Alex Pereira wants everyone to see what Sergei Pavlovich is about to deal with. The former two-division champion shared photos of his current shape on his own account five weeks out from the fight, and Championship Rounds passed them along on X on Nov. 6. Training camp is clearly in its back half now, and Pereira seems happy to let the pictures make his case for him.
The fight is set for UFC 335 on Dec. 12 in Las Vegas. Pereira vs. Pavlovich is the co-main event underneath Charles Oliveira vs. Diego Lopes for the BMF title, and it closes out the UFC’s year.
Pereira is coming off the worst night of his heavyweight experiment so far. He lost to Ciryl Gane in his debut at the weight, a knockout loss, and he hasn’t let it go. Pereira has pushed hard for a rematch and still believes Gane broke the rules with punches to the back of his head during that fight. Before the move up, he held the light heavyweight title, and years earlier he’d held middleweight gold until Israel Adesanya knocked him out to take it back.
View post on X
Pavlovich has his own ground to recover. He lost to Alexander Volkov, which knocked him down the contender line, but his 2025 decision win over Waldo Cortes-Acosta showed the kind of damage he can do over three rounds. MMA Mania counted 61 significant strikes landed by Pavlovich in that fight, and Cortes-Acosta somehow stayed upright for all of them. That same MMA Mania writer predicted Pereira won’t absorb more than 10 of those shots before going down.
The stakes are real. Gane defends the undisputed heavyweight title against Josh Hokit at UFC 334 on Nov. 14 at Madison Square Garden, and the title shot that follows is wide open. Tom Aspinall vacated the belt because of his eye injury and hasn’t given a return timeline. Volkov has won seven of his last eight, including a recent win over Rizvan Kuniev at UFC 333. As Athlon wrote for Yahoo Sports, a highlight finish for Pereira could vault him past Volkov on star power, and a big knockout for Pavlovich could do the same thing for him. Hokit has already been calling Pereira out, at one point yelling, “I wanna Chama on your mama!”
There’s also an exit ramp if heavyweight doesn’t pan out. Robert Whittaker told Submission Radio he’d be happy to see Pereira come back down: “It would be great [to fight Pereira], I would love to welcome him back to light heavyweight, it would be fun.”
My take: physique photos five weeks out are fun and tell you very little. Pereira looking huge doesn’t change the problem the Gane fight exposed, which is that heavyweights his size can hit him back, and his defensive habits got punished the moment he got careless. At least nobody has to worry about a brutal weight cut here, which is more than I can say for half the fighters I’ve watched fade in Round 3. Pavlovich doesn’t need volume to end fights, and he showed against Cortes-Acosta he’ll keep throwing hard shots all night. I’m taking Pavlovich by knockout in the first two rounds on Dec. 12, and I’ll gladly eat that pick if Pereira’s left hook lands first.
