Alex Volkanovski and the Real Winners, Losers and Results from UFC 314

The UFC's odometer was spinning yet again.

The promotion landed in Mexico City for an event two weeks ago before taking a pit stop at its Apex facility home base in Las Vegas. And it spent a weekend in South Florida this time around with another annual trip to Miami.

UFC 314 was the third straight spring-time pay-per-view in "The 305," which hosted the UFC 287 rematch between Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira in 2023 and a bantamweight title defense for Sean O'Malley against Marlon Vera at UFC 299 in 2024.

It was Alex Volkanovski's and Diego Lopes's turn to headline in a main event for the featherweight title belt vacated by the man who took it from Volkanovski just 14 months ago, Ilia Topuria. Volkanovski hadn't fought since that second-round TKO defeat at UFC 298, while Lopes had won five straight since a loss in his company debut.

B/R's combat team was in the building at the Kaseya Center to take in all the action and deliver a definitive, real-time list of the show's winners and losers. Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought of your own in the app comments.

It was easy to believe the Alexander Volkanovski narrative.

The bad one, that is.

After all, the popular Aussie hadn’t fought at all in 14 months and when he had it hadn’t gone so well, to the tune of three losses in his last four fights–including early KO losses to Islam Makhachev and Ilia Topuria in his last two.

The latter cost him his featherweight title after a four-plus-year reign and made it seem as if Saturday night’s risk, against a bigger, stronger and younger foe on a five-fight win streak in Diego Lopes, was a bit too much of an ask for a 36-year-old.

It wasn’t.

Instead, while maybe not the Volkanovski of old, it was far from an old Volkanovski as he worked effectively from distance, avoided prolonged damage and gutted it out down the stretch to earn a unanimous decision and his second reign at 145 pounds.

“Adversity is a privilege, this moment is incredible,” Volkanovski said. “Adversity is an opportunity. You can bring yourself back stronger. You can break records. This is the s–t people are gonna write books about and make movies about.”

Two judges had it 49-46, or four rounds to one, for Volkanovski and the other gave him three of five rounds, matching B/R’s W/L card, which also had it 48-47 for the winner after giving him the fifth thanks to effective movement and sharpshooting.

“I can see myself coming back,” Lopes said. “I can train better. I can come back and I can be a champion.”

Paddy Pimblett beat his chest, glared into the camera and yelled two words.

“What now?

And given the sheer ferocity with which he battered, bloodied and ultimately stopped one of the UFC’s most rugged competitors, “Iron” Michael Chandler, it’s hard to imagine the answer will be anything less than another high-profile pay-per-view opportunity.

Such was the magnitude of the star turn Pimblett had in Saturday’s co-main, during which he endured Chandler’s early rush before taking over from distance in the second round and continuing the beating on the ground while pushing his foe to the brink.

A jumping knee in the first 15 seconds of Round 3 busted Chandler open and a subsequent takedown led to a torrent of hard shots before referee Kerry Hatley intervened to make the TKO finish official at 3:07.

Analyst Joe Rogan labeled it “a superb performance,” and may have understated it.

“We come here, we use our fight IQ and we beat mother f–kers up,” said Pimblett, who arrived ranked 12th at lightweight to Chandler’s seventh. “To all those people who said I’ll never get ranked, I’ll never be in the top 10. What now?”

He ran off a number of names as suggestions, including Arman Tsarukyan, Justin Gaethje, and former champ Charles Oliveira. Oliveira, who beat Chandler in 2021 and 2024, is the UFC’s all-time leader with 16 submission wins.

But Pimblett refused to concede the Brazilian’s finishing prowess over his.

“I disagree with that,” he said. “I’m here.”

Patricio Pitbull believed, based on his pre-fight comments, that all he’d need to instantly insert himself into the UFC’s featherweight title picture was a decisive Saturday win.

What he believes now, though, is anyone’s guess.

The 37-year-old arrived amid much hype thanks to multiple title reigns at featherweight and another championship win at lightweight in the now-defunct Bellator promotion.

But it didn’t translate to immediate success in the octagon, and he now finds himself 0-1 in his new home after an every-bit-as-decisive-as-it-sounds unanimous decision loss to former UFC featherweight title challenger Yair Rodriguez.

All three judges scored all three rounds for Rodriguez, who snapped a two-fight skid to improve his UFC mark to 11-4. He celebrated and called for a late-summer title shot of his own when the promotion heads to Mexico in September.

Pitbull, meanwhile, dropped to his knees in the center of the mat and looked crestfallen as he was consoled by a member of his corner team.

He was out-landed by a 97-23 margin, dropped by a hard right hand in the third round, and never came close to displaying the skill that yielded 13 wins in 17 Bellator title bouts, including a first-round finish of Michael Chandler in 2019.

“I wanted to finish him in the first round,” Rodriguez said, “but the guy’s good.”

Sometimes the venom is for real.

Brazilian Jean Silva went nose to nose with American Bryce Mitchell at Friday’s weigh-in, and it was clear during Saturday’s octagonal entrances that the enmity between the two was both legitimate and continuing, too, when Mitchell refused to touch gloves.

So Silva went about his business. 

And seemed to enjoy himself while doing so.

The streaking featherweight pasted Mitchell with a variety of strikes while thwarting his foe’s attempts to get the fight to the ground, then happily went there in Round 2 on the way to securing the ninja choke that prompted a tap from his rival at 3:53.

And afterward, when asked by analyst Joe Rogan about the lingering dissension, Silva steered into psychology and expressed pity for the polarizing Alabaman, who lost for just the third time in 11 UFC outings.

“I thought it was all part of the show and part of the promotion, but apparently it was part of him,” Silva said. “I’m sad for him. I don’t think he’s right in the head. There's something wrong for him to be like that.”

Whaddya know? The Dominick Reyes comeback story isn’t done yet.

The Californian was as close to a title as you could be without winning it while dropping a light heavyweight shot to then-champ Jon Jones five years ago, but got as far away as possible while dropping each of his next three fights, all by KO or TKO.

So when he rallied with a pair of wins in 2024 against fellow veterans Dustin Jacoby and Anthony Smith, it was easy to find people excited about his return. 

But the enthusiasm spiked tenfold in Saturday’s main-card opener, when he jolted Nikita Krylov with a perfectly timed counter left hand and earned a highlight-reel KO win at 2:24 of the first.

“I’m back,” Reyes said, “but back and better.”

Krylov was leaping in with a right of his own when Reyes pivoted and landed the shot that sent his foe to the floor in a heap. 

A few hammer fists hastened the arrival of referee Marc Goddard and sent Reyes to the top of the fence in glee before he dropped to his knees with emotion soon after.

“The losing sucked. It sucked,” Reyes said. “But anything that goes wrong in your life, just keep fighting, keep bouncing back. One more and a title. Let’s go.”

The “50K” nickname was slowly losing its luster.

So Dan Ige did something about it.

Outworked and outlanded through a desultory first two rounds against streaking featherweight Sean Woodson, Ige reacted to a renewed push from a partisan Miami crowd and engineered a quick stoppage of his favored foe at 1:12 of Round 3.

It’s a first win in 14 months for the popular 33-year-old, who’d lost consecutive decisions to Diego Lopes and Lerone Murphy since beating late sub Andre Fili on a Fight Night show in Las Vegas. That win yielded the most recent of his four career $50,000 performance bonuses, a penchant for exciting fights on which his nickname was based.

“It’s great. It’s been over a year since I won,” Ige said. “I keep going down over and over and over again, but I keep getting up.”

The optics were trending against him with Woodson, an unusually tall, lanky 145-pounder who’d arrived on a four-fight win streak. Ige said he’d had difficulty finding quality sparring partners to mimic Woodson’s length, and he was struggling to land meaningful strikes through two rounds.

An overhand left early in the third changed the fight, though, and Ige pursued his reeling opponent and delivered a series of hard ground shots until referee Andrew Glenn pulled the plug at 1:12 of the third.

“I started to find my way in Round 2,” Ige said, “and in Round 3 I found the finish.”

It’s official: Virna Jandiroba is ready for her close up.

The third-ranked Brazilian strawweight arrived in Miami with four straight victories and had already climbed to the brink of a title shot when she encountered No. 1 contender Yan Xiaonan in the only matchup of ranked fighters on the preliminary card.

And now that she’s controlled the majority of 15 minutes with the Chinese striker, just one fight removed from her challenge of titleholder Zhang Weili a year ago at UFC 300, she wasn’t shy about staking her own claim for a championship try.

The ebullient winner flexed for the cameras, signaled to the crowd and leapt into the arms of her corner team shortly after the official announcement of her victory, which came by matching 30-27 scores on all three cageside scorecards.

Jandiroba, buoyed by Brazilian cheerleaders Amanda Nunes and Gilbert Burns in the front row of the spectator section, took Xiaonan down in each round, ran up just a second shy of 10 minutes of positional control and landed 96 strikes to her foe’s 64.

The win boosted her to 8-3 in the UFC and extended the victory streak that began with a decision over Angela Hill on a Fight Night show in 2022. She hasn’t lost since dropping a three-round nod to Amanda Ribas at UFC 267 in October 2021.

History shows that MMA is not exclusively a young man’s game.

But it was Saturday night, at least in the early going.

Featherweight Darren Elkins, who’ll turn 41 next month, looked many years past his competitive shelf life in a frighteningly one-sided first-round TKO loss to Julian Erosa.

Erosa is no spring chicken at age 35, but he was sharper and faster from the jump than Elkins, who was sent stumbling by the first strike he absorbed and was knocked dizzy by a pair of upkicks as he attempted to take the fight to the floor.

The Indiana-based fighter never recovered from those shots and was wobbled badly by each subsequent strike before referee Mike Beltran finally intervened at 4:15.

One fight later, veteran lightweight Jim Miller gave a far better accounting of himself but was still on the short end of a unanimous decision against Chase Hooper.

It was a fifth straight win and eighth in 11 fights for Hooper, who, at 25, was the show’s youngest fighter competing against its oldest in Miller, 41, who made his UFC debut in 2008, when Hooper was 9 years old.

“I’m tired of beating up on old guys,” said Hooper, whose last fight was a first-round submission of Clay Guida in December, the day before Guida turned 43. “Gimme some young guys. Any of the other younger (155-pounders). I want to test myself against another young buck.”

The chants were loud and frequent. But not particularly helpful.

It seemed that each time Brazilian middleweight Marco Tulio heard the crowd in a still-cavernous Kaseya Center let loose with another “USA, USA,” he delivered another in a series of punishing strikes to Tresean Gore’s head, body and legs.

Ultimately, it was too much for the American to bear and he fell in a bloody heap and was soon rescued by referee Marc Goddard for a TKO in Round 2 of the show’s second bout.

“I’ve seen this in my dreams. It was always going to be like this,” Tulio said. “I do this every day.”

The early preliminary card wasn’t welcoming to any of its four U.S.-based fighters, with each arriving as betting underdogs and each exiting the cage with a loss.

Gore’s loss to Tulio came immediately after a second-round finish in the night’s first bout, scored by France’s Nora Cornolle over Texas strawweight Hailey Cowan by a rear-naked choke submission.

Massachusetts flyweight Mitch Raposo dropped a tedious three-round decision to China’s Sumudaerji in fight No. 3 and Florida middleweight Sedriques Dumas was TKO’d by Poland’s Michal Oleksiejczuk at 2:49 of Round 1.

Main Card

Alexander Volkanovski def. Diego Lopes by unanimous decision (48-47, 49-46, 49-46)

Paddy Pimblett def. Michael Chandler by TKO (punches), 3:07, Round 3

Yair Rodriguez def. Patricio Pitbull by unanimous decision (30-27, 20-27, 20-27)

Jean Silva def. Bryce Mitchell by submission (ninja choke), 3:53, Round 2

Dominick Reyes def. Nikita Krylov by KO (punch), 2:24, Round 1

Preliminary Card

Dan Ige def. Sean Woodson by TKO (punches), 1:12, Round 3

Virna Jandiroba def. Yan Xiaonan by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 30-27)

Chase Hooper def. Jim Miller by unanimous decision (30-27, 29-28, 29-28)

Julian Erosa def. Darren Elkins by TKO (punches), 4:15, Round 1

Early Preliminary Card

Michal Oleksiejczuk def. Sedriques Dumas by TKO (punches), 2:49, Round 1

Sumudaerji def. Mitch Raposo by split decision (28-29, 29-28, 29-28)

Marco Tulio def. Tresean Gore by TKO (punches), 3:16, Round 2

Nora Cornolle def. Hailey Cowan by submission (rear-naked choke), 1:52, Round 2