Chris Weidman has picked his side for UFC 335. According to reports from NDTV Sports and Sportskeeda, the former middleweight champion laid out a strategy he believes carries Alex Pereira past Sergei Pavlovich on Dec. 12, and he framed it around something you can’t measure on a scale. “Pereira’s Got That Championship Mindset,” reads the Weidman line NDTV led with. Sportskeeda’s version goes further: Weidman thinks the plan he described leads to a Pereira win.
The detailed breakdown sits behind those headlines, so I won’t pretend to recite it. What I can do is test Weidman’s confidence against the loudest counterargument making the rounds this week, because it came from a coach with plenty of miles on him.
Longo’s case against
Ray Longo went on the Anik & Florian Podcast and said, with obvious affection, that he isn’t sure Pereira belongs at heavyweight. His evidence is the June fight at UFC White House, where Ciryl Gane, a two-time interim champion who now holds the undisputed belt, stopped Pereira with strikes in the second round. Pereira went in chasing history as the UFC’s first three-division titleholder. He came out with a loss and a pile of questions.
View post on X
Longo’s worry is specific, and I like that about it. He called Pereira’s style “Bobby Green-esque,” pointing to the power and the low hands, and then he asked the question everybody in a heavyweight camp eventually asks: “can he take the power coming back is the problem.” He noted that even in sparring Pereira is a guy who absorbs shots and fires back. Longo also recalled that Pereira was knocked down by a jab against Gane, hedging with “if I’m not mistaken,” and added that “It wasn’t even like a power punch, but these guys are huge.”
He set aside the illegal head shots from that fight, which he called horrible, and said nothing he saw before them made him believe Pereira could win a rematch. That’s a coach grading the whole tape, and it deserves respect.
Why Weidman’s angle still holds
The argument against Pereira is about trading. Low hands plus a willingness to eat one to land one works at 185, where Pereira knocked out Israel Adesanya and Sean Strickland, and it worked at light heavyweight against Jan Blachowicz, Jiri Prochazka and Magomed Ankalaev. Longo’s own summary of the stakes: “At 185, big difference. 250, I don’t know.”
So the fix has to be about distance, and the mindset Weidman is praising matters most here. A fighter with a championship temperament doesn’t need to prove he can stand in the pocket with a heavyweight puncher. He needs to decide, before the cage door closes, that he won’t. Pavlovich is a heavy hitter, which is the whole reason this booking scares people. Against a man like that, Pereira’s kickboxing background is the asset, provided he uses it to dictate where the exchanges happen instead of accepting them wherever they come.
There’s a useful parallel in an unrelated story from this week. On Jorge Masvidal’s Death Row MMA show, Masvidal explained that he beat Ben Askren at UFC 239 by studying exactly what Askren did whenever he ended up at a range he disliked: shoot or clinch. Masvidal built his five-second flying knee around that habit. Whoever controls the range, and reads what his opponent does when it’s taken away, writes the fight. That’s the job in front of Pereira, just with a giant instead of a wrestler.
View post on X
The Gane loss argues for this rather than against it. If Longo’s memory is right and a jab put Pereira down, the problem was positional. Gane got to stand at his preferred distance and touch him. A jab only lands from the range where you’ve allowed a bigger man to live.
The pick
Longo might be right that heavyweight is a bridge too far over the long haul. Pavlovich sits at No. 5 in the MMA Fighting Global Rankings, and MMA Fighting noted that a win could put Pereira back in title contention in 2027. That’s a lot of upside riding on one night against a man who can end it with one punch, which is why even fans are nervous. “I hope this guy doesn’t KO Alex Pereira,” Dovy posted on X this week.
I’m with Weidman, with an asterisk. Pereira wins if he fights tall, long and selfish about distance for 15 minutes. If he drifts into a Round 2 slugfest because he wants to prove he can take it, Longo will have been right in public.
Pereira, for his part, seems relaxed. He spent Friday on X questioning why Gane vs. Josh Hokit is headlining UFC 334 over the women’s fight, offering to “help promote this cause no one is paying attention to it.” Then again, Pereira says he’s all but done with any idea of a boxing move, so the Dec. 12 card is where his focus has to be. That’s when we’ll find out whose read on him was correct.
