Ilia Topuria And the Real Winners and Losers from UFC 298

It was a pay-per-view night in southern California.

And if you like your UFC shows top heavy, it was certainly your kinda card.

The 12-bout event from the Honda Center in Anaheim included a pair of preliminary segments with little to no star power before graduating to a five-bout headline portion billed as UFC 298 and topped with a sixth title defense by featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski.

The popular Australian arrived third on the UFC's pound-for-pound rankings and returned to 145 pounds after a second bid for Islam Makhachev's lightweight belt ended in a first-round loss atop the UFC 294 show four months ago in Abu Dhabi.

He faced unbeaten No. 3 contender Ilia Topuria, who was 6-0 in the promotion.

The co-main included top-six middleweights Robert Whittaker and Paulo Costa while the pivot fight had rising welterweight Ian Garry against eighth-ranked veteran Geoff Neal. The PPV open matched middleweights Anthony Hernandez and Roman Kopylov, and the follow was a duel between streaking bantamweight Merab Dvalishvili and ex-champ Henry Cejudo.

The B/R combat team was in place to take it all in and delivered a real-time list of the show's definitive winners and losers. Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought of your own in the comments.

It was as shocking as it was sudden.

Featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski hadn't lost a fight in his weight class, and, through a round-plus against third-ranked challenger Ilia Topuria, didn't appear in grave danger.

And then it was over.

His streak. His reign. And perhaps, with three losses in his last four fights—two at lightweight against champion Islam Makhachev—his long-term status as a pound-for-pound elite.

The unbeaten and supremely confident Spaniard delivered on a promise he'd repeated during fight week, stepping in with a flurry that pushed Volkanovski to the fence and catching him with a single right hand that left him in a semi-conscious heap as referee Jason Herzog intervened at 3:32 of the second.

Game. Set. Regime change.

"I know my skills. I work so hard," Topuria said. "It doesn't matter where you come from if you know where you're going. It's much more important what's in front of you than what's behind you."

It was a 15th straight overall win and seventh straight in the UFC for Topuria, who debuted in the promotion during the COVID-addled year of 2020 and had climbed to No. 3 in the division with a unanimous decision over Josh Emmett in a Fight Night main event last June.

Volkanovski, who'd reigned since defeating Max Holloway in 2019 and made successful defenses alongside the two challenges of Makhachev, is 13-3 since arriving in 2016.

"Well done to him. He fooled me," he said. "I was gonna start working everything and he got to me. Maybe we do a rematch over there in Spain."

Blow-by-blow man Jon Anik was not shy with his praise.

"That was high-level mixed martial arts at its finest," he said. "An instant classic of a co-main event."

And though people in his position often veer toward hyperbole, he did not.

The three-rounder between ex-middleweight king Robert Whittaker and former title challenger Paulo Costa was surely worthy of its lofty card placement, rewarding fans with 15 tense minutes of precision striking, laudable resilience and nary a backward step.

In the end, Whittaker earned a unanimous decision, getting two of three rounds on two scorecards and getting all three on the third.

The B/R card sided with the minority and gave all three to Whittaker regardless of the fight's single most telling blow, a head kick from Costa that landed flush on the right side of Whittaker's head and left him stumbling and probably on the verge of a KO loss.

The problem for Costa? It landed with about five seconds to go in the first round. And by the time the fighters reengaged after a 60-second break, his recovery was complete.

"Nothing but a flesh wound," he said. "It wasn't fun, but it was his best shot all night, for sure."

Whittaker had controlled much of the initial round with precision punches, superior movement and damaging kicks to Costa's left calf. He continued those attacks across most of the final two rounds and never took another significant blow from Costa as the bigger, stronger man tired.

"This is the fight that I wanted. He's a tough dude," Whittaker said. "I put a lot of pressure on myself to come out here and perform, and I did exactly that."

Ian Garry endured the split-decision verdict and heard the boos that let him know what the crowd in Anaheim thought about his 15 minutes of tedious, strategic combat with Geoff Neal.

But if you think it bothered him, think again.

The 26-year-old Irishman instead focused on his still-unbeaten status and the high-profile challenge he hopes comes next now that he's defeated the welterweight division's No. 8 contender.

Two judges saw Garry a shutout winner while a third gave Neal two of three rounds.

The B/R scorecard saw it 29-28 (or two rounds to one) in Garry's favor.

"I'm winning, undefeated, living the life," he said, lifting his index finger to his lips. "Keep talking. You're all here watching me. I'm here. I'm gonna be a world champion whether you guys want it or not."

Now 7-0 in the UFC with consecutive defeats of ranked contenders Neal and Neil Magny, Garry set his post-fight sights on fifth-ranked Colby Covington, who's lost three world title shots and hasn't beaten a still-active UFC fighter since Rafael dos Anjos in 2018.

He suggested a fight with Covington could be a co-main to the rumored but not finalized match between Conor McGregor and Michael Chandler.

"He's on a three-fight skid against world champions," Garry said. "I want to retire him for good."

It was easy to forget to whom it was it was happening.

As second-ranked Merab Dvalishvili continually smiled, gestured and played to the crowd—particularly Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg at cage-side—you'd have thought he was handling an upstart foe.

Not a former Olympic gold medalist and two-division UFC champion.

But in sure-fire future Hall of Fame inductee Henry Cejudo, that's precisely what it was.

And exactly how impressive it seemed.

Indeed, the 33-year-old Dvalishvili picked up the most significant win of his professional career with a comprehensively complete decision over Cejudo in the pay-per-view show's second bout.

"The biggest fight of his career, the best performance of his career," analyst Joe Rogan said. "For him to do that to Henry Cejudo is simply amazing."

All three judges scored it 29-28 in his favor, awarding him the second and third rounds after the 37-year-old Cejudo had come out aggressively on his feet and fared well on the mat.

But it was one-sided in the other direction the rest of the way, as Cejudo's gas tank emptied and Dvalishvili chatted toward Zuckerberg while holding his man in a guillotine choke to end the second, then picked Cejudo up and walked him across the mat for a slam to punctuate the third.

"I'm not even breathing heavy. I don't feel like I've been in a fight," he said. "I want to dominate all rounds. I want a 10-round fight. Where's the champion? Bring him to me right now. I'm ready. My only goal is for the title now."

Anthony Hernandez clearly loves his work.

As the California-based middleweight cinched his left arm under the throat of main-card foe Roman Kopylov and began squeezing, he looked toward his corner with, of all things, a gleeful smile.

But given the preeminence he showed over eight-plus minutes and what it's likely to mean for him career-wise going forward, the mirth was understandable.

"I've been conditioning my body," he said. "That was my weak point at first. Now I'm unstoppable and I'm ready to show the world."

Kopylov's surrender to Hernandez's rear-naked choke came at 3:23 of the second round, after Hernandez had pursued the Russian with 14 takedown attempts, hit him with 34 significant strikes and racked up better than four minutes of control time.

It was also his fifth straight win, which is the second-longest streak at 185 pounds—trailing only newly-crowned champion Dricus Du Plessis.

Kopylov, who'd also arrived with four straight wins, is 4-3 in the UFC.

"(Hernandez) is one of the most relentless fighters in this division," analyst Joe Rogan said.

Amanda Lemos and Mackenzie Dern slapped each other's hands, patted each other's backs and collapsed into a hug upon hearing the horn that ended their preliminary finale.

It was fitting end to 15 minutes particularly compelling high-level combat.

A stand-up striker by trade, Lemos was dominant while the fight was vertical, strafing Dern's calves with hard kicks and rendering her face a swollen, bloody mess with precise, hard punches. Dern, meanwhile, was a twisting-and-squeezing menace when things went horizontal, consistently working her Brazilian foe into dangerous positions and never appearing too far from a submission possibility.

So, the idea that the decision was equally reed-thin, with all three judges seeing it 2-1, was no surprise.

Lemos was the one sent to giddy celebration when Bruce Buffer finished his announcement, getting back on the winning side with a unanimous verdict six months after she'd fallen short in a championship bid against strawweight queen Zhang Weili at UFC 292.

The third-ranked Lemos improved to 8-3 in the UFC while No. 7 Dern dropped 8-5 with a second straight loss.

Lemos controlled the initial half of the first round after she rendered Dern nearly immobile with hard kicks to the left calf. Dern ducked under Lemos' right hand about halfway through the session, however, and kept her opponent on the mat until the horn.

More calf kicks left Dern vulnerable again in the second and she stumbled into a hard right hand that nearly yielded a stoppage with strikes. Dern again survived, though, and regained control when Lemos followed her to the mat after a knockdown.

Lemos finished with 41 significant strikes to Dern's 21, while Dern rolled up six minutes of control time.

You can spend all day on YouTube, but you'll never see a prettier combo.

Quite a way to make an octagonal debut for Chinese light heavyweight Zhang Mingyang.

The 25-year-old scored his 18th first-round finish in 18 wins and cranked the in-house volume in Anaheim to an 11 with a three-punch erasure of Brendson Ribeiro in their would-be three-rounder at 205.

A stiff left hand that landed flush to Ribeiro's mouth was followed by a looping right hand to the side of the head and a clean-up left hook to the jaw that deposited him flat on his back.

Three brutal hammer fists to the Brazilian's defenseless face made it academic for ref Mike Beltran.

The time was 1:41 of the first for the first Chinese fighter to compete in the weight class.

"I haven't had a fight in a year, so I wanted to experience more rounds in the octagon," said Mingyang, who'd not fought since June 2022. "But when his fists touched my face I thought, 'That feels good,' and I wanted to finish it quickly."

So, you want to be a combat sports fighter, eh?

Go ahead and look at Josh Quinlan's face after he spent 11-plus minutes with rising welterweight Danny Barlow and get back to us.

Quinlan had intermittent moments of success through two rounds against his lanky, rangy and powerful 6'2" foe, but his face—particularly his right eye—showed the evidence of a particularly brutal third.

A 28-year-old from Tennessee, Barlow used a variety of punches, kicks and knees across 10 minutes but went exclusively with his fists while finishing things with a particularly brutal sequence.

A left hand dumped the gutsy Quinlan to the floor about a minute into the third and another one bounced him off the canvas seconds later, and the follow-up barrage left Quinlan reeling along the fence before a particularly patient Jason Herzog finally stepped in to end it at 1:18.

It was Barlow's eighth win and sixth finish overall and his first in the UFC after a victorious Dana White's Contender Series appearance last September.

For Quinlan, it was a second loss overall, and first by finish, in nine fights, and he left the cage not only bloodied and beaten, but with a right eye swollen completely shut.

"It's hard to finish people that haven't been finished before," Barlow said. "It's like teaching an old dog new tricks."

For about 60 seconds, it looked like Hagler-Hearns in a cage.

But for the remaining 14 minutes, it looked like something far less titillating.

And the fans in the Honda Center weren't shy about letting welterweights Oban Elliott and Val Woodburn know when their collective outputs weren't up to ticket-buyer standards.

Ultimately, Elliott endured the occasionally violent three rounds to earn a clear unanimous decision in his official UFC debut after a win on Dana White's Contender Series in August.

The Welshman landed a crunching high head kick early on that Woodburn walked right through on the way to landing a punishing series of punches of his own.

A Fight of the Night candidate seemed imminent at that point, only to bog down into uneventful clinch and groundwork as Elliott ineffectively chased finishes and Woodburn quickly emptied his gas tank.

Two judges had it three rounds to zero in Elliott's favor while the third gave him a 2-1 margin.

"I knew he was gonna be tough tonight," Elliott said.

"I rocked him with a head kick, and I thought it was over but then he rocked me, and I thought, 'OK, fair play.' Say what you will about our performance tonight, but I know how good I am, and I know where I'm going. I am the man, and to be the man you've got to beat the man."

Miranda Maverick's UFC road has not been easy.

She'd lost three octagonal bouts before Saturday's preliminary opener against Andrea Lee, against fighters who've since climbed to rankings perches at No. 2 (Erin Blanchfield), No. 6 (Maycee Barber) and No. 14 (Jasmine Jasudavicius) in the flyweight division.

So, the uber-aggressive Maverick, now a veteran at age 26, knew she'd need to raise her game, too.

"I need to stop being a bully quite so much," she said, "but I need to be a better bully when I am one."

Mission accomplished.

Matched this time against the No. 15 fighter at 125 pounds, Maverick was economical with her shots, selective with her takedown tries and prudent with her distance management while grinding out a unanimous decision in which two of three judges gave her all three rounds and the other gave her two.

It's her sixth win in nine UFC fights and should at least get her to swipe the status of Lee, who's dropped four in a row and is just 2-7 since a 3-0 start to an octagonal run that began in 2018.

It wouldn't be a UFC event without some schedule changes.

The preliminary card was trimmed from eight fights to seven just 10 days before the opening strikes were thrown when middleweight Tresean Gore took to Instagram to confirm that he'd been pulled from a would-be bout with AJ Dobson thanks to a shoulder injury.

"Gutted posting this, but the UFC didn't clear me to fight," Gore said.

"I initially was gonna fight anyway, but my Coach made me (get) a MRI because he didn't want me fighting with one Arm!. Man I don't understand why some things happen, but it's all on God's time not mine! I will be back and when the time is Right, I will be P4P. I can't allow injury's to kill my dream!"

A second change tweaked the lineup when Justin Tafa was pulled from a heavyweight bout with Marcos Rogerio de Lima with an undisclosed injury and replaced by younger brother Junior Tafa. The younger Tafa, 27, had split two bouts in the UFC while de Lima, 38, was coming off a stoppage by Derrick Lewis in 33 seconds at UFC 291.

On Saturday, de Lima maintained his No. 15 ranking with a second-round TKO via leg kicks.

All 24 fighters across 12 full-card bouts successfully made weight on Friday.

Main Card

Ilia Topuria def. Alexander Volkanovski by KO (strike), 3:32, Round 2

Robert Whittaker def. Paulo Costa by unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 30-27)

Ian Garry def. Geoff Neal by split decision (30-27, 28-29, 30-27)

Merab Dvalishvili def. Henry Cejudo by unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 29-28)

Anthony Hernandez def. Roman Kopylov by submission (rear-naked choke), 3:23, Round 2

Preliminary Card

Amanda Lemos def. Mackenzie Dern by unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 29-28)

Marcos Rogerio de Lima def. Junior Tafa by TKO (leg kicks), 1:14, Round 2

Rinya Nakamura def. Carlos Vera by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 30-27)

Zhang Mingyang def. Brendson Ribeiro by KO (strikes), 1:41, Round 1

Early Preliminary Card

Danny Barlow def. Josh Quinlan by TKO (strikes), 1:18, Round 3

Oban Elliott def. Val Woodburn by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 29-28)

Miranda Maverick def. Andrea Lee by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 29-28)