Islam Makhachev and the Real Winners and Losers from UFC 302

It was punching and kicking time in New Jersey.

But it wasn't just another Saturday night in the swamps and on the shore. Instead, it was a sanctioned form of competitive violence that went down in downtown Newark.

The UFC pulled its production truck into the Garden State, where its early June pay-per-view extravaganza—billed for the masses as UFC 302—headlined a 12-bout card from the Prudential Center.

Lightweight champion Islam Makhachev was the belt-holding incumbent in the show's main-event fight, where he defended his laurels for the third time since wresting it from Charles Oliveira by second-round submission 20 months ago in Abu Dhabi.

Chasing a championship for the third time was undisputed MMA O.G. Dustin Poirier, who stepped into the title-shot picture with a second-round finish of Benoît Saint Denis three months ago at UFC 299 in Miami.

Ex-middleweight champ Sean Strickland faced former failed title challenger Paulo Costa in a five-round co-main event, and the other three main-card bouts featured middleweight Kevin Holland and welterweights Alex Morono and Randy Brown as pre-fight favorites.

The B/R combat team was in place to take in all the action and compile a definitive list of the show's real winners and losers. Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought or two of your own in the comments.

Say what you like about Islam Makhachev.

He's a convenient villain for U.S.-based fans because of his homeland and he seems to revel in his black-hat status, particularly when he faces popular UFC heroes.

But he's also a deserving world champion and he found another level in Saturday night's main event, grinding through adversity and blood and a particularly dogged opponent in Dustin Poirier on the way to a fifth-round stoppage win by D'arce choke.

It was his third defense of the lightweight title he won from Charles Oliveira and subsequently defended twice against then-featherweight champ Alexander Volkanovski.

He chased takedowns and secured them almost at will in the early going against Poirier before the American veteran rallied, cut him with an elbow, and began landing particularly good shots to the body and head.

Makhachev, though, never yielded.

He was still chasing finishes in the fifth round of an exhausting fight and secured it after getting a flashy takedown with a single-leg attack and a spin that cleared a path to Poirier's neck. Makhachev worked toward a guillotine before transitioning to a D'arce that Poirier said took his consciousness as he tapped in surrender at 2:42.

"(Poirier is) a champion, a legend of this sport," Makhachev said. "But it's my favorite choke. I can choke all night."

It was the champ's 15th win in 16 UFC fights and 14th in a row since 2016.

As for Poirier, it was his third fail on the title level and the starting point for questions about his future now that he's 35 years old, comfortably wealthy and eager to have family time.

"I know I can compete with the best of these guys," he said. "But if I do fight again, what am I fighting for? I think this could be it."

There were big winners and big losers on a Saturday night in Newark.

But no one had a worse night than Dave Tirelli.

The veteran cage-side judge is already no stranger to post-fight controversy thanks to previous scorecards but it's hard to imagine going a lot further off the rails than he went while turning two of the night's clearest results into split decisions.

It started in the very first fight of the show between Andre Lima and Mitch Raposo in which Lima landed more strikes in each round of a matchup that featured exactly one takedown and a combined 18 seconds of position control time between the two combatants.

Two judges scored each round for Lima. Tirelli gave two of three to Raposo.

Still, just when that seemed destined to leave the worst taste, Tirelli raised his level.

Though Sean Strickland landed more strikes in three of five co-main event rounds, landed the majority of what impactful shots there were across 25 minutes, and was clearly the fresher fighter when the horn sounded to end the final round, Tirelli still called four of five rounds in Costa's favor while his colleagues went 5-0 and 4-1 for Strickland.

It was a frequent, and warranted, drum for the broadcast crew to bang all night.

"You can't make these mistakes in judging," analyst Daniel Cormier said. "This is someone's future."

The former champ-champ's colleague, Joe Rogan, agreed.

"Check that guy for drugs," he said.

Every five minutes, Paulo Costa looked slightly worse.

He was ripped and ready upon being introduced for his co-main event with Sean Strickland, then looked slightly sweaty and a bit less confident by the end of a first round in which the former middleweight champ never took a backward step.

It continued in a dubious direction through rounds two and three, too, as the American consistently came forward with grinding violence and the Brazilian perpetually moved backward, threw fewer and fewer shots, and looked less and less confident.

So, by the time rounds four and five were done and the statuesque former title challenger slumped down on his stool, no one needed Bruce Buffer to know where Costa stood.

No comprehensive domination. No violent finish. None of the things that the 33-year-old had all but guaranteed he'd deliver by the time 25 minutes had been completed.

Instead, two scorecards in Strickland's favor—by 50-45 and 49-46 counts—overran a ridiculous 49-46 count in Costa's favor from a dissenting judge.

"It was a boring fight," Strickland said. "That Brazilian goes backward fast. He was hard to catch. I thought we were going to have a war."

Michal Oleksiejczuk was doing everything right.

He was putting heavy pressure on Kevin Holland, putting his dynamic middleweight foe in retreat mode, and dumping him to the floor with a particularly hard left hand.

But as he continued to pursue damage on a stricken opponent, the momentum quickly turned in Holland's direction.

The Texas-based veteran seized Oleksiejczuk's right arm during the melee, locked the limb into an armbar, and ultimately prompted referee Herb Dean to intervene after a particularly brutal sequence that looked like the arm broke or the elbow dislocated.

The official time was 1:34 of the first round.

Oleksiejczuk, for the record, didn't tap, but the arm hung limply at his side after regaining his feet and punched the cage wall with his left hand in frustration.

"Dude cracked me with a good shot, but he left his arm out a little too far," Holland said. "I realized he wasn't gonna tap so I squeezed it a little harder."

It was Holland's 13th win in 21 UFC appearances, ended a two-fight skid, and prompted him to label himself the sport's best gatekeeper.

"The chihuahua," he said, "beat the pit bull again."

Niko Price is no one's prototype UFC fighter.

He lurches as much as he moves, throws wide strikes from unorthodox angles, and hasn't won two straight fights since 2018.

But he's clearly got Alex Morono's number.

He beat Morono in two rounds when they first met in 2017—though the result was overturned by a drug test—and made it two straight on Saturday night with a unanimous decision over his second-time rival in a welterweight scrap.

All three judges scored it 29-28. But no, it wasn't very pretty.

Morono was the more effective fighter in the first round and had Price in some trouble while chasing a finish, but the gas tank seemed compromised from that point forward and Price gradually walked him down and beat him up over the subsequent 10 minutes.

It was just his fourth official win in his last 11 fights and followed up on an ugly 38-second loss to 41-year-old Robbie Lawler last summer at UFC 290.

He's now 8-7 in the promotion while Morono slipped to 13-7.

The cage-side team was pretty sure it was over.

Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos had his left arm under Randy Brown's chin and was squeezing hard enough for long enough to make nearby analysts think a finish was imminent.

But Brown wasn't quite ready to surrender.

Instead, the Jamaican welterweight didn't panic, bided his time and ultimately reversed the position and did some damage of his own to finish the second round and control the third, on the way to a close but unanimous decision in the main-card opener.

He'd won the first round largely thanks to a hard knee to Zaleski dos Santos' chin and left his foe a bloody mess with another knee in the third, improving his UFC record to 13-5 with a third consecutive win.

"I won, but I'm still not happy," Brown said. "We got work to do."

He made a case for a climb into the welterweight rankings with a callout of veteran Geoff Neal, who's ranked 10th at 170 pounds.

"It's my f--king time," Brown said. "I'll do whatever it takes."

Roman Kopylov was a striker by trade, having earned 12 of his 13 pro wins—including all four in the UFC—by KO.

But given a matchup with an accomplished professional kickboxer in Cesar Almeida, the Russian middleweight needed to change his tactics.

He was able to do exactly that in the preliminary card's feature bout, offsetting his Brazilian foe's striking prowess by getting the fight to the mat and keeping it there while securing a split-decision victory.

Two judges saw Kopylov a winner by 29-28 and 30-27 margins to offset a dissenting card that had it 29-28 for Almeida. The B/R card agreed with the last of the three judges, giving Almeida the second and third rounds due to superior striking before he was taken down.

Almeida landed more strikes in each of the three rounds on the way to an overall 114-74 margin, but Kopylov scored five takedowns on nine tries and wound up with better than eight-and-a-half minutes of position control time.

"If there was a fight where Kopylov was going to become a takedown artist," analyst Joe Rogan said, "this was it."

Jailton Almeida's corner teammate made a chilling pre-fight threat.

"We're taking (Alexandr) Romanov's neck back to Brazil."

The heavyweight submission artist was matched with the Moldovan big man in Saturday night's duel of ranked contenders, and he both justified his No. 7 status and delivered the promised rear-naked choke win after just 2:27 of the first round.

It was the night's first finish after five consecutive decisions.

"When I was in the locker room, I saw everything was going to decisions. And I knew I was going to get a finish," Almeida said. "I come here to finish fights."

Indeed, Almeida had drawn three submissions and scored a pair of KOs in his first six UFC wins before losing for the first time by second-round KO just three months ago.

That loss came against No. 4 contender Curtis Blaydes, and he reacted to it by calling for a match with second-ranked Ciryl Gane as part of a planned show later this year in Paris.

"I knew I needed to win this fight," he said.

Grant Dawson needed a win.

He'd been one of the UFC's hottest prospects and entered a fight with veteran Bobby Green last fall with eight wins and a draw in nine octagonal appearances.

And then he got KO'd in 33 seconds.

So, when it came to Saturday night's return against veteran welterweight Joe Solecki, the 30-year-old jiu-jitsu ace was programmed to go with what got him there.

He wriggled free from a guillotine choke attempt from Solecki in the fight's initial minute-and-a-half and spent most of the remainder of the 15 minutes in a smothering, controlling position while getting back on the winning side with a grinding unanimous decision.

Dawson scored a takedown in each round and landed 146 of 190 overall strike attempts while also racking up a staggering 13:46 in positional control time.

He took a 29-28 nod on one scorecard and was a 30-27 winner on two others in scoring his ninth UFC triumph and 21st in 25 fights in a career that began in 2014.

Solecki is now 5-3 in the UFC, having lost two straight.

The cleaner it was, the worse it was for Jake Matthews.

So, the 29-year-old Australian welterweight had little choice but to make his prelim bout with long, lanky and precise Phil Rowe a little filthy.

After spending the entire first round and the early portion of the second on the receiving end of hard jabs and snapping right hands, Matthews leaned into reckless abandon, got close to Rowe and began firing on all cylinders and from all angles.

He left Rowe wobbly with a hard right hand to start the momentum shift and rode it through the rest of the final two rounds on the way to a narrow but fair unanimous decision win.

Two judges saw it 29-28 in Matthews' favor and a third gave him all three rounds.

B/R also had it 29-28 after giving Rowe the first round.

The victory was Matthews' 13th in 20 UFC fights since debuting with the promotion on a Fight Night show a decade ago. He'd lost three of five heading into the Rowe fight and was a sizable underdog before rewarding his backers with the upset and scoring his 20th pro win.

Rowe is 10-5 as a pro and 3-3 in the UFC.

The New Jersey fans weren't particularly happy.

But it wasn't because they didn't enjoy the early prelim feature between local hero Mickey Gall and Philadelphia-based interloper Bassil Hafez.

The combatants went back and forth for much of their 15 minutes together, particularly a final round in which both men were wobbled and left swollen and bleeding from their foe's onslaught.

In the end, it was Hafez earning a unanimous decision with two shutout scores of 30-27 and another of 29-28 that earned him a win in his second UFC fight after he'd dropped a decision in his short-notice debut against contender Jack Della Maddalena last summer.

Gall fights out of Green Brook, about 25 miles to the southwest of Newark, but he was in hot water against the aggressive Hafez, who strafed him with shots and frequently stunned him in rounds one and two. Gall hadn't fought in nearly two years due to injury and he seemed warmed to the task in the later going but never got close to a finish.

"Mickey's tough. I'm not gonna lie. I thought I could knock him out," Hafez said. "But I prepared for a long fight. I'm gonna become better because of this performance."

In the end, everyone kissed and made up.

Figuratively speaking, that is.

It was an exchange of handshakes and hugs at the end of the three-rounder between out-of-cage rivals Ailin Perez and Joselyne Edwards, and the pleasantries seemed at least mostly genuine in the aftermath of Perez's unanimous decision win at bantamweight.

The two approached the fight as bitter enemies after a non-competitive altercation yielded threats of lawsuits in both directions and a near fracas at fight week face-offs.

The 15 minutes of combat were more methodical than mayhem, with Perez succeeding because of superior activity and a perpetual ability to take her foe down. She also landed the fight's single biggest punch, a spinning right back fist that connected on Edwards' jaw in the second round and sent her to her backside in a heap.

Two judges gave Perez a 2-1 margin in rounds while the third scored all three in her favor, paving the way for her customary post-fight twerking session. The victory was her 10th overall and third straight in the UFC after she lost her debut in September 2022.

Andre Lima was playing with house money.

He was a winner on Dana White's Contender Series and earned his first official UFC victory when opponent Igor Severino was disqualified for blatantly biting Lima on his left bicep.

But then the good tidings went away.

The 25-year-old Brazilian reversed the regard needle by missing the 126-pound non-title flyweight limit by four pounds, then was desultory at best—and downright dull at worst—while opening Saturday's show with a decision over Mitch Raposo.

He won by a wide margin with 30-27 nods on two scorecards to counter a ridiculous 29-28 in Raposo's favor but generated little if any buzz from the crowd upon scaling the fence in celebration moments after the final horn.

"Lima seems to have potential to fight at the top of the division," analyst Daniel Cormier said, "but in order to fight at the top of the division, you've got to make the weight."

Main Card

Islam Makhachev def. Dustin Poirier by submission (D'arce choke), 2:42, Round 5

Sean Strickland def. Paulo Costa by split decision (46-49, 50-45, 49-46)

Kevin Holland def. Michal Oleksiejczuk by technical submission (armbar), 1:34, Round 1

Niko Price def. Alex Morono by unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 29-28)

Randy Brown def. Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos by unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 29-28)

Preliminary Card

Roman Kopylov def. Cesar Almeida by split decision (29-28, 28-29, 30-27)

Jailton Almeida def. Alexandr Romanov by submission (rear-naked choke), 2:27, Round 1

Grant Dawson def. Joe Solecki by unanimous decision (29-28, 30-27, 30-27)

Jake Matthews def. Phil Rowe by unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 30-27)

Early Preliminary Card

Bassil Hafez def. Mickey Gall by unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 29-28)

Ailin Perez def. Joselyne Edwards by unanimous decision (30-27, 29-28, 29-28)

Andre Lima def. Mitch Raposo by split decision (30-27, 28-29, 30-27)