Steven Koslow had to wait almost four years between fights. On Saturday at UFC Edmonton he made the most of it, choking out Chad Anheliger with a rear-naked choke at 4:31 of Round 3 to collect the first UFC win of his career. That left 29 seconds on the clock in the final round of a fight that had been headed for the judges.
The bantamweight bout ran on the Paramount+ prelims at Rogers Place in Edmonton, Alberta. Nolan King called it “the battle of the inactives” on X before the walkouts, and he had the receipts. Anheliger, fighting in his home country, hadn’t competed since November 2024. Koslow hadn’t been in the Octagon since December 2022. MiddleEasy reported that his time away came from a long injury layoff. Both men weighed in at 135 pounds on Friday as part of a card where all 26 fighters made weight, which is the kind of boring news I always love to see.
The finish also kept a strange streak alive. The UFC noted on X that Koslow’s tap was the third consecutive submission of the night, so the Edmonton prelims were running on chokes before the main card ever started. MMA Fighting had picked Koslow in its pre-event predictions, so at least one set of forecasters got to feel smart early in the evening.
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After the fight, UFC News on X posted a clip of Koslow talking about leaning on his faith during the layoff, captioned with the line “Ain’t no such thing as coincidence.” The UFC Canada account offered Anheliger some local sympathy with a quick note that he fought hard. Neither source mentioned what’s next for either man, and no follow-up bookings have been reported.
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My take: the timing of the finish is the part worth your attention. Long layoffs usually show up in the third round, when the legs go and the hips get slow on scrambles. Koslow coming back from more than three and a half years off and still having enough left to take a back and lock a choke in the final 30 seconds tells me the time away was spent doing something useful. Anheliger was the more recently active fighter, and he was the one who couldn’t get out of it late. Ring rust is real, but a well-timed choke wipes it right off the scorecards.
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