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Gerald Meerschaert etched his name in the UFC history books on Saturday by submitting Edmen Shahbazyan with a nasty arm-triangle choke to earn his 12th finish in the octagon.

Not only did the come-from-behind win net Meerschaert a $ 50,000 Performance of the Night bonus, his fight-ending submission also put him one spot ahead of UFC legend Anderson Silva for the most finishes in UFC middleweight history. It’s a notable accomplishment, no doubt, but because he’s still actively competing right now, Meerschaert admits he’s not sitting around waiting for the chance to polish a plaque for his wall at home.

Instead, Meerschaert insists he still has a lot of work left to do, which means the record he just set will only end up extended even further into the stratosphere with more UFC wins.

“It’s cool to say,” Meerschaert said after UFC Vegas 96. “I don’t think about it too much right now. It’s just kind of one fight at a time, and I wish I could give you more than that because it is a cool thing. Truthfully, if I sit here and stop and give myself a little pat on the back, like, that’s awesome — just to have my name in the same conversation or sentence as somebody like Anderson Silva or Demian Maia and guys like that, that’s great — but I got a lot of fight left in me, I’ve got a lot more fights to go.

“When I hang them up, that will be a cool thing to throw around, like, ‘I was cool back in the day. I got a T-top Firebird.’ It’s a cool thing to say for now, and then when I’m retired, it will be fun to tell my kids and watch them not care.”

Of course, Meerschaert didn’t break Silva’s record without facing some serious adversity.

Prior to his submission win, Meerschaert found himself in great danger after getting blasted with a shot that dropped him to the canvas and prompted Shabazyan to rain down punches on him in hopes for a finish. Yet, as he does, Meerschaert was able to gut through a difficult situation before staging an awe-inspiring comeback to snatch the fight-ending sequence.

In a perfect world, Meerschaert prefers a dominant win like the submission he used to beat Bryan Barberena in March, but he’ll never complain too much when his hand gets raised.

“You mean getting punched in the head and face a bunch of times? I’m trying not to do that, but you get into a fist fight, that’s kind of what happens.,” Meerschaert said with a laugh. “Edmen did a very good job on the feet. He had very good distance management. He had some good clean power shots down the middle. He caught me with a really good body shot that, just the way it landed, the action on it at the end it kind of landed on a weird spot.

“I’ve got a pretty tough stomach, like usually body shots don’t do anything, but the way and the time he caught me, that really sucked and that kind of started the little sequence of him beating me about the head and shoulders. But as long as I’m awake, I’ve got a chance to win. I pretty much blocked everything and had to weather the storm a little bit and found my way out.”

Meerschaert credited referee Mark Smith for giving him every opportunity to survive the onslaught before storming back to get the submission on Shahbazyan.

As much as he wishes he wouldn’t end up in those kinds of hairy situations in the first place, Meerschaert knows through plenty of experience that he has what it takes to absorb a whole lot of punishment and still storm back for the win.

“I know if I’m still awake, there’s a way for me to win,” Meerschaert said. “You’ve got to put me six feet under before I’m going to stop fighting. Whether it’s on the feet swinging back, if I’ve got a chance on the ground, my chances are as good as anybody on the mat.

“I know what it looked like because obviously it was happening to me, but all I was thinking after that body shot and when he was trying to get me out of there, I was like, ‘Oh, this is great, he’s going to tire himself out, it should make wrestling him a whole lot easier.’ Fortunately for me, it didn’t get stopped and it did [tire him out] because I blocked most of the shots. … Eventually, he gassed out and I got ahold of his neck.”

Between the new promotional record he set and the bonus he’s taking home, Meerschaert had a pretty successful night at UFC Vegas 96. It may not be the way he wanted to win, but Meerschaert acknowledges that durability and a never-say-die attitude are attributes that separate him from much of his competition.

“A clean victory like my last fight would be a much better example of that, but I fought a really tough guy,” Meerschaert said. “He’s been ranked before and he’s got some really good wins.

“I think if you’re going to go fight somebody, like, yeah, it’s scary to go fight somebody who’s a knockout artist or a guy that’s super strong or has endless cardio and all this stuff, but I think you should be really scared of a guy that’s not going to quit and that’s not going to go away just because you land a couple of shots.”

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Amid his sidelining from action, former undisputed light heavyweight champion, Jiri Prochazka has claimed a potential middleweight title run may be on the cards next — particularly after Dricus du Plessis retained his title at UFC 305 against former champion, Israel Adesanya.

Prochazka, who still retains the number one rank in the light heavyweight pile, most recently headlined UFC 303 at the end of June during International Fight Week.

Suffering his second defeat to champion, Alex Pereira in their heated title rematch, Czech Republic striker, Prochazka was stopped with a brutal high-kick knockout.

And in the immediate aftermath of his loss, the former Rizin FF star weighed up both a middleweight drop in chase of a second Octagon crown — or a title-eliminator against fellow former champion, Jamahal Hill.

In his most recent victory, devastating knockout ace, Prochazka rallied to best Aleksandar Rakic with a stunning second round stoppage at UFC 300 earlier this year to boot.

Jiri Prochazka weighs up Dricus du Plessis title charge

And still undecided on his future amid links to an impending return to action later this year, Prochazka has welcomed the chance to take on Pretoria favorite, du Plessis for the middleweight championship.

“I’ve been considering that if (Israel Adesanya) wins, I’ll stay in the light heavyweight division, but if (Dricus) du Plessis wins, I’ll follow him,” Jiri Prochazka said on his official YouTube channel.

“I’ll clear things up in a bit there and take the belt,” Jiri Prochazka explained. “It would certainly be a challenge for me to go for the belt in the [middleweight] division. And then move up [back to light heavyweight].”

Winning 205lbs gold back in the summer of 2022, Prochazka travelled to Singapore where he toppled then-champion, Glover Teixeira with a stunning fifth round finish — defeating the Brazilian with a rear-naked choke stoppage — sans hooks, with the challenger down on the scorecards heading into the final round.

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Unless something dramatically changes, 2024 will come and go without Conor McGregor fighting in the UFC.

Despite McGregor expressing his wishes to return this year, UFC CEO Dana White has been adamant that “The Notorious” won’t compete in 2024 after a broken toe cancelled his fight against Michael Chandler, which was originally scheduled for UFC 303 in June. All signs appeared to point toward a December showdown for the long-awaited matchup, but White revealed that while he talked to McGregor, “he won’t fight this year.”

Recently retired UFC welterweight Matt Brown has long believed that McGregor will never fight again, and his opinion was only strengthened by this latest delay.

“He’s gone,” Brown said of McGregor on The Fighter vs. The Writer. “I’ve said it for a long time now. How many years have I been saying it? He’s done. I don’t discount that there’s a chance that he comes back, but the chances of him coming back are way lower than the chances of him not fighting again. He’s at, like, a 20-percent chance of coming back, I think.

“He’s doing great staying in the news, doing great keeping his name out there. We’d all love to see him fight still. I’d love to see him fight Chandler, whoever I’d love to see Conor fight — if he’s training properly, staying off the various substances or whatever it is. Come in the real Conor. Live your life all want when you’re 45 and you’re retired and you’re totally out. Enjoy it then, but for now let’s see all the fights. Let’s see them. I want to see you fight.”

There’s a myriad of reasons why Brown never bought the McGregor comeback after the Irish superstar suffered a gruesome broken leg in his last UFC appearance in a loss to Dustin Poirier back in 2021.

Truth be told, Brown’s opinion on McGregor doesn’t differ that much from White, who has long questioned if the former two-division UFC champ would actually fight again one day.

“Conor McGregor — maybe he’ll fight again, maybe he won’t,” White said on The Jim Rome Show in June. “You never know with some of the guys that get to that level [of wealth]. You never know when you’re going to see them again.”

While McGregor’s future remains cloudy, Chandler remains stuck waiting after first signing up for the matchup upon agreeing to serve as a The Ultimate Fighter coach in early 2023.

From McGregor still recovering from his injury, to a required six-month waiting period to fight again after re-entering the UFC’s anti-doping program, to the broken toe in July, Chandler has been forced to the sidelines as his 39th birthday creeps closer in April 2025.

Assuming the fight doesn’t get scheduled in 2024, Chandler has missed at least two years of his career waiting for McGregor, and there’s still no guarantee his patience pays off.

“In my view, you only live once and this is a short window of time in your life that you get to compete at the highest level,” Brown said of Chandler’s situation. “I think he’s going to look back when he’s 50, 60 years old and be like, ‘I missed out on a couple of years there just waiting for a payday.’ I don’t think he’s hurting for money anyways [but], ‘I waited for this payday and I could have been out there putting myself on the line.’

“I think Michael Chandler’s a competitor. I think he wants to be out there putting it on the line. I think he’s going to end up regretting this someday.”

Perhaps the biggest risk for Chandler would be booking a different fight and then potentially missing out on the matchup against McGregor. He could have done that multiple times over by now, but Brown argues even if Chandler fought and lost during the past two years, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t eventually get McGregor anyways.

“I’ve said it a million times, say he fought four times and those two years and he went 2-2 — Conor still fights him,” Brown said. “It’s not like Chandler’s an up-and-comer that’s going to be on Fight Nights or the prelims or something. He would have had to lose all of his fights for Conor to say, ‘I’m not fighting you.’ Maybe even then Conor might fight him. Conor’s going to need a tune-up fight coming back. He might see that as a tune-up fight. I don’t think he would have lost anything by fighting however many times.

“I get it why he’s waiting, I guess. Maybe they’re just stringing him along. We don’t know what he’s hearing. We don’t know the voices in his ear, what they’re telling him. Hindsight’s always 20/20, right? It’s easy for us to look back and say, ‘You should have fought all this time,’ but it’s like, OK, we know in hindsight you should have fought, but at what point do you put your foot down and say, ‘OK, I’m fighting again.’”

Brown also argues that because McGregor has so many questions surrounding him after at least three years off and a 1-3 résumé in his past four fights, that beating him now isn’t the same as handing him a loss when he was coming off his mythical “champ-champ” status nine years ago.

Of course, Brown doesn’t fault Chandler for seeking the fame and fortune that comes along with a McGregor fight, but at this point, that’s all he’s after.

“It’s clear the wait is for a payday,” Brown said. “It’s not a legacy thing. It’s not for competitive nature. I think Michael Chandler’s probably going to look back on it and say, ‘I should have jumped in there.’ Maybe he won’t. I can’t read his mind, I don’t know what’s going on in his life, but I’m guessing he’s probably solid on money. It doesn’t really add up to me why you’d want to do that.”

Listen to new episodes of The Fighter vs. The Writer every Tuesday with audio only versions of the podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio

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Ronda Rousey appreciates that every now and again when UFC starts building a massive card, her name still comes up for a potential comeback.

The latest instance was UFC 300. As the promotion promised the biggest event in history, there were seemingly millions of rumors swirling about what kind of a rabbit Dana White might pull out of his hat. Rousey’s name somehow ended up being mentioned as a candidate, but White admitted very openly that she was never even in consideration because the former bantamweight champion was happy raising her family in retirement.

Despite her last UFC appearance happening almost eight years ago, Rousey enjoys that her name still comes up from time to time, but she promises there’s no chance she’s ever fighting again.

“Every couple years … the same rumor comes out,” Rousey told the Insight podcast. “It’s nice to feel missed, I guess. But it’s not happening. I’m not neurologically fit to compete anymore at the highest level. I just can’t.

“You just get to a level where the neurological injuries you take accumulate over time. They don’t get better.”

As she was recently promoting her autobiography, Rousey said repeated concussions that began when she was still a child played the biggest factor in her MMA career coming to an end. Rousey said she never addressed the situation publicly because she was still actively competing, and even after she left UFC, she didn’t want to potentially risk her future in WWE after transitioning into professional wrestling.

But, she said, eventually the symptoms she suffered as a result of so many concussions forced Rousey to walk away from full-time competition.

“When I got into MMA, I had already had dozens of concussions that I trained through,” Rousey said. “Like, not even stopped for. So that was about a decade of having concussion symptoms more often than not. So when I got into MMA, I was playing a game of zero errors. Then it got to the point where I was fighting more often than anybody. I had more outside of fighting responsibilities than anybody, and it just got to be lighter and lighter hits were hurting me more and more and more.

“I got to a point where I couldn’t take a jab without getting dazed, without getting concussion symptoms. It just got to a point where it wasn’t safe for me to fight anymore. I just couldn’t continue to fight at that higher level.”

Rousey endured her first professional loss back in 2015 when she suffered a brutal head kick knockout courtesy of Holly Holm. That fight cost her the UFC bantamweight title and Rousey ended up sitting out for the next year as she recovered from the loss.

When she eventually came back 13 months later, Rousey lasted just 48 seconds against Amanda Nunes before she walked out of the octagon and never returned to the UFC.

Truth be told, Rousey admits now that she probably should have walked away for good after the loss to Holm, but she just couldn’t let her career end like that.

“It was really tough and I think that’s why I took that first loss so hard, because I knew it was over,” Rousey said. “I knew I’d reached that limit. I was in denial about it and I tried to come back again with a lot of rest and a better weight cut, not doing the extra stuff, the extra press, and just coming in and fighting.

“If I could just cut to that moment when they say go and I fight, I f*cking love that so much. Nothing makes more sense in the world. There’s not a single thing that happens that I don’t understand or that I don’t know what to do.”

Rousey said her problems with concussions followed her into WWE, but she eventually had to say enough was enough. With a growing family alongside husband Travis Browne, Rousey realized she had to put her athletic career behind her or risk permanent damage that she wouldn’t walk away from.

To add to that, Rousey appreciated that she became a role model for young fighters coming up in the sport and she preferred serving as an example to girls following in her footsteps rather than becoming a cautionary tale.

“The men have been around longer so they just have more history of boxing and stuff like that, they just reach their limit of how many hits that they can take and then they start getting knocked out,” Rousey explained. “They start getting knocked out easier and easier, more and more often. Then you see them down the road and they’re having all kinds of neurological issues.

“I just felt it was my responsibility to age gracefully because I’m a representative of my sport. People look at me and think of women’s MMA. If I’m rolling around in a wheelchair, people aren’t going to let their little girls go and do it. You never know when you take one hit too many until decades later. You see these guys who are like punch drunk.”

As much as Rousey loved the support she received from fans, the now 37-year-old UFC Hall of Famer knows attention like that is fleeting and she had to begin thinking long-term as far as her life was concerned.

That’s why she’s so resolved to put fighting behind her for good, no matter how many times she hears calls for a comeback.

“Everyone loves to see you fight when you’re in the cage, but none of those people are going to be there for you down the line,” Rousey said. “You’ve got to take care of yourself and your family and put that first. Because you’re just a passing entertainment to everybody else. You see that in pro wrestling, people get addicted to that applause and they can’t stop, they can’t walk away even when it becomes to their detriment.

“I just had to put my foot down and be like, ‘This has gotten to a point where my brain cannot take anymore and it has nothing to do with how tough I am or anything like that.’ It’s just the way that it is.”

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A women’s strawweight bout between ninth-ranked Angela Hill and eleventh-ranked Tabatha Ricco served as Saturday’s UFC Vegas 96 co-main event at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas.  

Hill entered the fight on a two-fight winning streak and having won four of her last five bouts.  She scored a second-round submission win over Luana Pinheiro in her last fight in May earning a ‘Performance of the Night’ bonus.  

Ricci made the walk to the octagon coming off a split decision win over Tecia Pennington.  Heading into Saturday, she had won five of her last six fights.    

Ricci pressed forward with pressure and Hill landed a right hand.  Ricci continued to close the distance and clinched.  They worked for position along the fence before separating.  Ricci connected with a right hand and tied Hill up.  Ricci pressured Hill throughout the opening round.  

Ricci pushed her way to the inside behind punches.  The two exchanged knees to the body in the clinch before breaking free.  Hill clinched and tried to trip Ricci but Ricci remained standing.  They separated before the bell.  MMAWeekly scored the round 10-9 for Ricci.  

Ricci continued to pressure Hill in the second frame.  She connected with a right hand and tossed Hill to the canvas.  Hill threw up kicks before scrambling to her feet.  After s brief clinch battle, the two separated.  Ricci switched stances and delivered a combination.  Ricci closed this distance and clinched.  Hill landed to the body with kicks as they separated.  Hill connected with a clean right hand.  Ricci responded with a combination.  She changed levels and took Hill down.  In the closing seconds, Hill kicked Ricci off and rose to her feet.  They clinched and exchanged punches at the bell.  MMAWeekly scored the round d10-9 for Ricci.  

Ricci came out in the third pressuring Hill.  Hill spun and landed a spinning back fist.  Ricci took it and continued to press forward.  Hill caught a leg kick and took Ricci down.  Ricci got to her feet and took Hill down.  Hill kicked her off and they were back standing.  Ricci closed the distance with a combination and clinched.  They disengaged and began exchanging in the middle of the octagon.  

Ricci again to the clinch.  Hill pushed her away and landed a combination.  Hill picked up the output and starting delivering front kicks to the body.  Ricci landed a right hand and Hill responded with a big right hook.  Ricci clinched with 10 second remaining.  Hill circled free and the round ended.  MMAWeekly scored the round 10-9 for Hill.  

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LAS VEGAS, NEVADA- “The Natural” wants his shot.

Caio Borralho scored a massive win in the main event of UFC Vegas 96 last night (Sat., Aug. 24, 2024) when he ran through former UFC Middleweight title challenger Jared Cannonier, defeating him via unanimous decision from inside the Apex in Las Vegas.

During his post-fight interview with Michael Bisping, Borralho made a bonehead callout (again) by calling out Middleweight champion Dricus Du Plessis.

Watch it:

Once the dust settled, Borralho spoke with Ag.Fight after his win to break down his callout.

“It was as tough as I expected. I knew Jared was a very tough guy. I knew he had champion-level skills, he’s fought for the title before. Adesanya didn’t do what I did to him,” Borralho said. “I knew he was someone who would demand the best from me, and he really did. It was exactly as I imagined, and the victory came as I imagined.”

For the third time, I challenged [Du Plessis]. UFC is listening. The other times, I won by decision. Tonight, I won by decision, but I almost finished Jared, and I won Fight of the Night. I think Dana [White] liked it; Hunter [Campbell] said he loved it, and the crowd enjoyed it. If my title shot is not next..Whenever there’s talk about the next contender, my name will be in the mix.”

Borralho makes a great point that he dismantled Cannonier over five rounds while Israel Adesanya outpointed him in a horrendous fight at UFC 276.

The top of the UFC Middleweight division is completely crowded at the moment, with multiple fighters who deserve a crack at the title, and unfortunately, Borralho is probably fourth in line.

Nevertheless, Borralho is undefeated in UFC, sitting pretty at 7-0, and will be ranked No. 5 in the Middleweight division on Tuesday.

What about a fight with Adesanya?

For complete UFC Vegas 96 results, coverage, and highlights, click HERE.

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