T-Mobile Arena, the site of Max Holloway’s win against Conor McGregor – Source: Unsplash
Nine seconds. That’s how long it took for the biggest fight of the summer to stop being a fight. Conor McGregor threw a jumping scissor kick to open his rematch with Max Holloway, his knee gave out on the landing, and the sound that followed wasn’t a crowd roaring — it was thousands of people at T-Mobile Arena realizing, in real time, that they’d just watched the ending before the fight had really started. McGregor tried to stand on it. Tried twice. Referee Mike Beltran waved it off at 1:09. That’s it. That’s the whole fight.
Nobody paid for that. Nobody dreamed about that on the walk into the arena. It’s the kind of night that sends fans straight to their tools to make sense of what just happened. Running the numbers through an expected value calculator has become as much a part of the post-fight ritual now as arguing about it on social media. And somewhere behind the scenes afterward, Holloway had to figure out how to feel about winning something that never got the chance to be won — a fight that barely lasted long enough to work up a sweat, a UFC record for total fight time attached to a night where he threw maybe a dozen real strikes at best.
Much of the post-fight narrative has centered around McGregor. Why did he come back? Was he injured heading into the fight? Will he ever step foot into the Octagon again? Those are questions only the Notorious One can truly answer. The real questions should now center on Blessed and what’s next to come for the Pride of Hawaii. Here are three names that we think former featherweight and BMF champion Max Holloway should fight next.
Justin Gaethje
Second round on the south lawn of the White House at UFC Freedom 250. Huge underdog Justin Gaethje’s on the mat as many thought he would be, with champion Ilia Topuria raining down ground-and-pound, and the entire lawn full of people is doing the math on how many more seconds “The Highlight” has left in him. Somehow, he survives it, and by round four he’s the one walking forward, and Topuria — unbeaten, untouched, supposedly unbeatable — is looking at his corner with both eyes swelling shut, deciding he’s had enough.
A new lightweight champion of the world was crowned that night, and the funny thing is, Max Holloway’s already knocked this version of Gaethje out — round five, UFC 300, the BMF title, out cold. Is Gaethje tougher and meaner than the man who went down that night? He does now have a belt to defend instead of a reputation to salvage. But at the age of 37 and two years older than he was the last time Holloway starched him, how much better can one truly be? Blessed will fancy his chances.
Ilia Topuria
Here’s the sentence that matters: Ilia Topuria’s aura is gone. Not his talent — his aura, the thing that made grown fighters look nervous in the staredown, the sense that losing to him was inevitable before the bell even rang. Alexander Volkanovski, Holloway himself, Charles Oliveira — he went through all three like it was scheduled maintenance. Then Gaethje hit him with something at the White House that no amount of talent could talk his corner out of stopping. And once a man like that gets humanized, he stays humanized.
Everybody who ever lost to him gets to wonder, quietly, whether the ghost they were chasing was ever really unbeatable. Which brings us to Holloway, who knows exactly what it felt like to be finished by peak Topuria — third round, UFC 308, the kind of knockout that ends a featherweight reign and starts a rebuild.
Does revenge taste sweeter now that the man who beat him is someone Holloway has already handily dispatched? Or does it feel hollow, chasing a ghost who’s already had his mystique stripped away by another guy’s fists? There’s only one way to find out.
Paddy Pimblett
Forget the rankings for a second. Picture the actual cage: two guys who will talk your ear off before, during, and after every single fight, both fresh off statement wins on the same July night, both suddenly sitting in the lightweight top five within one spot of each other. Paddy Pimblett needed fifty-two seconds to erase a five-round decision loss against Gaethje from memory, choking Benoit Saint-Denis unconscious and then doing the walk he does. Holloway needed one wild knee injury to make history in a third weight class. Put those two energies in the same cage, and you don’t need a title on the line to sell it — you need a ticket window and a prayer for crowd control.
This is the fight the UFC books because it’s fun, not because a ranking sheet demands it. Holloway’s chin and volume have bailed him out against sharper strikers than Pimblett. But Pimblett’s world-class jiu-jitsu means the moment this fight hits the mat, anything can happen — and against a chin like Holloway’s, the mat might be the only place Pimblett’s got a puncher’s chance.