Jeremy Stephens and the Importance of Appreciating Tenured Talents
The long-time featherweight stalwart never reached the top of the division, but he never looked for an easy assignment either, and that deserves to be remembered and celebrated.
News came out on Wednesday afternoon that Jeremy Stephens and the UFC had parted ways, with the veteran having fought out his contract in July when he lost to Mateusz Gamrot.
Stephens, 35, departs the promotion after logging 34 appearances inside the Octagon, fourth most all-time, finishing with a 15-18 record with one No Contest across two divisions, and having gone without a victory in his last six appearances.
The Iowa native, who located to San Diego and trained with the team at Alliance MMA for much of his UFC career, enjoyed his best success after dropping down to featherweight in 2013, debuting with a bloody win over Estevan Payan to kick off a three-fight winning streak that carried him into the Top 10 and the first main event assignment of his career.
For the next eight years, the heavy-handed “Lil Heathen” remained a fixture in the featherweight rankings, never slipping out of the Top 10, but never climbing all the way into title contention either.
He took every tough assignment there was, believing every time that he was poised to detonate a right hand on whomever was set to stand across from him and propel himself into the thick of the title chase, but it never quite worked out that way. Good wins over Dennis Bermudez and Renan Barao were followed by losses to Max Holloway and Frankie Edgar; his career-best three-fight run of wins over Gilbert Melendez, Dooho Choi and Josh Emmett serving as the lead-in to the lengthy slide that ultimate resulted in his exit from the organization.
For whatever reason, Stephens could never quite get over the hump, but that shouldn’t mean that his career inside the Octagon shouldn’t be celebrated.
#####
Ahead of Stephens’ fight with Calvin Kattar in May 2020, I put together a list of the 10 signature moments of his UFC career, a collection that included early wins over Cole Miller and future champ Rafael Dos Anjos (The Shoryuken Finish, as I’ve always thought of it) to his narrow loss to Anthony Pettis and the featherweight successes that followed.
What started as me sending the piece out on Twitter turned into a thread, the basis of which has been a longstanding position I’ve held and argued for time-and-again when it comes to how we speak about and remember the men and women that step into the cage and put their bodies on the line for out entertainment.
It’s unfortunate that Stephens will forever be remembered by a large swath of the MMA audience as “That Guy” in Conor McGregor’s infamous “Who the fuck is that guy?” line ahead of UFC 205 because the totality of his career was in the UFC was so much more than that.
I don’t think people comprehend just how difficult it is to remain a Top 10 fighter for as long as Stephens did in a division as deep and dangerous as the featherweight ranks. For the better part of a decade, the technical brawler took on the best the company had to offer, never seeking out an easy fight or trying to preserve a winning streak, instead opting to constantly face the most difficult test available.
Did he fail to pass a number of those tests? Absolutely, but think about how many people never actually get to take those tests or who fail the first time and are never seen or heard from again.
There are fighters that burst onto the scene, shot up the ranks, had their chance, and faded into the ether during the time Stephens held down a Top 10 spot in the featherweight division.
Anthony Johnson’s entire second act in the UFC transpired between 2014 and 2017, while Stephens was holding down tenure in the 145-pound ranks.
Current welterweight champion Kamaru Usman made his promotional debut the night after Stephens stopped Bermudez in the third round of their entertaining clash in the middle of the UFC 189 pay-per-view main card. The night Usman won the belt at UFC 235, Stephens fought rising star Zabit Magomedsharipov, catching the second loss in his ongoing six-fight winless skid.
It’s just really goddamn hard to remain that competitive, at that level, for that long, and yet when it doesn’t produce a championship, we have a tendency to downplay or diminish the achievements of those fighters.
Think about this: how would Michael Bisping be remembered if he never managed to shock the world and win the middleweight title towards the end of his career?
Like Stephens, Bisping ultimately found his best success after switching divisions, relocating from light heavyweight to middleweight, where he spent roughly eight years stationed somewhere between No. 4 and No. 8 in the rankings, depending on when you looked, who had fought recently, and who was coming off which victories. He was an established figure who thrived against fighters ranked below him, but couldn’t ever get over the hump, earning more favourable real estate and more time in the spotlight thanks to his Ultimate Fighter pedigree, brash personality, and the perpetual shallowness of the 185-pound ranks.
But before 2016, was Bisping really all that different from Stephens? He was a bigger name, a bigger star, sure, and he had a shinier record, but he lost pretty well every big fight he was in prior to that year.
What was Bisping’s best victory before 2016 — beating Chris Leben? Sexyama? Brian Stann? Alan Belcher? Cung Le?
Those are all good wins over solid, capable competitors that all had a little moment where held down a spot in the Top 15, but it’s not all that different than Stephens beating Darren Elkins, Bermudez, Barao, Melendez, Choi, and Emmett.
The difference is that where Bisping caught lightning in a bottle and enjoyed a magical 2016 campaign that produced a gutsy win at home over Anderson Silva, a shocking title upset over Luke Rockhold at UFC 199, and a narrow victory over Dan Henderson in Manchester to defend his title, Stephens was never able to put together that run.
He maxed out at being No. 5 or 6 or 7 in the featherweight division, the same place Bisping resided before everything broke right for him.
#####
We do this kind of thing far too frequently in sports, stripping careers down to “Champions and Everyone Else,” grading athletes on how many rings or belts they won, rather than examining the totality of their careers.
Matt Serra is a former UFC champion, but did he had a better career than Donald Cerrone, who came up short on his lone attempt to win UFC gold?
What about Cody Garbrandt, who came out of the gates like a bat outta hell, pitched a perfect game to win the bantamweight title from Dominick Cruz, and has been spiralling ever since — would you say his career better than that of former teammate Joseph Benavidez, who spent over a decade as one of the three of four best fighters in two different weight classes, challenging for gold in each division?
Rather than fixate on one potential achievement and looking at things as a “pass/fail” scenario, we need to move beyond counting the rings and even just looking at win-loss records to get the most accurate picture of who these athletes are, what they accomplished, and how difficult it is to do what someone like Stephens did.
For all the time we spend falling over ourselves to predict the futures of countless prospects and getting infatuated with the latest surging contenders, we never seem to take the time to properly appreciate competitors like Stephens, who logged just an incredible slate of fights inside the Octagon over his 34-fight run inside the Octagon.
#####
As I was putting this piece together, I popped over to Twitter to check out a couple different things, and noticed Luke Thomas posted the following:
As John Gooden then pointed out, there are seven current or former UFC champions on that list, and not a single easy fight in the collection. He also fought Gleison Tibau (after Lauzon, before Buccholz) and Din Thomas (first UFC appearance), who are not included on the list.
Real ones know that despite his record, despite never reaching the summit, Jeremy Stephens was a tremendous fighter for a very, very long time, and his career inside the Octagon deserves to be celebrated.