Fighters who fell the farthest in one fight

felmmando said:
My bad for trying to assist your impaired comprehension. The OP is actually pretty straightforward to anyone with middle school level reading skills.
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Nah I want you to deep throat them boy
 
When Kabob beat Nuggets, I'd never seen anyone take so much from someone.

I dunno how but as soon as I saw that fight, I knew the Conor era was either over or it would never be the same.
 
Talon81 said:
One of my favorite UFC fights of all time. Lacy got tore up by those leg kicks and the GnP was unreal.
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It’s a classic example of what the OP was talking about. I never said it was a UFC fight. Lacy was 21-0-0, 1 NC before the Calzaghe fight. After the Calzaghe fight he went 6-5 with no real notable wins.
 
Rationality said:
Fighting is a merciless game. Nearly every fighter is one beatdown away from a rapid decline. So who fell the farthest and fastest in one fight?

Rory Mac v Ruthless?
T-Ferg v Gaehtje?
R3 vs Holm?
Silva v Weidman?
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Love the thread and your examples, but have to question a few:

3rd one (Ronda/Holm) Ronda didn't necessarily rapidly decline post-fight; we don't have any realistic sample size to prove it. She got destroyed mentally by losing to the point where she took her ball and went home until she got spoon-fed an opportunity that was probably tied into her getting into Pro Wrestling.

Against Nunes she fought like a moron like she always did expecting her opponents to be scared and got clocked so hard in the first 10 seconds that she was fighting on pure instinct after that. She actually did better then I thought she would in a couple spots but she didn't have power/experience/technique to overcome Nunes blitzing her in the first minute of the fight because she got rocked. She actually show-cased a hell of chin if anything, so for me it's tough to that she truly declined physically/mentally to an extreme degree, she just fought the dumbest fight possible, which she almost always did but her opponents weren't very dangerous and/or skilled to hurt her in those spots prior.

I say this as having won my largest ever MMA bet by getting Nunes as a +160 underdog on this fight ;)

4th one (Silva/Weidman) Anderson wasn't really that shot afterwords (at least Mentally).

He had lost a big step due to the leg break, but he still had a competitive loss against Bisping on his title run (could've won by TKO with a different ref with the flying knee at the end of the round where he did the walk off), got a gift decision against Brunson (definitely lost but was still taking damage and hanging in the pocket), and got a passing of the torch fight against Izzy and lost a decision that wasn't embarrassing.

To breakdown your other examples (perfect ones) I'd say:

Rory vs. Robbie = Rory changed the most in how he fought after (scared to take damage, turned into a pure grappler where he used to be a solid stand-up fighter).

Ferguson vs. Gaethje = Ferguson changed the most in how he physically degraded - still tried to fight like he used to but his body wouldn't let him, it was like he was starting to decline before the fight and then aged a decade overnight.
 
StewDogg11 said:
It’s a classic example of what the OP was talking about. I never said it was a UFC fight. Lacy was 21-0-0, 1 NC before the Calzaghe fight. After the Calzaghe fight he went 6-5 with no real notable wins.
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We are in UFC discussion, on an MMA board. I wouldn't think he'd need to specify that we werent talking about basketball, hockey, or boxing. I mean if you had mentioned a PRIDE fighter or something, ok. But to each their own. Carry on.
 
Talon81 said:
We are in UFC discussion, on an MMA board. I wouldn't think he'd need to specify that we werent talking about basketball, hockey, or boxing. I mean if you had mentioned a PRIDE fighter or something, ok. But to each their own. Carry on.
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They’re both combat sports, who cares. I can tell you were the token hall monitor in high school. Loser.
 
felmmando said:
I don't agree with your general formulation. Weidman did take a steep fall when he lost the title, but that wasn't at such a late stage: he competed for years after that. On the other hand, Alexander Volkov's TKO of Alistair Overeem came at a very late stage in the latter's career, but he didn't fall especially far.
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So you don’t agree with the following being turning points in fighters careers?

Chuck/Evans
Wanderlei/Cro Cop
Silva/Weidman
Rockhold/Bisping

Are you doubting a late career knockout will prevent you from ever being the same? You don’t think years of prior punishment in conjunction with exiting your athletic prime could inhibit your recovery? Also Overeem has not fought MMA since that KO, he won a kickboxing decision against an equally old and battle worn Badr Hari that was overturned because Overeem was pumped up on steroids.

Also not sure what you mean by Weidman not being late career against Rockhold. He was 29 but might as well have been 39 with the dozens of surgeries he had. He was 13-0 before it, and 2-6 after it with 5 KO losses. Just because he kept fighting doesn’t make it not late career. He already had 13 of the 15 wins he would ever have, for all intents and purposes his prime was over.

When your ticket is punched there’s no coming back from that. This really isn’t much of a debate for anyone who has seen legends come and go.
 
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JDS after the Cain wars. He still got some wins here and there but he was never his old self.
 
Silva vs Weidman 2
Weidman vs Rockhold
Rockhold vs Bisping 2
 
Rationality said:
Fighting is a merciless game. Nearly every fighter is one beatdown away from a rapid decline. So who fell the farthest and fastest in one fight?

Rory Mac v Ruthless?
T-Ferg v Gaehtje?
R3 vs Holm?
Silva v Weidman?
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Rory by a landslide.

It's important to remember WHO Rory was at the time. He had all the skills, the athleticism, the reach, and the nasty mean-streak that makes a champion. A lot of people saw Rory's ascendancy to UFC 'champion' as a foregone conclusion. At the time, he represented a new kind of technical fighter, not just some psychotic tough-guy.

Then he ran headfirst into Robbie Lawler who, for some reason, showed up to that fight looking to scalp his opponent to a degree that was excessive (even for Lawler).

Rory took AT LEAST 5 fights' worth of damage in that scrap. It was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen in combat sports because we all knew that he was taking compounded damage. It's one thing to break your nose in a fight. It's another thing entirely to add 10 layers of physical trauma on top of that broken nose, not including the severe damage his body took.

We joke about fights 'shaving years' off a fighter's life. In the case of Rory/Lawler, it was undeniably true. He wasn't knocked out. His body just GAVE OUT.
 
kingghidrah said:
Ronda lost a lot from the Holly fight, too, she didn't recovered mentally for weeks. And it killed her confidence and aura of invincibility. So if it's truly based on the effects of one fight, that one was huge.
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Agreed.

I think Ronda had a lot left in the tank after that fight, but her spirit was just completely broken. Women's MMA was still fairly new at the time, but people look back upon the Ronda era as if she had been gifted a series of undeserved decisions. It's really bizarre. She really was that good.

It's a fucking shame she had that fraud Edmond as her coach. That loser wasted valuable training time filling her head with false confidence in her striking, rather than teaching her how to, you know, actually strike.

She had a fantastic base as an Olympic level Judoka. With the right coach, she probably could have extended her reign by 2 or 3 more title defenses, and likely wouldn't have lost in such devastating fashion.
 
Starnes vs Quarry

Not that Starnes was a world beater but people forget he had a win over Leben at the time, after his running competition against Quarry he became the punchline to a joke no one asked to hear.
 
StewDogg11 said:
They’re both combat sports, who cares. I can tell you were the token hall monitor in high school. Loser.
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Sometimes having reading comprehension or caring about the intended topic you are replying to could be helpful, that's all. Just give it a shot.
 
Not quite as drastic, but Faber, after a run of dominance at FW, ran into Mike Brown (literally if you remember the finishing sequence) and never touched gold again. He was competitive right up until retiring, but never the same.

Miguel Torres after the Bowles/Benavidez back-to-back brutal KOs. Completely changed his style from aggressive to passive, never reached anywhere close to his previous highs.

Condit after the Lawler title fight (I thought Condit won).

WEC 4 Ever!!!!!
 
My money is on Ferguson.

Gaethje broke him mentally and physically.

He never won a fight again and looked off every fight after.
 
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