5 UFC fighters who turned out to be better than fans initially thought
No fighter in the UFC travels the same path, and while the likes of Conor McGregor and Francis Ngannou took a pretty direct route to the top, the same cannot be said for many of their contemporaries.
Over the years, we’ve seen several fighters break into the UFC and fail to impress – only to be far better than they were initially assumed to be.
This is often because fighters improve over time, but sometimes it’s also because said fighters somehow get underrated.
Regardless, here are five UFC fighters who turned out to be much better than the fans initially believed.
#5. Charles Oliveira – former UFC lightweight champion
It’s probably fair to state that every UFC fan always knew that Charles Oliveira had serious talent. After all, the Brazilian arrived on the scene in 2010 with a 12-0 record and quickly dispatched his first two opponents inside the octagon via submission.
However, there probably weren’t many fans in Oliveira’s early days with the promotion who would’ve predicted that he’d become the world’s most feared 155lb fighter.
After all, ‘do Bronx’ always appeared to be fragile, and for a long time, it seemed like any fighter who could hit him with a heavy shot had a strong chance of beating him. Donald Cerrone was the first man to stop him with strikes in the summer of 2011, but his loss to Cub Swanson seemed to cement him as a fighter with a bit of a glass jaw.
That fight saw Swanson land a seemingly innocuous shot, only for Oliveira to collapse to the ground after a delayed reaction, leaving the referee to step in before Swanson could follow up.
However, after suffering another five losses between that fight in 2012 and 2017, Oliveira improved dramatically, taking out opponent after opponent to climb up into the top ten at 155lbs.
By 2020, ‘do Bronx’ had become a genuine title contender – but when he fought Michael Chandler for the title vacated by Khabib Nurmagomedov, it looked like his old fragility was about to resurface when ‘Iron Mike’ dropped him in the first round.
However, Oliveira was able to recover, and in the second round, he turned the tables on Chandler and finished him off with a series of strikes of his own, becoming the new champion in the process.
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Essentially, ‘do Bronx’ perhaps didn’t turn out to be more talented than the fans expected – he’s turned out to be far tougher than he was ever given credit for.