Joel Faglier ate the worst five minutes Javad Mahjoub could dish out at UFC Edmonton, then stopped the exhausted Calgary heavyweight by TKO at 2:11 of Round 2 on Saturday’s prelims at Rogers Place.
Mahjoub was making his UFC debut in front of a home-province crowd. UFC Canada billed him on X as “Calgary’s own,” and for one round he looked every bit the local kid about to send everybody to the concession stand happy. The UFC’s account posted a clip of him “LANDING BIG EARLY” and followed it a couple of minutes later with “Javad Mahjoub can sense the finish.”
He could. He just couldn’t get it.
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Aaron Bronsteter scored the opening frame “10-9 Mahjoub on the cusp of a 10-8” on X, then tacked on a warning that turned out to be the whole fight: “Let’s see if his gas tank holds up here because Faglier is tough”.
It did not hold up. Faglier, the American who weighed in at 261 pounds to Mahjoub’s 252.5 on Friday, came out for the second with plenty left while Mahjoub had spent his savings in the first. The momentum swung hard, and referee intervention came at 2:11. Bronsteter’s postfight summary was blunt: “Mahjoub simply ran out of gas.”
UFC light heavyweight Johnny Walker watched along and offered the most accurate scouting report of the night on X: “Look like those heavy weights are fighting the fifth round on the first haha”.
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The context
This was not the result the picks columns expected. MMA Fighting’s UFC Edmonton predictions had Mahjoub over Faglier, part of a prelim slate that also included Tanner Boser vs. Jhonata Diniz at heavyweight. Faglier flipped that one on its head, and he did it the hard way, by surviving a round in which he was getting hit often enough that a 10-8 was on the table.
The rest of the early action Saturday leaned toward finishes. Katlyn Cerminara stopped Mackenzie Stiller by first-round TKO at 4:46, Steven Koslow choked out Chad Anheliger with a rear-naked choke at 4:31 of Round 3, Chelsea Chandler submitted Melissa Croden with a kimura at 4:52 of Round 1, and SuYoung You tapped Cody Chovancek with a kimura of his own at 4:19 of Round 3.
No next fight has been announced for either heavyweight. The main card starts at 8 p.m. ET on Paramount+, with Joaquin Buckley vs. Mike Malott at welterweight in the main event and Erin Blanchfield vs. Jasmine Jasudavicius in the flyweight co-main.
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Quick take
I’ll take this kind of heavyweight fight every single weekend. Two big men, one of them nearly gets finished, the other one runs out of fuel, and the guy who looked done at the horn walks out with his hand raised. Faglier deserves real credit for absorbing that first round and keeping his feet under him, because plenty of guys fold when the debutant is teeing off and the crowd is screaming for a hometown finish. Mahjoub clearly has the power to hang around at 265. What he needs before he gets his second UFC booking is a camp built around one thing: still being able to throw hard at the 2-minute mark of Round 2.
