Sean Strickland thinks he knows how Ciryl Gane loses on Saturday, and his evidence goes back to the worst night of the Frenchman’s career.
“When [Gane] fought Jon Jones, his wrestling was so bad. Josh Hokit is a smart guy, he’s gonna take him down. I’m thinking either a TKO or submission in the 2nd or 3rd round,” Strickland said in a clip that Championship Rounds shared on X.
That’s the backdrop for Gane this week. NDTV Sports reported that the heavyweight champion talked about how his loss to Jones at UFC 285 changed his mindset ahead of the Hokit title fight. The published coverage we have doesn’t spell out exactly what he changed, so nobody should pretend to know the details of the camp.
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The loss itself is a matter of record. Jones won the heavyweight title against Gane in 2023 and held it until he retired in 2025, finishing his career 28-1. Gane picked up the pieces and then some. He’s now the UFC heavyweight champion, the first French champion in UFC history, and he sits at 14-2. He was No. 11 in the UFC pound-for-pound rankings as of Sept. 22. His last fight was June 14.
Hokit, meanwhile, has made fight week loud. The two faced off for the first time in Times Square on Tuesday, and Hokit didn’t stop running his mouth, according to clips posted by MMA Junkie and others. On Ariel Helwani’s show, he laid out a foul escalation plan that started with eye pokes and ended with a hypothetical invasion of France.
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“If he pokes my eye, I’m gonna hit him in the back of the head. If he hits me in the back of the head, I’m hitting him low,” Hokit told Helwani, before the bit went somewhere considerably darker and sillier.
Strip out the comedy and Strickland’s pick is the part worth taking seriously. The book on Gane after UFC 285 was that a heavyweight who can get him to the mat has a path. Gane is a former Muay Thai champion who has made his living on his feet, and Hokit’s camp would be foolish not to chase the takedown early.
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Gane says the Jones loss rewired how he approaches this. UFC 334 goes down Saturday, Nov. 14, and the first time Hokit changes levels, we’ll see whether the new mindset came with better hips.
