UFC 269: Why are People Still Doubting Charles Oliveira?
The streaking UFC lightweight champion heads into Saturday's main event as a betting underdog, feeling like someone that still hasn't gotten the credit his incredible four-year run deserves
Five years ago ahead of UFC 206 in Toronto, when Keyboard Kimura lived at The Province, I wrote a piece asking “Why isn’t Max Holloway a star?”
The Hawaiian had just been tapped to face Anthony Pettis in an interim featherweight title fight atop the revamped UFC 206 main card and was entering on a nine-fight winning streak, and yet folks weren’t all that keen on “Blessed” being the main attraction on a pay-per-view broadcast. It didn’t matter that he had bested a collection of Top 15 talents and had all the markings of someone poised to rule the division, which would come to pass — he wasn’t a marquee name, had lost to the most established or popular opponents he’d faced, and folks just weren’t ready to get behind him as a pay-per-view headliner and potential divisional kingpin.
In reading it back this morning, I was drawn to the similarities between Holloway then and Charles Oliveira now, as the Brazilian readies to defend his lightweight title for the first time against Dustin Poirier this weekend in the main event of UFC 269.
Their situations isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, but there are similarities, and it makes me wonder why so many people take so long to warm up to athletes that are consistently putting on a show inside the Octagon?
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Think about when you started to believe that Charles Oliveira might actually be the best lightweight in the UFC.
For a lot of people, it was probably when he beat Tony Ferguson at UFC 256 at the end of last year, but even that could have been argued away and diminished. After all, Ferguson was only seven months removed from the hellacious beating he took from Justin Gaethje at UFC 249, was a little older, and showing signs of slowing down, plus, Oliveira couldn’t finish him.
It’s reasonable to believe that some weren’t sold when the 32-year-old Brazilian was tapped to face Michael Chandler for the vacant lightweight title earlier this year.
There are still probably some that don’t believe it now, as he readies to defend the lightweight strap he won in May against Dustin Poirier on Saturday night in the main event of UFC 269.
Part of that is being able to chip away at Chandler, the Bellator transfer who landed opposite Oliveira after knocking out Dan Hooker in his promotional debut in January.
Part of that is because Poirier had been the second best lightweight on the planet through the end of Khabib Nurmagomedov’s reign, going 6-1 with one No Contest from the start of 2017 until the close of 2020, with wins over Jim Miller, Anthony Pettis, Eddie Alvarez, Gaethje, Holloway, and Hooker, and his lone setback coming against Nurmagomedov, who retired 13 months later with an unbeaten record.
And part of that, I would assume, is because it’s difficult to shift your perceptions about someone after you’ve had so much history with them and reaching this point never seemed like it was in the cards for Oliveira, right up until he made it happen.
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Oliveira made his UFC debut on August 1, 2010, submitting Darren Elkins in 41 seconds.
Over his first eight years competing under the UFC banner, “Do Bronx” went 10-8 with one No Contest. There were flashes of brilliance and reasons to be excited, but each seemed to be accompanied by a questionable decision, an uneven performance, or a reason to think the long-limbed Brazilian finisher would never quite reach his full potential.
Those eight losses all came against fighters positioned ahead of him in the rankings, which can be explained away as a young fighter learning the ropes and struggling in his toughest assignments or taken as an indication that there was a level Oliveira just wasn’t going to be able to reach. The initial four setbacks felt like the former, while the second four-pack felt like the latter, and after eight years and 19 fights, it just felt like everyone had a pretty good read on who Oliveira was as a fighter and where his ceiling sat.
We were all so convinced that we knew who Oliveira was, what he could be inside the Octagon that his winning three fights in 2018 didn’t really register all that much. We were wrapped up in Nurmagomedov finally winning the title and his feud with Conor McGregor, and in Poirier’s resurgence; Gaethje’s first two career losses, and Al Iaquinta having a moment; the emergence of Dan Hooker and Alexander Hernandez and so much more.
When he added three more wins in 2019, it still didn’t make major waves, even though winning six straight fights in the lightweight division is a colossal undertaking, regardless of who is on the other side of the Octagon. The finishes were great and the streak was impressive, sure, but he wasn’t beating ranked opponents and there were scores of talented fighters stationed ahead of him in the divisional hierarchy that seemed far more likely to make a run at gold.
One of the things that really worked against Oliveira is that during those first eight years, he earned a reputation as someone that looked for an exit at the first sign of trouble. He was a frontrunner, and as soon as things started going south, he crumbled, and in a sport where resilience and mental fortitude are prerequisites for championship success, the talented finisher appeared to be lacking those vital pieces.
So when he started rattling off finishes of veteran lightweights outside the Top 15, no one really got too worked up because Oliveira had been doing the same thing for years.
Even after he submitted Kevin Lee in the final bout before last year’s COVID shutdown in mid-March, the reactions were split between wondering if Oliveira was becoming a factor in the lightweight division and wondering if Lee was ever going to figure things out and reach the lofty heights many forecasted him to reach. It was Oliveira’s seventh straight win and seventh consecutive finish, and yet we still weren’t sure if he was someone to consider in the championship conversation because there were plenty of more established options and we had never been forced to consider him before.
In hindsight, it was dumb, but it was also emblematic of one of the flaws with how we think about and talk about fighters in this sport.
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We have a tendency to anchor our opinions about established fighters, but be open to limitless possibilities and prone to hyperbole when it comes to newcomers, rising stars, and fighters we pegged as potential champions earlier in their careers.
Guys like Oliveira, with their long histories inside the Octagon, get cemented in our brains at a certain position within their division; those previous experiences dictating the just how high we could see him climbing, no matter what the evidence in front of us suggests. But a newcomer with an impressive debut or someone that flashes in their second or third appearance — someone that doesn’t have that track record and baggage and hasn’t let us down in the past — is always capable of ascending to the greatest heights, especially if they’re someone generating a little buzz and polling well with MMA Twitter.
We cling to reasons to downplay runs like the one Oliveira was on prior to last year’s stoppage because we’d seen him amass a ton of finishes in the past, watched him falter inside the Octagon on multiple occasions, and already had a long list of lightweight contenders we preferred at the time. The results almost didn’t matter, and when it got to a point where we needed to really detach ourselves from that pre-established position we held regarding the Brazilian, we did the thing where we diminished his success by picking apart the guy he beat, as if Oliveira ascending and Lee being a frustrating underachiever couldn’t be happening at the same time.
Lee is the perfect counterpoint to Oliveira here, actually, as he’s someone whose scattered moments of brilliance continue to inform peoples’ position on him, even though there has been plenty of evidence to suggest it might be time to change how we think about “The Motown Phenom.”
Kevin Lee is 1-4 in his last five fights, but the performance most everyone clings to in that run is the lone victory over Gregor Gillespie at UFC 244 in New York City.
It was a stunning effort — a first-round head kick finish that left Gillespie slumped against the cage, separated from his consciousness and bounced from the ranks of the unbeaten at the exact same time — but objectively speaking, it also feels like an outlier and not the norm.
In the two fights before that, Lee dropped a unanimous decision to Al Iaquinta and suffered a fourth-round submission loss to Rafael Dos Anjos in his first foray to welterweight. After that victory, he missed weight ahead of his bout with Oliveira, where he succumbed to a guillotine choke in the third round, was out of action for 17 months dealing with multiple knee surgeries, proclaimed himself to be a “Top 5 welterweight” despite having zero welterweight victories, and then lost a decision to short-notice replacement Daniel Rodriguez in his return to the 170-pound weight class.
He was released by the UFC last week, and the prevailing narratives surrounding the news were that Lee was still capable of putting it all together and being a champion, and that the UFC made a mistake in letting him go. The main evidence people used to support those arguments? His win over Gillespie.
People are so tethered to their initial impressions of Lee as a skilled, athletic, potential contender that he continues to get the benefit of the doubt despite their being far more evidence to the contrary, while Oliveira’s history of wilting kept folks from viewing him as a legitimate lightweight threat even when he was rattling off finish after finish… after finish after finish after finish after finish after finish.
Even after he beat Chandler in Houston earlier this year to win the title, a whole ton of people were quick to play the “… yeah, but he’s not really the best lightweight in the world” card, as if it remains highly unlikely that the guy with the nine-fight winning streak carrying the big, shiny belt into this weekend’s main event could possibly be the best lightweight on the planet.
It’s almost like people are waiting for Oliveira to lose in order to say, “See? There was really no reason to get excited,” as if people put together nine-fight winning streaks with eight finishes and a championship victory in the lightweight division all the time.
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Five years ago, I asked why Max Holloway wasn’t a bigger star heading into his interim featherweight title fight with Anthony Pettis at UFC 206.
He had won nine straight fights, six by stoppage, and was coming off his “let’s throw down right here” moment with Ricardo Lamas at UFC 199. He would go on to beat Pettis three nights later, felling “Showtime” in the third round to claim the interim featherweight title, then venture to Rio de Janeiro and do the same to Jose Aldo, emerging as the undisputed featherweight champion and a budding superstar.
Five years later, I’m sitting here asking similar questions about Oliveira, wondering why it still feels like people aren’t sure about the Brazilian finisher set to enter this weekend’s championship main event on his own nine-fight winning streak, with championship gold draped over his shoulder?