Josh Hokit just got handed the biggest assignment of his career. RingSide24 reports the heavyweight is set to face former interim champion Ciryl Gane at UFC 335, and plenty of people decided Hokit was cooked about four seconds after the matchup surfaced.
Chael Sonnen is not one of them. Per RingSide24, Sonnen said it’s too early to write Hokit off. Sonnen has talked his way into and out of a lot of predictions over the years, but on the general principle of not burying a heavyweight before the cage door shuts, he’s on solid ground.
The card number needs an asterisk. Championship Rounds, posting on X last Friday, framed Gane vs. Hokit as the main event of UFC 334. RingSide24’s report from Monday says 335. Until the UFC puts out an official lineup, treat the event number as unsettled.
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Alex Pereira had something to say about the billing, too. According to Championship Rounds, Pereira doesn’t think the fight should headline, and he posted: “Why the Women’s Fight is not the Main Event? Okay let me help promote this cause no one is paying attention to it.” That’s a guy who has shared a cage with Gane and apparently didn’t leave a fan.
That history matters. In MMA Mania’s mailbag this week, the staff broke down what Pereira needs to change from “the Ciryl Gane fight” before his newly announced bout with Sergei Pavlovich, and Ryan Harkness wrote that Gane had already proven Pereira isn’t really built for heavyweight. Thomas Myers took a different shot at the Frenchman in the same piece, joking that if he were a fighter he’d be Jon Jones, “or, Cyril Gane in 2026,” in a rant about fighters piling up eye pokes and low blows without losing points. So Gane arrives with a big 2026 win on his ledger and a reputation for testing referees’ patience.
He also arrives with the scar tissue of a title loss. Jones submitted Gane in 2023 to win the heavyweight belt Francis Ngannou left behind when he bolted for PFL. Gane has been one of the division’s best for years, and the knock on him has always been that he’s lost when the stakes were highest.
Hokit isn’t exactly a stranger to attention either. A USA Today Network opinion piece published this week named him alongside Sean Strickland as one of the UFC’s most openly conservative fighters. He talks, and now he gets to back it up against a guy with real heavyweight gold on his résumé, even if it was the interim kind.
My take: I’m with Sonnen. Gane is the more skilled fighter on paper and should be favored, but heavyweight is the division where paper goes to die, and a matchmaker throwing a rising name straight at a former champ is the kind of booking I’ll defend every time. Hokit has nothing to lose and a former interim champ to take it from. Pereira can lobby for the women’s fight all he wants. I’d rather watch two big men find out.
