Two submission stories shared the Meta Apex on Saturday night, and they ran in opposite directions. Gerald Meerschaert fought in the featured prelim at UFC Vegas 122, dropped his sixth straight fight, and retired. A few hours later Brendan Allen closed the card by finishing Christian Leroy Duncan with a rear-naked choke. That tap was Allen’s seventh at 185 pounds. Meerschaert leaves holding the UFC middleweight record with 11.
Bloody Elbow laid out the math the next day. Allen is four submissions from tying GM3 and five from passing him, and he’s 30 years old. The outlet called the record his to chase, and I agree he gets there. My argument is that the gap is bigger than four or five fights suggest. The best evidence for that comes from Allen’s own record.
The streak and the wait
Three years before he made Duncan tap, Allen ran off four consecutive submission wins over Paul Craig, Bruno Silva, Andre Muniz and Krzysztof Jotko. Per Bloody Elbow, that ties him with Charles Oliveira for the fourth-longest submission streak in UFC history. Think about who’s on that list. Craig and Muniz are grapplers with dangerous guards of their own. Allen choked or cranked his way past both of them inside one run, which tells you the ground game is a weapon he can point at specialists.
Then came the drought. Bloody Elbow said he had to wait a while for his next tap-out, and that is the part of his résumé I keep coming back to. The streak happened on his way up the rankings. The wait happened once he got near the top. Allen is now holding a spot in the top five of the UFC middleweight rankings, and the Duncan win kept him there. Top-five middleweights get matched against other top-five middleweights, and that’s the level where sub defense is tightest and fighters are most willing to stall on the mat rather than give up a neck.
I think that’s the real difficulty of the chase. Seven submissions came across a career that included a stretch of easier stylistic matchups and a hot run against grapplers. The next five have to come against a tier of opponent who has seen every Allen highlight and will spend camp drilling hand fighting against the rear-naked choke. Five taps against that tier is a lot. Five taps against anyone is a lot.
The counterargument is sitting right there in the Duncan fight, though. Allen was in a main event, against a ranked-division opponent, and he still found the back and finished. The tool didn’t rust during the dry spell. At 30 he has years of fights ahead, and a guy who submits people at this rate doesn’t need a streak to get to 12. He needs a steady drip, one or two a year, and a little patience.
What GM3 built
None of this should shrink what Meerschaert put together. The numbers Bloody Elbow pulled are wild. Of his 37 professional wins, 29 came by submission. His last nine UFC victories were all submissions, which means nine years passed without him winning a fight any other way. That’s a fighter whose entire offense, for close to a decade, funneled toward one outcome, and opponents knew it, and he kept getting the tap anyway.
The ending was rough. Six losses in a row is six losses in a row, and he hadn’t added to the middleweight tally since 2024. Pretending otherwise does him no favors. But the losing skid will fade from memory well before the 11 does. He walked out of a prelim slot at the Apex on October 10 as the most prolific submission finisher the UFC middleweight division has ever had, and Bloody Elbow described the pair of them as the two most prolific submission specialists in UFC history. The guy chasing him finished his own night a few hours later in the same building. Fight scheduling rarely writes anything that tidy.
I like that the record now has a live challenger. A mark that sits untouched turns into trivia. One with a ranked, 30-year-old grappler four taps behind it gets discussed every time that grappler fights. Every Allen bout from here on carries a second scoreboard: did he get the finish, and did it come by submission?
My prediction is that he passes Meerschaert, though slower than the “four away” framing implies, because the drought after the Jotko win is the most honest preview of how hard taps come at the top of this division. When he does get number 12, the guy he passes will have earned all 11 of his the hard way. The choke on Duncan made it seven.
