While this weekend gave UFC fans plenty to talk about and look forward to, the UFC 287 main event left us with one important question: Where does Israel Adesanya’s middleweight championship win over Alex Pereira place him among the top pound-for-pound fighters?
Beyond last weekend’s card, two upcoming fight announcements also sparked questions such as: What will Adesanya’s teammate, UFC men’s featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski, do after his upcoming title fight against interim champ Yair Rodriguez?
And what about the announcement of a trilogy bout between double champ Amanda Nunes and former women’s bantamweight champ Julianna Peña? Could we be looking at the greatest rivalry in the history of women’s MMA?
Would a win over Max Holloway mean that Arnold Allen could be next in line for a featherweight title shot?
ESPNs panel of Brett Okamoto, Marc Raimondi and Jeff Wagenheim sorts out what’s real and what’s not following the UFC’s pay-per-view in Miami, and each offers the next PPV event he wants to see booked.
Real or not: Israel Adesanya is a top-5 P4P fighter
Raimondi: Pretty clearly real. Adesanya has now avenged the defeat against Pereira, the only man who ever knocked him out and the only man who ever beat him at middleweight. It’s tough for champions who lost their titles to win an immediate rematch. It’s happened only four times out of 15 such attempts in UFC history, and Adesanya was the latest Saturday night at UFC 287. It was the way Adesanya did it, too. He knocked Pereira out in the second round in violent fashion. The amount of mental strength to beat a man who had defeated him three times previously (twice in kickboxing, once in MMA), including two knockouts, is absolutely off the charts.
