What Kamaru Usman is Doing is Incredible
The UFC welterweight champ is on an all-time great trajectory, but some people seem to have a difficult time accepting or acknowledging that fact
Kamaru Usman is 13-0 in the UFC.
Only one person has ever won more consecutive fights than that inside the Octagon, and at the time it was happening, everyone was in agreement that it made Anderson Silva the greatest fighter of all-time.
Only four fighters — Georges St-Pierre, Demetrious Johnson, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and Max Holloway — have ever won as many consecutive fights as Usman, and each of them is considered the best to ever do it in their respective divisions.
Not only has Usman gone 13-0 inside the Octagon, but he’s done it in the welterweight division, an historically strong weight class where climbing into the Top 10 is an arduous process and stringing together four, five, or even six wins is rare.
What’s more is that the welterweight champion’s unprecedented run of success includes victories over the fighters currently ranked Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 in the division, as well as former interim title challenger and lightweight titleholder Rafael Dos Anjos, which is just an insanely rugged slate of competition.
Not impressed? Here’s what the “Usman Scale” looks like for every other division:
HW: Ngannou, Blaydes, Rozenstruik, Lewis, Gane, and Abdurakhimov
LHW: Teixeira, T. Santos, Reyes, Rakic, Oezdemir, and Krylov
MW: Whittaker, Costa, Cannonier, Till, Brunson, and Hall
LW: Poirier, Gaethje, Oliveira, Chandler, RDA, and Hooker
FW: Holloway, Ortega, Zabit, Y. Rodriguez, Emmett, and Stephens
BW: Sterling, Sandhagen, Font, Garbrandt, Edgar, and Munhoz
FLY: Moreno, Benavidez, Askarov, Perez, Schnell, and Bontorin
BW: de Randamie, Holm, Ladd, Aldana, Kunitskaya, and McMann
FLY: Andrade, Chookagian, Murphy, Maia, Araujo, and Eye
SW: Namajunas, Jędrzejczyk, Xiaonan, Esparza, Gadelha, and Waterson
In terms of the active champions in those divisions (using Khabib Nurmagomedov at lightweight because he’s technically still the champ), here’s who the current titleholders in each division have beaten from their corresponding list of six opponents:
HW: Ngannou
LHW: Reyes, Krylov
MW: Whittaker, Costa, Vettori, Brunson
LW: Poirier, Gaethje, RDA
FW: Holloway
BW: (crickets)
FLY: Benavidez (twice), Perez
BW: de Randamie, Holm
FLY: Chookagian, Maia, Eye
SW: Jedrzejczyk
Now, there are elite talents left off those lists that the reigning champs have beaten (examples: Daniel Cormier, Fabricio Werdum, Yoel Romero, Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey, Miesha Tate), but only one of them (MW champ Israel Adesanya) has beaten more than three of the six corresponding fighters in their respective divisions, and only one of them (Nurmagomedov) has more than 10 consecutive victories inside the Octagon in one division; Amanda Nunes has won 11 straight split between bantamweight (9) and featherweight (2).
Despite his staggering success, it feels like Usman doesn’t get anywhere near the same level of acclaim and adoration as many of his contemporaries, including those that have achieved considerably less than he already has.
Maybe it’s because he’s not considered the best in the history of his division like heavyweight champ Stipe Miocic or doesn’t have the bombastic personality and panache of middleweight ruler Israel Adesanya, but what Usman has done in his six-plus years on the UFC roster is staggering and should be talked about it those terms far more frequently than it is.
Coming out of Saturday night’s event, Usman’s incredible run has largely been talked about in terms of how it doesn’t quite measure up to the career achievements of GSP, who is universally regarded as the greatest welterweight of all time, and is arguably the greatest fighter of all time.
It’s the MMA equivalent of diminishing a transcendent film because it’s not The Godfather.
What makes it weirder still is that we have no hesitation about hustling someone up the pantheon of all-time greats in some of the more historically shallow divisions, but are quick to downplay greater overall accomplishments in more competitive weight classes because they don’t quite measure up to the absolute apex-level achievements of someone like St-Pierre.
Take heavyweight, for instance, where most agree Miocic is the best in the history of the division.
The two-time reigning heavyweight champion is 14-3 in the Octagon and has one win on the “Usman Scale.” His three successful title defences against Alistair Overeem, Junior Dos Santos, and Francis Ngannou during his first reign set a new record for the most consecutive successful title defences in the UFC heavyweight division.
Miocic gets all-time great status because he’s put together the best total resume in a division where no one has ever really been able to dominate, but Usman is currently doing something only five other fighters in UFC history have ever accomplished and yet it doesn’t seem like it’s that big of a deal to some folks.
So let me see if this helps put what he is doing / has done into better perspective:
Usman and Khabib Nurmagomedov are both 13-0 in the UFC.
Like Usman, Nurmagomedov took an abnormally long time to finally reach the top of the lightweight division. Each won their respective titles in their 10th UFC appearances and then earned three consecutive successful title defences.
Nurmagomedov has beaten three fighters on the lightweight “Usman Scale,” and a total of five athletes currently ranked in the Top 15 in the 155-pound weight class.
Nurmagomedov is considered the greatest lightweight of all time and on the short list of the best fighters in MMA history, while suggesting the same about Usman is usually met with a dismissive head shake and a sigh of derision, but why?
If the only thing keeping Usman from being in the conversation is that there is already a welterweight in the conversation, that’s stupid; the presence of one great athlete from a particular division shouldn’t mean that another can’t be considered amongst the best fighters to ever grace the Octagon.
No one is going to suggest keeping Adesanya out of the mix should “The Last Stylebender” continue his unbeaten reign atop the middleweight ranks simply because Anderson Silva exists and has already been penciled in as the middleweight representative in all current “Best Fighters Ever” discussions.
It can’t be that he’s not unbeaten overall because if that’s the criteria, Silva and St-Pierre get bumped because the former lost a couple times prior to arriving in the UFC (and a bunch following his 16-fight winning streak) and the latter dropped a pair of contests inside the UFC cage, though he did avenge both defeats. Among active champions, only Adesanya remains unbeaten overall, and he’s four victories back of the welterweight champion, though he is 4/6 on the middleweight “Usman Scale” and has beaten six athletes currently stationed in the Top 15.
But while Nurmagomedov and Adesanya are held in extremely high regard, it seems like many view Usman as being a notch or two below his contemporaries in the lightweight and middleweight divisions.
If the argument is that his fights aren’t always the most exciting, that feels like focusing too much on the past because his wins over Burns and Colby Covington were tremendously entertaining and his title-winning effort against Tyron Woodley was dominant, plus no one seems to say all that much about the fact that two of Adesanya’s last five victories were tepid affairs because the others were bangers.
Usman got labeled as a “boring fighter” early on because while he was dominant, he wasn’t earning finishes. Combined with his lack of flamboyance on the mic, it has created a skewed impression of him as a competitor, and rather than pushing back against that perception by highlighting his incredible success in the Octagon and that he speaks facts whenever he’s got a mic in his hand, a large number of critics and observers seem more inclined to measure his achievements against an all-time great like St-Pierre, which automatically diminishes what Usman has done and keeps him from getting his due.
What Usman has done thus far in his UFC career is some real all-time-great-level stuff, whether you want to admit it or not.
I just don’t understand what’s so difficult about acknowledging that?