Is the UFC about to get a new featherweight champ?

Dricus Du Plessis does not look like a man ready to win the title at UFC 297. He also did not look like the man to KO Robert Whittaker—but he did.

Let's break down former UFC champion Alex Pereira's favorite weapon.

Israel Adesanya might be the best middleweight of all time, but if you wouldn't know it from half his fights.

BE's Connor Ruebusch breaks down the technique, style, and grit displayed by Sean O'Malley in his (unfortunately) great fight with Petr Yan.

Connor Ruebusch breaks down the game of the GOAT of women's MMA, Amanda Nunes, ahead of her UFC 289 title fight.

Ryan Garcia had exactly the wrong game to beat a southpaw like Gervonta Davis.

This Saturday, Leon Edwards takes on Kamaru Usman for the third time. Looking at this matchup, I was excited to finally revisit my old series, Gameplanning for Greatness, in which I prescribe strategies for championship fights. It would have been called something like, How Leon Edwards beats Kamaru Usman. Only one problem: that series was always geared […]

What makes a good gameplan? Is it security? Should a fighter focus his attention on avoiding whatever it is that the opponent does best? Or should he resolve to stick to his own strengths, whether or not it affords the opponent some opportunities? Last weekend, at UFC 281, middleweight champion Israel Adesanya faced his own […]

Chris Curtis was a veteran of 24 fights when he competed on season two of DWTNCS (that’s Dana White’s Dancing with the Contenders, for the uninitiated). A sharp boxer with solid defense and heavy hands, Curtis was what we in the horse-trading business call a finished product. He was good, and he was ready. Of […]

Bobby Green has been a very good fighter for a very long time. A veteran of 14 years and 42 professional fights, Green entered the cage last weekend having finally reached what appeared to be his fighting prime. The opponent was Nasrat Haqparast, a formerly hot prospect who, while stagnant, remains a durable and dangerous […]

There are certain matchups that just… deliver. When those matchups are made from a pairing of the two best fighters in a division, viewers can be forgiven for foaming at the mouth, just a little. Holloway and Volkanovski. Figueiredo and Moreno. Whether or not Colby Covington is actually the second best welterweight in the UFC […]

16 years ago, Robbie Lawler was one of the most hyped young prospects in the UFC. In 2002, he hit Tiki Ghosn so hard, his memory short-circuited. “They stopped it because of a cut,” Ghosn famously recalled, moments after his cornermen managed to scrape his corpse off the canvas. Lawler was fast, powerful, and scary. […]

Gerald Meerschaert closed as the biggest underdog on last weekend’s UFC Vegas 35/TUF Finale card. Most sportsbooks had him at about four-to-one odds to beat the Money Team’s Makhmud Muradov, some as steep as six-to-one. And there was sound reasoning to back up those lines. Muradov was on a 14-fight win streak; Meerschart was 8-6 […]

This weekend, Sean Strickland is slated to fight Uriah Hall in a contest that could see him elevated to contender, or relegated back to the ranks where he has spent the entirety of his 13-year MMA career. It’s a tantalizing thought, mostly because Strickland is such an exceptionally weird fighter. The way he stands, the […]

Leon Edwards has a problem. He is undeniably the most deserving contender in a division otherwise starved for fresh challengers. The last person to beat Edwards was the current champion, Kamaru Usman, and that was six years and nine (mostly) one-sided wins ago (plus a single one-sided no contest). It seems profoundly obvious that a […]

We all know the jab is the boxer’s most foundational weapon. It does almost everything, and everything it doesn’t do it helps to set up. But if we had to pick which punch really embodies what it means to box, I might select the humble left hook instead. Boxing (including the boxing we see in […]

Usually, for the professional MMA geek, a flash knockout is the worst possible outcome. Just like a coach studying tape (but considerably lamer and a lot less useful), we analysts make most of our reads by picking out repeating patterns. And the larger your sample size, the more repetitions you get, the easier the patterns […]

“I need you to reset, alright? Let’s start this over. Let’s start moving forward, get back on that jab. The low kick is there as well, alright? But we gotta start putting some combinations together. You gotta get him to open up, alright? Soon as he opens up the shots gonna be there for you, […]

Aljamain Sterling is a worthy contender. So worthy, his upcoming bout with bantamweight champion Petr Yan just may be the best fight the UFC could possibly make right now. It wasn’t always this way. While Yan’s path to the title was as straight as the right hand that got him there, Sterling hit more than […]

Two heavyweights are about to fight, and both of them are good, skillful strikers. Before we move ahead with the rest of this article, I’d like you to pause and reconsider that first sentence. Because when, I ask you, is the last time we were able to say that? Sometimes, heavyweight MMA feels like a […]

At the start of 2015, Kamaru Usman and Gilbert Burns were both new to the UFC. Burns was 7-0, having just notched a couple of wins in the Octagon, and Usman, 5-1 with two exhibition wins on The Ultimate Fighter, was poised to earn his first. Both had already accomplished a great deal in other […]

This weekend at UFC 257, Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier will meet in the Octagon for the second time. Discussion in the leadup has focused on what may or may not have changed in the six and a half years since the first meeting between the two knockout artists. Both men are bigger, both men […]

Max Holloway and Calvin Kattar have a lot in common, even aside from the fact that both men are scheduled to take part in this weekend’s UFC main event. They are within three years of one another in age. Both are 5’11”, tall for the featherweight division they share. Where Holloway has fought 27 times […]

UFC flyweight champion Deiveson FIgueiredo’s nickname is Deus da Guerra, which in English sounds a good deal less romantic and considerably more like something you’d find scrawled on an Affliction shirt in Olde English font: “God of War.” Kinda dull, I know. Yet no one dares groan. That’s because the moniker has so far proven […]

UPDATE: Blaydes vs. Lewis has been cancelled due to Blaydes testing positive for COVID-19, is is presumed Anthony Smith vs Devin Clark will be elevated from the Co-Main and become the new headliner for the event. First, there are a few things you need to know about Derrick Lewis. These are the characteristics that make […]

Connor Reubusch breaks down the excellent, and terrifyingly dull, Valentina Shevchenko ahead of UFC 255.

This weekend, the world will witness something it has only seen once before. Two Anderson Silvas, fighting each other. More precisely, the world is about to witness Anderson Silva 1.0 (the actual Anderson Silva) versus Anderson Silva 4.0, otherwise known as Uriah Hall. Of course, Hall is no longer the preeminent “Next Anderson Silva,” having […]

This weekend, Justin Gaethje is set to challenge Khabib Nurmagomedov for the UFC lightweight throne. It was a long road to get here. When Gaethje made his UFC debut in early 2017, his all-action style had already made him the favored cult icon of some of the saddest people on earth: hardcore MMA fans. Casual […]