Twelve seconds. That’s how long Gable Steveson’s heavyweight bout with Sean Sharaf lasted on September 19 at Crypto.com Arena, on the UFC 331 card headlined by Van vs. Pantoja 2. Within about a day of the knockout, the glass jaw verdict was in, stamped and filed by people who apparently believe a chin can be fully evaluated in less time than it takes to read a fight poster.
Chael Sonnen isn’t buying it, according to MiddleEasy. His argument is that getting caught by heavyweight power is a thing that happens in this sport, and that one clean shot landing early doesn’t settle anything about a fighter’s durability or where his MMA career goes from here. I agree with him, and I’d push it a step further. A 12-second knockout is close to the least informative result a fight can produce.
What a chin actually is
When analysts talk about a fighter’s chin, what they’re really describing is a pattern. You watch a guy absorb shots across rounds, across fights, in different positions and from different angles, and over time you learn whether he wobbles on the first clean one or eats three and keeps walking. That takes volume. Steveson’s loss gives you one exchange, maybe two, and the only thing it proves is that he got hit flush by a heavyweight before he settled in.
That’s the division. Heavyweight is where the margins for a single mistake are thinnest, because one connection from a 250-pound man ends nights regardless of whose name is on the other end. Calling that a glass jaw confuses a defensive lapse with a structural flaw. The lapse can be coached. A bad chin, the structural kind, mostly can’t, which is exactly why you shouldn’t diagnose one off a sample this small.
The corner fight is the better story
If you want something real to argue about with Steveson, it’s who’s teaching him, and that argument already broke out in public. Colby Covington used the loss to go after Jon Jones’s role in Steveson’s development, calling Jones a “narcissistic abusive sociopath” on X and advising Steveson to join Daniel Cormier’s camp, per MMA Mania. MMA Mania’s own aside was that Steveson could easily have trained with a shorter Olympic wrestler who found serious heavyweight success, and chose otherwise. That’s a fair jab.
Jones, for his part, stayed dismissive. Responding to Covington on X, he wrote, “I just like reminding Colby that I’m not the man I used to be,” and added, “And even at my weakest, I’ve always been better than him.” He also posted separately that he’ll more than likely never fight again but is still in the UFC drug-testing pool and “leaving doors open,” as MMA Fighting reported.
What I take from all of this is that the coaching question is a legitimate one and the chin question is a lazy one. Early knockouts are often about entries, distance management and hand position in the first exchange, the habits a camp drills or fails to drill. That’s where Steveson’s people should be spending their October. The Covington and Jones feud is mostly noise, but it at least points at the right variable.
Heavyweight forgives fast
The other reason the obituaries are premature is how quickly this division rewards momentum. Look at Josh Hokit. MMA Mania notes he’s headlining UFC 334 at Madison Square Garden on November 24 against Ciryl Gane for the heavyweight title, in what would be only his sixth trip to the Octagon and 11th pro fight. Gane is a -270 favorite, and Alexander Volkov told Helen Yee that a Hokit fight would be “the easiest fight ever, easier title shot.” Whatever you think of Hokit’s act, his path shows how few wins it takes for a heavyweight with a profile to get back into the conversation.
Steveson has a profile. Covington, Jones and Sonnen are all talking about him off a 12-second loss, which tells you the UFC isn’t going to bury him for it. A good win or two and the clip of September 19 becomes a footnote in his highlight package.
So here’s my position. Sonnen’s right that the glass jaw talk is premature, and the people pushing it are reading a single frame as if it were the whole film. I’d wait until Steveson takes some real damage across some real rounds before anyone pronounces on his chin. Until then, the most important number from UFC 331 is how many seconds he got to work before the shot landed, and the answer, 12, is too few to judge anything except the first exchange.
The heavyweight picture keeps moving without him in the meantime. Volkov meets Rizvan Kuniev on October 24, and Gane and Hokit settle the belt a month later at the Garden.
