Charles Oliveira holds the UFC records for finishes, submissions and bonuses. Since he arrived in 2010, he has stopped 21 of the 25 men he’s beaten in the octagon. And this fall the conversation around him has somehow turned to whether he’s too boring to hold a belt with a curse word in its name.
He told MMA Fighting what he thinks of that, and his first answer was that he laughs. His second answer was better. “Someone saying my fights are boring? Sorry, but you’d have to be pretty stupid to say something like that,” Oliveira said. Then he got to the line Guilherme Cruz posted on X Monday, which has been ricocheting around ever since. If the BMF fight is about going in there and breaking each other up, he said, “Then, honestly, brother, here’s the belt. Take it somewhere else. That belt is not for me.”
He’s right, and the people complaining owe him a better argument than the one they’ve been making.
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What actually happened in March
Oliveira won the BMF title from Max Holloway in March by out-grappling and dominating him over the full distance. That’s the whole offense. He fought the fight that won. In his telling, his best punches and kicks landed, every takedown he attempted put Holloway on the mat, and his ground control was total. “Anyone who’s a fighter or an athlete knows that nobody in the division has done to Max what I did to him. Nobody,” he said, and he made a point of adding that he respects Holloway enormously.
You can quibble with how he grades himself. The result is harder to quibble with.
The complaint, as far as I can tell, is that a lopsided win doesn’t count under the BMF banner unless it looks like a pileup on the interstate. That logic falls apart the second you apply it to the man with the finish record. Oliveira didn’t pile up all those stoppages by playing it safe. He got them by being the most dangerous finisher in whatever building he was fighting in. When the finish didn’t come against Holloway, he took the decision. Punishing that is punishing a fighter for being good at fighting.
He laid out the double standard plainly. “If I go out there and trade punches and get knocked out, I’m stupid because I could have used jiu-jitsu. If I go out there and use jiu-jitsu, then it sucks.” His only measuring stick is the record. “What I want to know is what’s on Sherdog. It’s right there, a win or a loss.”
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The belt never had a rulebook
Quoting Cruz’s post on X, Jed Meshew wrote that he honestly doesn’t know what the BMF title is about, other than giving the promotion another belt to leverage. That’s what makes the criticism of Oliveira so slippery. Nobody wrote down what BMF behavior is supposed to look like, so fans fill in the blank with whatever they’d most like to watch. Usually that’s two guys planting their feet and swinging.
Oliveira’s answer was to define the sport instead of the belt. “We’re not going to box, we’re not going to fight muay Thai, we’re not going to wrestle or do jiu-jitsu. We’re going to fight MMA,” he said. A fighter who mixes the martial arts better than his opponent has done the job. Asking him to throw away half his arsenal so a title with a vague mandate feels more on-brand gets it backwards.
Where the critics have half a point
There is one awkward fact in the middle of all this. Holloway lost that night, and months later he headlined a massive rematch with Conor McGregor. Oliveira sat on the sidelines hoping for a lightweight title shot and ended up booked against Lopes. Some people told him a more aggressive performance might have earned him the kind of fight Holloway got. His reply was a fair one: “Would Conor even have accepted a fight with me?”
So yes, the loser of the March fight walked into the bigger payday. That stings, and it’s the best case the brawl crowd has. But Oliveira’s view holds up better over the length of a career. He said that if he’d lost to Gamrot or Holloway, he wouldn’t be making the money he makes and wouldn’t even be in the UFC. One McGregor booking is a lottery ticket. Fifteen years of winning is a living.
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Dec. 12 in Las Vegas
The next test is Lopes, the two-time featherweight title challenger, in the UFC 335 main event at T-Mobile Arena. Alex Pereira and Sergei Pavlovich fight in the co-main. There’s no bad blood between the two Brazilians, and Oliveira’s scouting report on Lopes is generous. He says Lopes has jiu-jitsu, wrestling, aggressive hands and knockout power. Oliveira says his team is studying Lopes from every angle, and he was blunt about the one thing he won’t do: “Of course, I’m not approaching this with the mindset of, ‘Let’s stop and trade punches to see who goes down first.’”
If he wins by dragging Lopes to the canvas and holding him there until the horn, call it whatever you want. The belt will still go home with the guy who has finished more UFC opponents than anyone alive.
