‘The belt belongs to nobody’ — Why three dominant UFC champs were dethroned in

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?…