Alex Pereira stood with his back to the fence inside the UFC’s Octagon at Madison Square Garden. It was right before the start of the fifth and final round of a title fight in front of a sellout crowd. Pereira looked across the cage at his opponent, then-UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya, and the Brazilian mouthed the words “ready to kill” in Portuguese.
During that fight week in New York last November, Pereira and his team had watched Adesanya’s 2019 fight with Kelvin Gastelum. Before coming out for the fifth round of that bout, Adesanya said to himself, “I’m ready to die.” Pereira’s coach Plinio Cruz said Pereira and his posse would joke about the statement in the days leading up to the bout.
No one was laughing, though, about Pereira’s utterance in apparent response on fight night.
“I think that was him talking to his inner self,” Cruz told ESPN. “Almost like a mantra. Like, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s go. I gotta do it now.’ That’s what I believe. Those times in our lives, sometimes you gotta talk to yourself.”
Pereira, down on the scorecards, would finish Adesanya via TKO with punches two minutes into Round 5 to win the UFC middleweight title.
It was not the only recent title fight that ended with the challenger winning via stoppage in the final two rounds — known as the championship rounds. Three months earlier, Leon Edwards shocked then-UFC welterweight champ Kamaru Usman via head kick knockout with about a minute left in their five-round fight.
Both Usman and Adesanya were high on MMA’s pound-for-pound list — longtime, dominant champions. Last month, Alexa Grasso became the third challenger to dethrone a Hall of Fame-caliber champion via finish in the championship rounds. Grasso stunningly beat Valentina Shevchenko to win the UFC women’s flyweight champion with a rear-naked choke submission in the fourth.
UFC champions being finished in the late rounds is a rare occurrence. That there has been three such instances in seven months is unprecedented. Between 1997 and 2021, there were only five UFC title changes via stoppage in the fourth or fifth rounds — an average of one every five years, according to ESPN Stats & Information research. In the past 10 months, there have been four, including Jiri Prochazka’s UFC light heavyweight title victory over Glover Teixeira by submission in the fifth round last June.
Fighters and coaches are split on if this is indicative of a trend and, if it is, what it means. Is this the ushering in of a new generation of MMA or maybe an example of the evolution of coaching and film breakdown in the sport? Perhaps, it’s merely a coincidence — three isolated instances — and the course will be corrected when Pereira and Adesanya compete in a rematch Saturday in the main event of UFC 287 in Miami.
What most in the mixed martial arts community do agree on is that the era of dominant, yearslong championship reigns and lengthy winning streaks — Usman had won 15 straight when Edwards KO’d him — is likely over.
“Like Leon said, ‘The belt belongs to nobody,'” Edwards’ coach Dave Lovell said. “And that has been proven again. And no doubt, in fights to come you’re going to be seeing more of this.”
Lovell’s Rocky-esque pep talk to Edwards in the corner in between the fourth and fifth rounds at UFC 278 last August has become part of MMA lore. Lovell told Edwards to stop feeling sorry for himself. He knew his fighter was capable of more than just coasting to a decision loss.
Video of the speech went viral in the aftermath of Edwards’ come-from-behind knockout victory. Another video, one perhaps even more vital to the win, also circulated, though not as widely.
In that clip, Lovell and coach Henry Clemenson are looking at video of Usman and noticing his tendency to dip to his head to the right during striking exchanges. So, at the behest of his team, Edwards started working on a counter to that: a left head kick set up by feinting a jab. That exact technique is the one that landed in the fifth round, knocking Usman out cold. Edwards won the rematch last month at UFC 286 by majority decision.
In the days after Grasso won, her team released video of her drilling a back take as a counter to Shevchenko’s spinning back kick. Her coach (and uncle), Francisco Grasso, saw that hole in Shevchenko’s game and they worked on capitalizing on it. Alexa drilled the sequence her entire training camp, mostly with training partner Diego Lopes. In the fourth round, Shevchenko threw that kick, Alexa dodged it and quickly jumped on Shevchenko’s back. Seconds later, she locked in a choke and Shevchenko tapped out.
“Exactly the moment I saw she was going for that spinning kick, I said, ‘OK, this is the moment you were training for,'” Alexa Grasso told ESPN. … “When you do something thousands and thousands and thousands of times, it’s natural.”
Xtreme Couture coach Eric Nicksick said that before his fighter Francis Ngannou challenged for the UFC heavyweight title for a second time against Stipe Miocic, he watched hours of tape of Miocic’s first bout with Ngannou and his trilogy with Daniel Cormier. Several coaches and fighters said watching that much film was not prevalent in MMA even five years ago. There is much more access to fight video and instructional videos online now more than ever, such as UFC Hall of Famer Daniel Cormier’s “Detail” program on ESPN+.
“The sport has evolved really to tape study and trends,” Nicksick said. “You sit down and you listen to [former UFC double champion and coach] Henry Cejudo and he’s doing such a great job breaking down tape study [on his YouTube channel]. The champions at the highest level are looking at one little hole, one little thing where they can go, ‘OK, I can take advantage of this with my skill set.’ That’s what you look for. Same thing in football. If I can find a hole in their defense and I can exploit that hole with my best player, then I’m going to take advantage of that over and over and over again.”
Long-term champions such as Usman, Adesanya and Shevchenko have the disadvantage of having a copious amount of footage on them out there. Usman had five successful title defenses and three of them went into the fifth round. In Adesanya’s five successful title defenses, four went to decision. Shevchenko went to the championship rounds four times over her seven title defenses. While all have had growth in their games, such as when the kickboxer Adesanya used his wrestling against Pereira, opponents aren’t likely to be surprised.
While those titleholders are taking on challenger after challenger, the other contenders in the division are already eyeing them – and in some cases, training for them well before a potential matchup. Champs in the pound-for-pound rankings have targets on their backs more than most.
“I’m always going to watch the champion,” UFC welterweight contender Belal Muhammad said. “I’m always going to look and see what I would need to do to adjust to beat the guy. I think most fighters do that. … Especially when Usman was the guy, I was like, ‘I want to be the one to beat him. I want to be the one to knock him off his pedestal.'”
Usman, Adesanya and Shevchenko might end up being the last of a dying breed, fighters and coaches said. Amanda Nunes, the most accomplished fighter of all time in women’s MMA, might have started the recent trend, getting choked out by Julianna Peña in December 2021 after five successful title defenses. In 2022, seven UFC champions lost their belts, the second most in a calendar year and the most since 2016 (9), per ESPN Stats & Information research.
The UFC is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2023. Compared to other major sports, MMA is still an infant. High-level fights look completely different now than they did even just 10 years ago, with more well-rounded competitors who grew up training in MMA as a whole rather than in individual disciplines, like in the sport’s early years. Fighters such as 18-year-old uberprospect Raul Rosas Jr. are coming into the UFC having only lived in a world where MMA was a viable path for athletes. The generations of fighters who came before did not.
That the defeats of Adesanya, Usman and Shevchenko were so shocking says as much about them as it does about the current state of the top level of the sport.
“What needs to be highlighted is these champions are so dominant that they’ve been able to maintain the top positions in their divisions in the most competitive environment ever,” Fortis MMA head coach Sayif Saud said. “MMA is three times more competitive than it was three years ago. I think that’s a very fair thing to say. And with MMA expanding globally and with the ESPN deal, there [are] shows every week with that many more combatants, that many more gyms, that many more eyes, that many more people. It just really speaks to these three’s ability to hold it through all of that, how great these three are. And in reality, I think we’ll see a lot higher turnover from here on out when it comes to champions.”
Another possibility, some fighters and coaches said, is that those three late-round title losses were simply a coincidence and not any kind of pattern. Shevchenko had shown weaknesses in previous fights, and maybe the competition was catching up to her. The situation with Adesanya and Pereira is unique, because Pereira had already beaten Adesanya twice in kickboxing, including once by knockout. Usman and Edwards had already fought before, too, in the UFC, though seven years prior.
“There’s always these ebbs and flows and stuff like that,” Fight Ready MMA coach Santino DeFranco said. “Are we going to continue to see this? Probably not. But I think what happens eventually is these long-term champions fall from grace. I think really what it’s coming down to is the champions don’t have challengers really up to par with them. … I think it’s just the changing of the guard.”
UFC light heavyweight contender Anthony Smith, who fought into the championship rounds with Jon Jones in a title fight in 2019, chalks it all up to happenstance and three very different fights. Edwards beating Usman in the rematch by decision, Smith said, fortifies the argument that the two men might be on different career trajectories.
The results of Pereira vs. Adesanya on Saturday and the inevitable rematch between Grasso and Shevchenko will add to the data. But Smith does agree that feats such as Anderson Silva’s seven-year reign with the UFC middleweight title and the dominance of titleholders Georges St-Pierre and Jose Aldo are things of the past.
Smith, 34, could put himself close to a title shot with a win over Johnny Walker on May 13. But if he earns that chance and wins the title, Smith said he’s not sure how long he’d be able to hang onto the belt. The level of competition has gotten so high in the UFC, he said, that many fighters don’t get a championship until the back end of their primes.
“I do think the age thing is a problem,” Smith said. “By the time you f—ing wade through the fire to get to the title, you’re already starting to slow down. Maybe you got two or three really good ones left in you at that level.”
Maybe Pereira will end up being an example of that. He has had only eight pro MMA fights, but he’s 35 years old — the same age as Usman and Shevchenko — after the rigors of more than 40 pro kickboxing matches over an eight-year career.
Pereira’s team, of course, does not think that will be the case. They expect, like Edwards did, to win the rematch this weekend. But even if he loses, it doesn’t mean what has transpired over the last seven months is some kind of fluke.
“The game has been evolving in general,” Cruz said. “The level of the fights, the level of coaching – like everybody evolves together. The fact that we’ve been fighting Israel for so many times makes not only our camp better, but I believe their camp better, too. Because, you know, times of rivalry is when mankind evolves the most.”