The UFC Don't Make Champs Like They Used To

If every title fight left on the schedule actually happens this year, and we all know that is a huge if, the UFC will finish 2026 with 13 undisputed championship fights. That is the fewest in a calendar year since 2012. By the end of 2012, the UFC only had 9 belts. Today, they have 11. And between the 11 champions, they've only got 5 successful title defenses. 5. Total. Joshua Van has 2. Volk, Islam, and Mackenzie Dern each have 1. And the other 7 champions have 0. 0 defenses. Go back to January 2014, and there were eight reigning champs. Between those eight, they had 21 defenses. And that is without GSP, who vacated the belt in December of 2013. So, I mean, it's settled. Champions used to defend their belts. They used to fight more often. The belts used to get passed from one great to the next instead of getting vacated all the time. These champions today are soft. That's how it feels, right? Well, as fans, we are really, really good at romanticizing the past. And, you know, maybe our nostalgia glasses are wrong. Maybe champions have always been this way. So let's find out. Every era, every long reign, every vacancy, every interim belt, we're going to figure out whether the legacy champion is really dying or if it's just taken a different form. And if it turns out nothing actually has changed, then we got to figure out why we think it did. I'm Tommy from MMA on Point. And make sure you check out the official UFC gear through our link in the description below using code .10 for 10% off all products and rep your favorite fighters with the UFC store. So, is the era of the legacy UFC champion over? First though, what's a legacy champion? What's that mean? Well, there's no actual definition, I don't know what you were expecting, so I get to make one up, because this is my video, and my criteria is very simple. A legacy champion is someone who won a belt in a division, a single division, and tried to defend it at least four times. Three successful defenses and a loss on the fourth? That counts. A draw somewhere in the middle there? That counts too, because the belt stayed with them. What doesn't count is defenses spread across two different belts, or interim defenses, or one-off superfights. It has to be one belt, one division, one reign, which is a very high bar, I know. Under these rules, for instance, Khabib doesn't make the list. But I would argue that a lot of people felt like his reign was too short to be considered amongst the all-time greats of the sport, which I disagree. But I do think it makes sense, if we're talking legacy champions, to make the cut at four. Three is just not enough, so Khabib is not a legacy champion. Now, let's break this down by era. We'll go with three different groups here. The early days, up to 2005, the golden era from 2006 to 2015, and then everything from 2016 to right now. First up, the wicked wild wild west, Jim West, Desperado. Weight classes didn't even exist in the UFC until 1997. Before that, it was tournaments, and whoever survived the night got a big novelty check. So, the first real title era after those tournaments is short and a whole ass mess, but it still gave us five legacy champions by our rules. Frank Shamrock won the light heavyweight title, back then it was still called the middleweight, and defended it four times. Then he walked away from the UFC in 1999. Pat Miletich held the welterweight title, then called lightweight for four defenses, even though all of his opponents were ridiculously bad. Oh, brother, this guy's... Tito Ortiz defended the light heavyweight belt five times over three and a half years. Matt Hughes did five straight at welterweight before BJ Penn took his gold from him. And Chuck Liddell won the light heavyweight belt in 2005 and defended it four times before Rampage flattened him in 2007. And their activity was insane. Tito fought for the title four times in ten months. From December 2000 to September 2001, Hughes made five defenses in about 20 months. These guys were basically fighting every few months, belt on the line every single time. The standard was set by these guys. But you also have to remember that there weren't that many titles. And you had to headline the cards with something, and the talent pool was way smaller. Not to mention, belts were constantly being left behind, either due to contract disputes or outside-the-cage actions. Most of this era, none of you were watching, and that's totally fine. I don't blame you. Nobody blames you. I'm an old man who just happened to fall into this cage-fighting trap at a very young age. So to most of you, this first era is ancient history. It might as well have been written on scrolls. For most of you, back in the day is the second era, the golden era. The UFC's real peak period, essentially from boom to the end of the Fertittas. 2006-2015, you ready for this? 12 legacy reigns started in this 10-year window. Anderson Silva, 10 straight defenses at middleweight from 2006-2013. Georges St. Pierre, 9 at welterweight before he vacated in 2013. Jon Jones, 8 at light heavyweight before he got stripped in 2015. Demetrius Johnson, 11 at flyweight. Jose Aldo, 7 at featherweight, more if you count the WEC. Ronda Rousey, 6 at bantamweight. Joanna Jędrzejczyk, 5 at strawweight. Then the guys who got right to the bar. BJ Penn, Frankie Edgar, Benson Henderson, Chris Weidman, Daniel Cormier. When you break it all down during this golden era, the average legacy reign saw almost 6 successful defenses. And it saw the only 2 double-digit reigns in UFC history, Silva and DJ. Nobody before or since has ever reached 8. And they were active. Jones fought for the title 3 times in 2011 alone. DJ defended three times in 2013. GSP was doing two title fights a year like clockwork until injuries started acting up. These dudes were obsessed with keeping and defending their titles. When DJ broke Silva's record at UFC 216 in 2017, he basically said the best part was that people would stop putting Silva's name next to his. Now my name is like, they're like, oh, who has the longest reign, you know, title defense is Demetrius Johnson does. And the idea of super fights was so rare. For years, people would whisper here and there about GSP and Silva, and I think GSP later said that there was one legitimate attempt at that, but that was it. I'll do it, but catch weight and drug tests, no problem. So the UFC never wanted to do it. Dude, superfights to us were like Chuck vs. Vanny, Silva vs. Henderson, Brock Lesnar vs. Fedor, two guys in the same division from different promotions, basically. GSP vs. Penn is really the only time in that period you can look at something similar to the idea of a super fight as we would later talk about it in the UFC, where Penn, an active champion, was fighting for a championship in another division. But as prestigious as the very best during this period were, the Golden Era wasn't all dynasties. Light heavyweight between 2007 and 2011 was a revolving door. Rampage, Forrest Griffin, Rashad Evans, Lyoto Machida, Shogun Rua, five champions in under four years. And not one of them made more than a single defense. Interim belts were everywhere, too. Three at heavyweight between 2008 and 2010. The division was a mess. So even the peak had churn. It just had a handful of all-timer outliers sitting on top. And then Conor McGregor happened. The biggest boom in the history of the sport came from him. 2016 was Conor's peak. In terms of overall popularity, probably the UFC's peak as well. And a starting point for the final era. The one that leads all the way to right now. So if legacy champions are dead, this is where the data is going to show a chalk mark outline. Now, I think most of you would agree that our criteria and our conclusion about what a legacy champion is, in terms of the number of title fights and defenses needed, it's a pretty reasonable cutoff. And like I said earlier, the fact that Khabib doesn't qualify, I think shows that this isn't a generous criteria. And I reiterate that point right now because the current era, the era that Conor McGregor, Mr. ------- Champ Champ himself defined, actually has more legacy reigns than the other two eras. There's 13. Stipe Miocic at heavyweight, the first heavyweight in UFC history to hit three defenses. Tyron Woodley, Amanda Nunes, Max Holloway, Valentina Shevchenko, Kamaru Usman, Israel Adesanya, Alexander Volkanovsky, Aljamain Sterling, Islam Makhachev, Alexandre Pantoja, Alex Pereira at light heavyweight, and Merab Dvalishvili. Holy ----, right? I said the same thing. So on paper, just with the arbitrary legacy champion criteria I made up, It looks like we're all wrong. We were all just made fools of. I got you. Don't you feel stupid? Don't you feel like an idiot? Hold on now. Don't feel dumb. That's not the conclusion. You're not an idiot. At the start, I hinted that maybe the form of these legacies has changed. And I think that is very much the case. See, the Golden Era averaged almost six defenses per legacy reign. This era averages just over four. The longest reign of the whole decade is Valentina's with seven. And she's in one of the weaker divisions in the whole sport. The highest a male champion has scored was five. That's actually tied between Izzy, Kamaru Usman, and good ol' Alexander Volkanovski's first reign. It's also massively back-end loaded. Every single five-defense reign in this era started between 2016 and 2019. Nunes, Usman, Adesanya, Volk, Valentina, all of them. Since the start of 2020, nobody who's won a UFC title has made it to five defenses. Not one. The best anyone's managed is four. Islam at lightweight and Pantoja at flyweight. Everybody else either stalled at 3, vacated, or lost before they got going. So by the criteria we laid out, Legacy Champions very much still exist, but it is absolutely not the same as that Golden Era. The bar of 3 or 4 defenses is getting cleared, but 6, 8, 10 defenses? Those are not happening. Those reigns are gone completely, and because those types of reigns defined the greatest champions ever, it looks like the Legacy Champions of today are barely doing anything. Anderson Silva and GSP defined that tough boom to Endeavor Era, and so they were the bar. They were what everybody wanted to be. In the 2016 starting era, the biggest star in the sport, Conor McGregor, held two belts at the same time and never defended either one of them. He got stripped of both, and it didn't hurt him one bit. He became the richest fighter in the sport's history. He became a household name. Every fighter on the roster watched that happen. He became the new standard. Basically, this is all Conor McGregor's fault, but not really. I mean, his influence is undeniable, of course, but as I just pointed out, there have been a bunch of champs that have built legacies since he hoisted those two titles up to the sky at MSG. But the thing that we're all thinking about, the problem of a lack of legacy champions, the stuff all of us fans see, is absolutely happening. but it's been more so since 2021 than 2016, and even more so than that in the last 20 months or so. Champions are not holding onto these belts very long anymore. Of the 11 champions we have right now, 9 have held their belt for less than a year. 9, that's almost all of them. Only Volkanovski and Kayla Harrison have been champion for more than 12 months, and Kayla hasn't even fought since June of last year. We're about to ring in 2027. Then there's all these vacant titles. Between February of 2025 and September of 2026, seven belts were given up without being lost in the cage. Seven belts in 20 months. Two of the nine undisputed title fights this year were for belts nobody was holding. We've also had interim belts that never actually got unified. Look at heavyweight. Tom Aspinall won the interim title in November of 2023. He never got to fight Jon Jones. Aspinall was just promoted after Jones retired in 2025. And then, of course, his first defense ended up being a no contest. against Gunn who poked his eyes out and he's never fought again then Ciryl Gane won the interim belt at the White House so when Aspinall vacated because of him Gane was promoted Josh ******* Hoket might be the first heavyweight champion since 2021 to actually win the heavyweight title from a champion but yeah two heavyweight champions in a row who became undisputed without beating the man holding the belt three of you count Jones not fighting in Gane which i am and i do hey at least Gaethje did it the right way. He won the interim lightweight title in January and then beat Topuria in June to unify. So at least one time, an interim title worked as it should. And then the other thing is that none of these champions are fighting very often right now. Jones won the heavyweight title in March 2023 and made one defense before retiring 27 months later. I just mentioned Kayla Harrison. Her first defense will be after 17 months from winning the title. Piotr Jan is fighting this week, but that is after 10 plus months of inactivity due to injury. Compare Compare that to Jones in 2011 or DJ in 2013, both fighting for the belt three times in a single year. Not to mention champions keep chasing other belts. In about a year, four reigning champions gave up their belts to chase a title in another division. Topuria left featherweight after one defense. Islam left lightweight after four. Zhang left strawweight after three. Pereira left light heavyweight right after winning it back. Then there is the freak outlier that is Merab Dvalishvili, who fought for the bantamweight title four times in 2025, which is a record and one that will probably never be broken because fighting for gold more than once a quarter is just insane. Marab won three of those fights and then lost the fourth to Pyotr Yan in December, of course. So the most active champion of this whole era, the one doing exactly what fans say they want, came up short on his fourth one. And afterwards, he admitted that taking the Yan fight so quickly was a mistake. My guess is, though, had he won, he'd have fought first thing in 2026 and just kept up this insane pace forever because he's a lunatic. dick. If he wins this weekend, he's just gonna start that ---- right back up, you watch. But anyway, so yes, in the last five years, the complaints about a lack of legacy champions is legit. It's definitely not just people misremembering the good old days. There's short reigns, vacated belts, vacant title fights, interim champs that skip the champion, long layoffs, and champions jumping around all over the ******* place. So why is this happening? Why now in the last five years? I think it's a few things compounding, really. The first thing is that the money is not in legacy reigns. The guy who got the most money ever in this whole sport held two belts, had zero defenses, and this is where I really do blame Conor, but really only because why would anybody be chasing anything but what that guy had? And even though he's irrelevant in 2026, his influence on what's important in the sport absolutely is not. He taught every fighter on the roster that in the modern UFC, the big money isn't in your fourth defense against the number three contender it's in the super fights, second belts, massive events, red panties it's a celebration and when you hit double champ status which you can literally do in two fights now you're in rare air you're being mentioned with Conor with BJ with Randy with DC with JBJ with Nunes all the greatest of the great and all you had to do was win two fights that's like a insta legacy Pantoja made 650k at UFC 331 at least disclosed now that's a **** ton of money but Conor wipes his ass with that. And while nobody is ever gonna reach that level again, most likely, everybody wants to. Nobody gets punched in the head for a living in a cage and knows that down the line, they're gonna have to pay the piper for all that damage and not wanna make the most money possible for the least fights possible. Unless you're Marab, then you're just insane. But Conor has been the blueprint for a decade. So of course, you're going to see every champion and their mother ask for the next champion up the second they win their first title. I want to take a year off the sport and box two, goddammit. The second thing causing all this, you could argue the scale. In 2022, Charles Oliveira missed weight by half a pound for his second lightweight title defense. Now, it was total bullshit, and I stand by that, but that's neither here nor there. He became the first champion in UFC history to lose his belt on the scale. He still went out there and took Justin Gaethje out, but the belt was gone. Now, that was an isolated problem, but there's another, and this is another thing Conor is probably guilty of influencing a lot of. Massive, massive cuts. Ilia Topuria left featherweight just because the cut got too hard. He said that when you're that drained, they could offer you bags of money and cars and you wouldn't care you'd trade anything for a glass of water. Beautifully said, get that man a rose. His manager claims that Topuria was cutting up to 50 pounds every camp, which is insane. Islam Makhachev cited the same reason for his move up. Now, cutting weight and mixed martial arts is a whole different problem, of course, but it's always been a massive advantage if you do it extremely enough. It seems like fighters are only getting better at it all the time. The only downside is that you're destroying your body and it's just not possible to maintain. I mean, Topuria said it. Do you want a Bugatti? Or do you want a ******* Gatorade? Another reason is that nobody can stay healthy. You'd think that with the PI and all the crazy science they're doing over there for recovery and everything else, this big, massive, free, open resource for all these fighters with ******* hyperbolic time chambers and ----, that every fighter would just be healthy as possible at all times. But I don't see everybody staying any healthier, do you? Look at this year. Aspinall's eye ended his reign. Piotr Jan needed back surgery. Valentina vacated with an injury. Pantoja dislocated his elbow in 26 seconds against Joshie. Kayla broke her neck. What the hell is going on? We need to double the PI, or maybe everybody needs to actually start going there for everything, apparently. Another thing I don't think a lot of people think about from this era compared to the golden age is that competition has gotten way stiffer. I know how we all talk about how the UFC will just let anybody into the promotion these days, but that problem's more so on the lower end of the card. There are straight-up killers as you get closer to the top all over the place, and the sport has expanded so much, and the talent pool has come with it. At the start of 2014, the UFC had eight reigning champions. Seven were American, and one was Brazilian. Two countries. Today, there's 11 champions from seven different countries. There's no safety anymore. It feels like there's more parity in the UFC than ever. I mean, Justin Gaethje beating Ilya Topuria has to be the greatest example. That is insane. That's not supposed to happen. Strickland keeps upsetting everybody all the damn time. Van beat Pan. Ian Garry lasted five rounds with Islam. It's hard as hell to keep these belts these days. There are no easy baskets But I think the biggest thing really is that we're comparing everyone to really just a few complete outliers. It is our fault We're the ones who are ruining everything. Oh the good old days Silva GSP and Jones. That's nostalgia glasses ******* with us We don't think about the five light heavyweight champions in four years or heavyweight changing hands every goddamn weekend Those were all part of the golden era, too We just forgot about them. Not to mention there's more belts than ever. Five divisions in 2001, 11 active now. And more belts means each title fight feels a little bit less special. Your attention gets split across more champions. Not to mention there's more fighters in general. You know, I have pointed out plenty of times that there are the same amount of cards right now with the same amount of fights as there's been like for forever now. There's not more cards, but there is a lot more fighters. There is a massive roster now compared to the old days when you knew every single dude on every single prelim. Don't sit there and tell me that you know Mateus Marais is on the prelims this weekend. You don't know who that is, and I know you don't know who that is, because he isn't fighting on the prelims this weekend. I just lied to you. He's only had one pro fight. I just picked him at random from Tapology. But you didn't know that. You thought this guy was fighting for the UFC. So I think all those reasons combined are contributing to what's going on right now. It's not a one-thing kind of thing. But yeah, I mean, just straight-up numbers looking at the eras, There's definitely a lot of champions that are hitting that 3 or 4 defense mark pretty much at the exact same rate as any other. What is gone is the deep runs. 7, 8 defenses in a row. But for all the reasons I just laid out, that's becoming harder and harder both logistically and in terms of competition. I would love to see those all-time greats thrown into today's environment. I imagine, with the exception of Jon Jones, who only ever kept losing his title to just ******* everything up in his entire life, they'd probably all end up right around the greatest champions of this era. I doubt we'd see these massive runs, 10 and 11 defenses. The sport is just different now. So I think like all sports, as the game evolves, you kind of have to look at things a bit differently. You can't look at NFL players who were doing 14-game seasons and compare them to the guys playing 18 games now. That's such a massive jump. Plus preseason, that's so much more football. Rules change, the meta changes. You really can't compare eras in mixed martial arts because we're so young. we're still very much having these rapid growth spurts, even more so than more established sports, which are even still growing too. If you're old like me, go ask a 20-year-old what they think of Michael Jordan, I promise, you will feel like ----. So the legacy, it just means different things now. Islam is dominating two divisions, Marab did four title fights in one year, Volk's still defending the belt at 38. There's still amazing feats happening all the time. They're just happening in a different way than the most revered champions of the era many of us started watching this sport. And so naturally, we look at those fighters as the greatest. And when we compare these guys to Anderson, to GSP, to Jones, to DJ, there is no comparison because there really can't be. Those guys are not the norm. They were freaks of their own time. So what I'm really trying to say is the real legacy champions are the friends we made along the way. And while you can't compare eras, this era is doing just fine, just in a different way than the previous one. Hey, I want to give a big old thanks to Oven, our social media manager. he wrote this video go engage with our social media and tell him you liked the script also a massive thanks to max randall of course for the edit fantastic work sir a big shout to our channel members love you guys thank you for all the support guys hit the join button you become a member you get exclusive content highly recommended like and subscribe because i do this all the time and there will be more videos leave a comment about what you think of legacy champions what you think of the current era love reading them and thank you so much for watching guys have a fantastic day Thank you.