UFC 254: The Scorecard

Oh, how I love a good story. And there aren’t many better than the one being written by flyweight newcomer Miranda Maverick. A full-time student pursuing her PhD while chasing UFC gold, the 23-year-old has a tale mainstream media will jump on…if she can fight. And with wins over three UFC vets (Pearl Gonzalez, DeAnna Bennett, Shanna Young) before she even stepped into the Octagon for the first time, plus a first-round stoppage of Liana Jojua in her debut on Fight Island, it’s clear that she can fight. Now it’s time to see how far she can take this, and by the looks of it, Maverick may be going pretty far in the UFC.

Patience. It’s so rare in the fight game, but so essential. And when fighters who made their name being impatient learn it, special things can happen. Look at Justin Gaethje for example. His ability to pull it back when he needed to got him an interim lightweight title and a UFC 254 main event. And now Robert Whittaker may have gotten himself a shot at regaining his middleweight title from Israel Adesanya after a pair of patient and impressive wins over Darren Till and Jared Cannonier. It’s this evolution – coupled with a brief break from the fight game after his loss to Adesanya – that could make the former champ even more dangerous than he was before.

It wasn’t the end we expected to the career of Khabib Nurmagomedov, but maybe we should have seen it coming, simply because “The Eagle” has never done things in a conventional fashion. The Dagestan native always marched to the beat of his own drum, and that individuality extended to his work inside the Octagon, where the game plan always remained the same. There were no tweaks to his attack to prepare for certain opponents, no curveballs to throw his foes off. Nurmagomedov told you what was coming and he dared you to stop it. And no one ever did. It’s why today, fresh from a submission win over Justin Gaethje that lifted his perfect record to 29-0, the debates aren’t about where he stands in today’s MMA world after his retirement, but where he stands all-time. Sure, you want to see the great ones tested, show the ability to roar back from adversity and engage is fights that go down in the books as all-time classics. But what of the fighters so good that they never got the opportunity to pull out a last-minute win or rise from the canvas in an all-out brawl to secure a victory? Nurmagomedov was that guy, and if you want to call him the best of all-time, you have a strong case, depending on what you want to see out of your MMA heroes. But even if you don’t consider him the greatest to ever put on the gloves, you have to admit he’s in the top five at the very least. That’s quite a legacy to leave, but maybe more important is that this could be one of the rare MMA retirements to stick, and in keeping a promise to his mother, he’s certainly made his late father proud.