight because Gane was beating him up, which, assuredly, has nothing to do with Tom’s open discussion of the UFC’s attempts to sideline him or his intentions of pursuing boxing after his contract ends. While Tom seeks medical aid, Gane is rewarded for maiming the champion with an interim title fight--on the lawn of the White House, for Donald Trump’s birthday, in one of the worst propaganda moments in the history of combat sports--against Alex Pereira. Pereira, of course, is one of the sport’s biggest stars! He had also been at Middleweight just three years prior, had spent those intervening years at Light Heavyweight, and was getting a shot at the Heavyweight title despite being on a one-fight winning streak and having never competed at the weight class before.
Gane knocks him out. It wasn’t a close fight, and Gane was seemingly going to win no matter what, but he seals the TKO by elbowing a wobbled Pereira repeatedly in the back of the head. Pereira spends the subsequent half-year gradually eroding his goodwill with the fans complaining about it. Gane, three months later, is promoted to undisputed champion when Tom Aspinall vacates the title because his eyes are still so damaged that he reinjures them when he spars and multiple surgeries haven’t stopped him from being unable to get medical clearance to fight.
Over this same time period, Alexander Volkov, who had rightfully beaten Gane, is forced to defend his top contendership in three consecutive fights against difficult, lower-ranked contenders. Josh Hokit, who had risen to infamy thanks to a speech after his contract-winning performance on the Contender Series about his desire to beat up societal undesirables including trans people, is immediately given the green light by the UFC. He’s everything they want: Young, American, cheap and a raging bigot. While Volkov fights the toughest people in the division, Hokit is given the debuting Max Gimenis, who had never fought anyone with a winning record, Denzel Freeman, who had one bout in the company, Curtis Blaydes, a legitimate top ten fighter whom the UFC has been trying to get rid of for years, and Derrick Lewis, who is 41 years old, visibly depleted, and coming off a knockout loss just four and a half months prior.
We are almost four years into the New UFC Heavyweight Championship. Two out of three champions vacated the title. Two interim champions have been crowned to deal with its dysfunction. There has been only one completed defense of the undisputed championship in this brave new world--in Ciryl Gane’s greatest-ever era of the sport--and both men retired as soon as it was done.
Ciryl Gane got the championship because he gouged Tom Aspinall’s eyes so badly he couldn’t legally drive a car anymore.
Josh Hokit got the title shot because he beat up a 41 year-old on the White House lawn and called Michelle Obama a man.
This is TKO’s desired future for the entire sport. No history. No rankings. No need for credibility or continuity. If they do not like the #1 contender, as they do not like Alexander Volkov, his lack of finishes, and the Bellator-era bidding-war contract he’s been enjoying raises on for ten full years, they will keep him spinning his wheels until they can replace them with whatever Contender Series attention-getter they’ve been putting the full-court marketing press behind for a year. They will feed them a Derrick Lewis and proclaim them the only contender that matters.
Yes, we had Jon Jones and Tom Aspinall and we failed to make it happen. Yes, we called Aspinall a coward because he was brutally fouled. Yes, we gave the man who potentially ended Tom’s career his fifth championship opportunity in eight fights against someone who arguably lost a decision to Jan Błachowicz. Yes, we had Josh Hokit beat an actual contender and then immediately pumped the brakes and gave him a soft target because we already knew we were going to try to make him one of the faces of the company.
Yes, we are looking you in the eye and telling you this is the best Heavyweight fight we as the stewards of the sport of mixed martial arts can give you.
Yes, we expect you to like it.
No, we do not have the capacity to feel the slightest sense of shame.
I have no desire to analyze this as a fight. Ask me if Ciryl Gane, the best striker in the division, can catch a flailing headfirst pressure fighter like Josh Hokit; ask me if Josh Hokit, a pressure fighter, can hurt Ciryl Gane, who was once caught flatfooted by Tai Tuivasa.
Ask me if I think there’s any chance whoever wins defends against Alexander Volkov instead of the winner of next month’s Alex Pereira vs Sergei Pavlovich fight.
CIRYL GANE BY TKO and we are all bastards.
CO-MAIN EVENT: THE END, PART TWO
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Kayla Harrison (19-1, Champion) vs Amanda Nunes (23-5, NR)
Heavyweight’s decline may be the most dramatic and visible, but 2026 was above all a year of lamentation for Women’s Bantamweight.
Nineteen. That is how many fights the UFC has promoted at this weight class in 2026. Only four of them made it off the prelims. 1.7 bouts at Women’s Bantamweight per month. There were 10 Middleweight matches in October alone. I actually fucked up a match two weeks ago when the UFC hired Lucia Szabová, the best Women’s Bantamweight in the world outside of its clutches, because it legitimately did not even cross my mind that they would go to the trouble of getting her only to book her at Flyweight.
But they did. That’s what this year has been for the division. And it makes this fight feel fucking tragically underserved for just how big it really is.
Kayla Harrison might never get her flowers as one of the best women’s combat sports athletes of all time. There have only been two American Olympic gold medalists in Judo: Kayla Harrison is both of them. She was an absolute monster of the sport, she switched to mixed martial arts as soon as she was done, and her mere presence as a potential draw was one of the only things extending the life of women’s MMA above 135 pounds. She’s talked openly about her disdain for the weight cut. She’s threatened to give it up altogether on multiple occasions. The Professional Fighters League wove Women’s Lightweight out of the ether to make sure she could comfortably compete.
She did it anyway. She wanted to make it to the UFC, this was the only option left, and despite being in her mid-thirties and already tired of this bullshit, Kayla cut down to 135 pounds for the first time in her life and ran the table all over again. She strangled Holly Holm, she dominated Ketlen Vieira, and when the moment came, she damn near tore Julianna Peña’s arm off and took the sport’s canonical title home with her. One more for the trophy case. One more honor under her name.
But it wasn’t the specific honor she wanted most.
As sports age, arguments about its practitioners begin to abstract. Ali vs Tyson, Howe vs Gretzky, Jordan vs LeBron and Pele vs Messi aren’t just conversations about talent, but era. Different eras of sports with different athletic and technical standards. Different levels of popularity obscuring different levels of accomplishment. Past a certain point, everything becomes an exercise in subjectivity.
The one advantage of a sport being young is the rare ability to have an objective best. Amanda Nunes is, objectively, the best women’s mixed martial artist of all time. There’s a very simple equation on that: She’s beaten every single other woman in the fucking world who could disagree.
Every Bellator Women’s Featherweight Champion. Every UFC Women’s Bantamweight and Featherweight Champion. Every female mixed martial artist the average human being has heard of--Ronda Rousey, Cris Cyborg, Miesha Tate, Holly Holm, Julianna Peña--Nunes didn’t just beat them, but beat them by the combat sports equivalent of wadding them up and throwing them in a dumpster. Tate’s big Bantamweight title run ended when Nunes choked her out in one round. Holm’s Featherweight hopes crashed headfirst into Amanda’s shin. Peña’s time atop the sport ended when Nunes hit her so hard she scrambled around the cage like a Looney Tunes character. Rousey’s big career comeback ended when Nunes hit her twenty-seven times in forty-eight seconds.
There are, realistically, three other women who can cast any kind of bid as the best woman in the sport’s history. One of them, Megumi Fujii, fought mostly at 115 pounds and came just tragically too early to really be around for WMMA’s boom into the mainstream. One is Cris Cyborg, who had a truly incredible twenty-year run across mixed martial arts with just two losses: Her first fight ever, and a UFC title bout right in the middle of her prime that saw Nunes drop her four times in one minute, the last a knockout shot so hard Cyborg’s entire body flew like she’d been shot out of an ejector seat.
One is Valentina Shevchenko, who’s been a top fighter in women’s MMA for nearly a quarter of a century. Valentina’s one of the statistically greatest champions in the sport’s history and even that was after a decade as a champion in kickboxing and Muay Thai. She essentially is the UFC’s Women’s Flyweight division. She’s only lost four times in her mixed martial arts career, and she’s avenged all but two of those losses.
Because both of them were against Amanda Nunes.
She’s the best. Simply, undeniably, indisputably. There has never been anyone better.
Which makes it really unfortunate that she decided to come out of retirement for this.
Amanda laying down the gloves in 2023 was the feelgood story of the year. The greatest to ever do it, after a brief COVID-era spill, avenges her loss, dominates one more challenger to prove she still has gas in the tank, and rides off into the sunset with her wife and daughter on top of the sport. You treasure those endings because you do not get those endings because fighters, more often than not, don’t know how to quit.
Because they need to be the best, and no one tells you how to stop.
Kayla always wanted the Nunes fight. Even between PFL bouts, she would agitate for it. She set aside years of her career for it. Hell, Kayla, herself, could have easily retired this year. This fight was supposed to happen in January, and two weeks beforehand it got scratched when a neck injury she’d been trying to ignore got so bad she couldn’t lift her right arm. She’s got a big, fancy new scar on her throat from the cervical fusion surgery she got to keep her vertebrae from breaking altogether. It would have made MORE sense to stop doing this shit on her freshly surgically-sealed spinal cord.
But that wouldn’t let her silence the am I really the best that nags at the back of her brain when she can’t sleep.
It is, in many ways, one of the best sports stories mixed martial arts has ever told. The greatest in the world against the greatest of all time, both coming back against odds and common sense alike because they just have to know. You couldn’t ask for a bigger fight or a better reason. You couldn’t ask for two better competitors. You could not ask for something that better exemplifies what it means to be a champion.
It’s playing second fiddle to Eyepokes McFrench and Budget Shithead.
Women’s Bantamweight has an uncertain future. The UFC definitely isn’t treating it like a division they’re enormously concerned about maintaining for more than another year--two days after I wrote that sentence they, in fact, cut Norma Dumont, the #4 woman in the weight class. Kayla’s talked openly about the possibility of retiring after this fight, no matter what happens, which was already understandable even before her spine had to be reconstructed with sticks and tape. Amanda says she intends to win, stick around and defend her title at least a couple more times, but she already retired once, she turns 39 in May, and none of this is going to get any easier.
Maybe it’s the last hurrah for both of them. Maybe it’s the last hurrah for the whole division and we’ll see it peter out over the next couple of years like Women’s Featherweight did. If so, as trepidatious as this match-up makes me, I’m glad we got this one big fight out before the end of all things.
Fuck if I know what’s going to happen, though. In a vacuum I’d pick Amanda to ping Kayla’s head around with how stiffly she tends to hold it and Kayla to ragdoll Amanda a few times given how much stronger she’s going to be with clinch trips. In reality? One of these women had major spinal surgery this year and the other hasn’t fought since Israel Adesanya was still a world champion. Amanda could be a shadow of her former self, Kayla could have lost the pop that makes her throws work.
Or, rejuvenated, both could look better than ever.
I don’t know how it’ll end. I do know I’m not letting go of another chance to root for one of my favorites. AMANDA NUNES BY TKO.
MAIN CARD: NOT EVEN PRETENDING TO TRY
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Caio Borralho (18-2 (1), #5) vs Yousri Belgaroui (11-3, NR)
Remember the whole ‘this is what TKO’s vision of the sport looks like’ thesis from the main event? We’re already right back there. Caio Borralho is one of the most accomplished contenders the Middleweight division has right now. 8-1 in the UFC. Beat the stuffing out of multiple top-ranked guys, including a former title contender with a win on his record over reigning world champion Sean Strickland. Only one loss in the last eleven years, and that came against Nassourdine Imavov, a top contender the UFC has spent the last two years sidelining. Just finished beating Reinier de Ridder, who was a top ten Middleweight and is now a top ten Light Heavyweight. Caio’s in the top five. He could be fighting for the title with one more win. Hell, with Strickland unhappy with the promotion, Chimaev fighting once a year and the company trying to push Dricus du Plessis up to Light Heavyweight, there’s a solid argument to be made that Caio’s one of the three best available Middleweights in the entire goddamn company.
So he’s fighting Yousri Belgaroui. Even the shitty Meta AI robots don’t rank Yousri. He got beaten out of the Contender Series in 2023 by Marco Tulio, who’s 2-2 in the UFC. His second bite at the apple was more successful because they gave him Taiga Iwasaki, who, and I say this so, so god damned often now, is somehow 12-2 without a single victory over anyone with a winning record. As a sign of exactly the way things work now, the UFC actually gave Yousri some potentially interesting competition in his first two bouts, letting him thump the then-promising Azamat Bekoev and Mansur Abdul-Malik, and upon realizing ‘oh, shit, we actually want to push this guy’ they promptly backpedaled as hard as fucking possible by matching Yousri up against Kelvin Gastelum, on whom Yousri had 3/4 of a foot in both height and reach, and when Kelvin couldn’t make it they picked Djorden Santos, a 1-2 fighter who’d been choked out just a few months prior.
Caio just beat Reinier de Ridder. Yousri just beat Djorden Santos. Caio has victories over near-champions. Yousri has three UFC fights and his opponents combine to a truly impressive 6-7-1. But Caio goes to decisions and has at least two contract extensions under his belt, and Yousri is tall and knocks people out and is on a first-gen Contender Series deal, and nothing qualifies you for the top five like being easily affordable. Caio has a tendency to fight like he needs to prove he’s a striker so they get back to marketing him, and if he does that here he’s almost certainly going to get fucking killed. I am begging him to remember that this is, in fact, a sport and he can take Yousri down any goddamn time he wants. CAIO BORRALHO BY SUBMISSION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Uroš Medić (14-3, #12) vs Kevin Holland (29-15 (1), #15)
Speaking of beneficiaries of booking: Hi, Uroš. They programmed an entire show around you, man. They fed you a series of aging, shaky guys, several of them coming off really devastating stoppage losses, and you dispatched every single one of them, and they rewarded you by going to Serbia. I want you to really, really think about that. There was a point in the not-at-all distant past when the UFC had Francis Ngannou, Israel Adesanya and Kamaru Usman as standing world champions, and they all collectively said ‘it’d be really cool if we did an event in Africa while we’re all some of the biggest stars in the world,’ and the UFC wasn’t interested, but you, Uroš Medić, knocked out no less than Geoff Neal, and they built a bridge to Serbia for you and matched you up against Daniel Rodriguez just weeks after spending a year in prison in Mexico.
As it turns out: Not a great base for success. You won, and now you get Kevin Holland, the man who should have been king. Rangy, powerful, underratedly tricky with chokeholds, goddamn near impossible to knock out, too fun and charismatic to ignore. But he takes basically every fight the UFC sends his way, and he’s pretty open about not taking the arc of his career too seriously as opposed to fighting for paydays and funsies, and consequently he’s this generation’s Cowboy Cerrone: Too active to miss, too dangerous to ignore, too inconsistent to matter. Makes it to the bell with Mike Malott, barely loses a split decision to Jack Della Maddalena, and yet, it’s been six years since Holland managed to string together more than two back-to-back wins.
The UFC’s hoping Uroš dusts him. I perpetually underestimate Uroš, and I’m going to do it again right here. He still fights wild, he still exercises a real lack of caution, and while I’m assuredly setting myself up for disappointment, this is his first fight in years in which his opponent was neither a) over 40, b) coming off a devastating knockout, or c) taking the fight immediately after being in fucking jail. KEVIN HOLLAND BY TKO.
FLYWEIGHT: Bilal Hasan (10-0) vs Luis Gurule (11-4)
This fight is rad as hell and also just a little bit tragic. When Bilal Hasan made his company debut back in August I praised him as one of the prospects I was genuinely excited for. Fun, funny, well-rounded as hell and the rare kind of fighter who’s creative with their striking not because they’re too loose not to, but because they’ve gotten good enough at the bread-and-butter stuff that they’ve learned to experiment. He fought Nilson Rojas and flattened him in a round and a half. Absolutely lived up to the hype.
Luis Gurule has not. He came off the Contender Series in 2024 with a lot of hype as an undefeated Flyweight tank, and I get it wrong an awful lot of the time, but sometimes, I get it right.
Luis Gurule is the latest, and after watching his tape, and watching his Contender Series fight, and trying to shake off my feelings of deja vu because he just reminds me of Brian Kelleher an awful lot, I must admit: Luis Gurule is Okay. I dunno, man! He didn't wow me. He's aggressive and he pushes forward well behind charging punches but his head movement isn't great, he spent most of that DWCS appearance throwing the same 1-2 over and over while getting repeatedly taken down, and he ultimately scraped an incredibly close split decision off a guy the UFC didn't want in the first place. Nothing in his skillset gave me great hope for his future title aspirations.
It’s almost two years and six fights later, and Gurule went from an undefeated prospect to 1 for his last 5. Ode’ Osbourne knocked him out in his debut, Rei Tsuruya choked him out in his last fight this past May, and the company is officially trading him in for new models because he just has not been able to get over the hump.
Sorry, Luis. BILAL HASAN BY TKO.
PRELIMS: WONDERBOY WANDERS BY
WELTERWEIGHT: Stephen Thompson (17-9-1) vs Charles Radtke (12-5)
Ordinarily, when a fighter announces their retirement, I am happy they’re choosing to stop. I do not feel that with Stephen Thompson, who will always have unfinished business with combat sports. Back in 2016 Thompson was one of the UFC’s favorite sons, an almost-undefeated karateman who was knocking out former champions with jumping spinning back kicks. By 2017, they were done with him. Thompson got two shots at then-Welterweight champion Tyron Woodley, both were as close as fights can possibly be--the first a draw and the second a majority decision that media scorecards split straight down the middle--but they didn’t live up to the action the UFC was hoping for, and Thompson went on a shitlist he never quite got out of. We have spoken on innumerable occasions, at this point, about the UFC’s tendency to give people they like gentle matchups when they need a hand getting back on track. Bear that in mind and then read the list of Stephen Thompson’s last ten opponents:
Darren Till
Anthony Pettis
Vicente Luque
Geoff Neal
Gilbert Burns
Belal Muhammad
Kevin Holland
Shavkat Rakhmonov
Joaquin Buckley
Gabriel Bonfim
That’s an absurd list. What’s even more absurd: Thompson was still doing fine. He took rounds off Burns. He was competitive with Belal. He was en route to a decision victory over Joaquin Buckley before getting knocked out midway through the third round. According to 12 out of 14 media cards, Thompson beat Gabriel Bonfim, and the judges handing the decision to Bonfim instead was one of the biggest robberies of 2025. Stephen Thompson is 43 and weathered and still capable of being a top five Welterweight.
But we’re ending here, instead, with the UFC hoping a diminished Thompson who gets knocked out periodically will feed a win to a younger, cheaper guy. Fuck ‘em up one more time, Wonderboy. STEPHEN THOMPSON BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Drew Dober (29-15 (1)) vs Chris Duncan (15-3)
You could just slap one of those “I’m here for a good time, not a long time” bumper stickers on this and call it a day. This fight is not meant to last longer than , at most, seven minutes. These men are not distance runners. Drew Dober has lasted a very long time in this sport as a kill-or-be-killed power puncher, and I can’t help feeling bad for him because if he’d been just a few years later they would absolutely have tried to surf him to a title shot off the back of beating Michael Chandler or something. But in the prime reality he got fucked up by Renato Moicano and Manuel Torres and now he’s gonna fight other Lightweight puzzle pieces until he retires. Chris Duncan: You are one of those pieces. Remember when they gave Chris Duncan a main event? That was this year! That was, like, seven months ago! They decided to give the guy who jumps on chokes constantly a top billing against Moicano, meaning Moicano has brutally fucked up both of these men.
Both men like to jump on offense, but Dober likes punches and Duncan likes chokes except Dober rarely ever taps and Duncan almost never gets knocked out. It would be very, very funny if this results in a tentative fifteen-minute decision and I almost wanna pick it just for that. All the same: DREW DOBER BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jim Miller (39-19 (1)) vs Terrance McKinney (18-9)
I’m really, really mad I just used the Good Time vs Long Time line, because this is the platonic ideal of that fight. In one corner: Jim Miller, the longest-tenured fighter in UFC history, who enters the cage for his 48th UFC bout, which is an absolutely absurd number in an absurd career that started when the UFC didn’t even have a Lightweight championship, and now it’s 2026 and he’s still beating people like Jared Gordon who are objectively better than Paddy Pimblett. In the other: Terrance McKinney, a man who is constitutionally incapable of fighting for longer than two minutes and thirty seconds without his will to live spinning apart and leaving him too bereft to go on. Every goddamn time McKinney gets booked I write the same thing about his time limit, and every goddamn time I think ‘this will finally be the moment he breaks out and makes me look stupid,’ and every goddamn time it just happens again. McKinney just fought King Green this past July, and once again he looked like a wrecking machine who walked through one of the division’s trickiest fighters, and once again, when the finish failed to materialize by 2:30 of the first round he fell apart and Green wound up knocking him out before the bell rang.
McKinney could absolutely barnstorm Miller, just like he could barnstorm anyone, but I think Miller outlasts the gong and rush and makes him pay for it in the second round. JIM MILLER BY SUBMISSION.
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Donte Johnson (9-0) vs César Almeida (7-3)
I spend so much time complaining about fighters competing three months after getting brutally knocked out that when someone rolls into the cage a whole four months after a brutal knockout I think, well, shit, I guess that’s just fine. I’m sure those four weeks fix everything. It was weird as hell when the UFC made a big deal out of César Almeida as a big signing back in 2024 because sure, he’s only 4-0 in MMA, but back in kickboxing he BEAT ALEX PEREIRA (inbetween losing to him twice), and look! He just knocked out no less than Dylan Budka! He’s destined for the stars! Almeida’s turned out to be, like, fine, he can churn through the chaff the company keeps importing into the division but he’s proven himself incapable of getting any further, and Damian Pinas knocking him cold this past July more or less put an end to his hopes for forward momentum. Donte Johnson, somehow, is still here. I was very skeptical of his signing, as anyone should have been skeptical of a 5’8” Middleweight who exclusively fought regional competitors with bad records, but hey: He’s 3-0 in the UFC, baby! Sure, those three men were Sedriques Dumas, Cody Brundage and Eric McConico, all of whom are notable for their general lack of success, but wins are wins.
And this is the problem with the current state of the UFC’s roster-filling. If you like to try to evaluate fighters by way of comparative analysis, this match-up is an evolutionary dead end. Whether you consider Donte’s best win McConico, Dumas or Brundage is irrelevant, because McConico and Dumas both owe 1/3 of their entire UFC success to victories over--naturally--Cody Brundage. Almeida’s best win gives you a choice between the aforementioned Budka, the UFC’s favorite jobber in Ihor Potieria, or Abdul Razak Alhassan, who was, at one point, pretty solid, but in 2025 had just one win in half a decade, was staring down the wrong side of 40, and had just come off a No Contest against--you guessed it--Cody fucking Brundage. The entire thing is one big, forgettable circle. DONTE JOHNSON BY DECISION.
EARLY PRELIMS: TOP TO BOTTOM
LIGHTWEIGHT: Jared Gordon (21-9) vs Melquizael Costa (26-8)
It’s wild to think about how different Jared Gordon’s life could be right now if judges weren’t terrible. Four years ago, Gordon beat Paddy Pimblett. Clearly. Unequivocally. “Robbery” is a term that gets thrown around frequently and incorrectly (but not by me, whose judgment is perfect and infallible), but that was, bluntly, a robbery, and it threw Gordon down a path of bad luck. One fight later Gordon was drawing No Contests because King Green headbutted him to death. Two fights after that, Gordon lost another split decision the virtual entirety of the media gave to him, this time against Nasrat Haqparast. But for a small change in sheer luck, Gordon would have had one of the best winning streaks in the division. Instead it’s 2026 and he’s nearing the end of his career and he’s coming off back-to-back stoppage losses. Melquizael Costa is still at his peak. He spent two straight years running up a great streak of wins at Featherweight that culminated in taking on one of the greatest gatekeepers of all time in Dan Ige, a man who made it to a decision against Diego Lopes, and stopping him in a single round with a spinning back kick. He earned his shot at contendership the legitimate way, and unfortunately, he very legitimately lost when Arnold Allen shut him out. With his path to the top at 145 closed, Melk’s taking a shot at Lightweight instead.
Gordon’s a really solid test for him. After all, if you can beat him, you can beat Paddy fucking Pimblett. There are fighters whose styles and frames don’t seem like they’ll translate well to a higher weight class, but I’m fairly optimistic about Costa. His variety of attacks, his opportunistic submission game and his recovery should suit him at Lightweight. I don’t think his chances at the top of the division are any better here than they were at 145, but until he gets there, it’ll be fun. MELQUIZAEL COSTA BY DECISION.
WOMEN’S BANTAMWEIGHT: Macy Chiasson (10-6, #9) vs Bia Mesquita (8-0, #11)
Very few people have suffered as badly from the closure of Women’s Featherweight as Macy Chiasson, which is funny, because she abandoned the division before it abandoned her. Her 145-pound win on The Ultimate Fighter 28 (jesus christ) was followed by an instantaneous drop to Bantamweight, and then she remembered cutting weight fucking sucks and returned to Featherweight only to split two fights and watch the division die on the vine. So it was back to 135 pounds, a weight limit she’s only actually hit three times in her six fights since returning to the class, and she’s currently riding a three-fight losing streak and walking into the cage looking tired and like she just plain doesn’t want to do this anymore. Bia Mesquita is the young kid on the block--she’s only just now finishing her first year in the UFC--and she is simultaneously one of the division’s greatest hopes and seemingly inevitable car crashes. World-renowned grappler! Tapped out every one of her UFC opponents thus far! Real fun on the ground! But her striking is still so robotic and defensively porous that Melissa Mullins, who is historically not a successful striker herself, was absolutely running through Bia in boxing exchanges this past June, and had nearly flattened Bia with punches when, after wobbling and dropping her, Mullins decided that instead of making Bia stand up so she could finish her off, she would follow the multiple-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Champion to the floor. Bia armbarred her for her troubles and remains undefeated by way of Mixed Martial Artists Making Poor Decisions.
On one hand: Bia has all of the momentum and Macy has looked pretty over the sport lately. On the other: Macy has more than half a foot of size and range on her side and Bia couldn’t deal with the distance striking of a Melissa Mullins. I want Bia to win this, as much for my deep need for grapplers in the top ten as my desire to see her succeed. But I’ve lost a lot of faith after her last couple performances. MACY CHIASSON BY DECISION.
BANTAMWEIGHT: Juan Díaz (16-1-1) vs Alatengheili (18-10-2)
Juan Díaz, I now appreciate you deeply. When Juan made his promotional debut this past May I looked past him, as did the UFC. Decent record, really awesome knockout over former ONE title challenger Kwon Won-il on the Contender Series, but for all of his offensive talents he had the really bad defensive habit of keeping his head stock-still and, even in victory, ate too many punches for it. When the matchmakers booked him into the featured bout (in the Apex, so let’s not get too crazy) against Malcolm Wellmaker, the marketing superprospect who’d just suffered the first loss of his career, it wasn’t for Juan’s benefit. They saw the same opening and hoped their big knockout puncher could exploit it. I thought it was a safe bet, too! We were all wrong. Juan used just enough striking to keep Malcolm too concerned to stop Juan from grappling the shit out of him. Juan choked him out in the second round, and having beaten the guy he was supposed to lose to, he has now gone from featured bout to booked on the early prelims fighting quite possibly the worst ratio of toughness to name value the Bantamweight division has to offer. Alatengheili just shows up and ruins someone’s day once a year, at this point. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses, but no one has an easy night against him. He’s too well-rounded, he’s too well-conditioned and he hasn’t been stopped in almost a damn decade.
Juan still has the chops to outgrapple him, but it’s gonna be tough, and if he doesn’t move or cover up that head Alatengheili’s gonna make him pay for it eventually. JUAN DÍAZ BY DECISION.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Evan Elder (10-2) vs Samuel Sanches (11-1)
Poor Evan Elder. It’s like he has to start over every single year. Got brought on as a short-notice fighter on the absurdly cursed Andrade/Lemos card back in 2022, went from undefeated to dropping two in a row, finally won a UFC fight! Went on the shelf for a year. Got a really favorable matchup against the particularly unfortunate Darrius Flowers and, hey, Elder choked him out! Wound up back on the shelf for another year. Finally made it back to the cage in early 2025 and beat brand-new prospect Gauge Young! Busted his leg and went right back to the goddamn shelf for a year and a half. The UFC is hedging their bets with him and booking him against yet another brand new guy, and for once, I don’t really blame them. For all of the shit I give them about picking and choosing who they invest in, being especially picky about a guy who only makes it to the cage once per year, if even that, is sensible, and sticking him on perpetual New Guy duty is a good use of him. The 2026 model of New Guy is Samuel Sanches, and after watching the tape, he looks an awful lot like most of the New Guys we talk about these days. Young, fast, really good at throwing combinations on people who aren’t fighting back, and possessed of exactly the amount of defensive tactics you’d expect from someone who was fighting in the record-padding circuit* up until he hit the Contender Series.
I look forward to Evan teaching him a lesson about well-rounded fighting and then I look forward to seeing Evan again in mid-2027. EVAN ELDER BY DECISION.
*Fun fact: The card he had his last pre-DWCS fight on was designed to rehabilitate a former DWCS hopeful named Mario Piazzon, who was 10-0 but didn’t get his contract because he won his DWCS fight by DQ, which means he isn’t a fucking fighter, I guess. He was supposed to crush Alex “Marmaduke” Junius, who was 15-38 with a bunch of mysteriously convenient first-round losses. Marmaduke knocked Piazzon out in two minutes. God bless this idiot sport.