The UFC let Michael Page leave this month with a 5-1 record at middleweight, and ESPN has already framed the question as whether a strange Octagon run did real damage to his MMA legacy. My answer is no. Five wins in six fights inside the UFC is a winning résumé by any reasonable standard. The way it ended tells you far more about the company’s current appetite than it does about Page’s ability.
The honest knock is the stat everyone keeps quoting. Uncrowned’s Yahoo Sports feature on Movsar Evloev pointed out that all six of Page’s UFC fights went to the scorecards. For a man who fights under the name “Venom,” that’s an odd line on the stat sheet, and I understand why a matchmaker would squint at it. Do the arithmetic, too. If every fight went the distance and he finished 5-1, then his one UFC loss came on the cards as well. He was never stopped, and he never stopped anybody.
The company he’s keeping
Now look at the room Page walked into. Through the UFC’s past four cards, dating back to UFC Vegas 121 in September, only 10 of 51 fights went to the judges, according to that same Yahoo piece. That’s under 20%. Heavy, in a story syndicated on Yahoo Sports, described the promotion as moving toward entertainment first in its Paramount+ era, with matchmaking geared toward finishes. A fighter who goes to the scorecards six times out of six is swimming upstream in that current, regardless of how many of those decisions he wins.
Page also wasn’t the only casualty. Farid Basharat, 16-0 overall and 7-0 in the UFC, was released after his four-fight deal wrapped with a win over John Garza at UFC 329 in July. Six of his seven UFC fights went to decision. Dana White initially said “there’s definitely a reason” Basharat was cut, mentioning things like being difficult or turning down fights. Basharat denied it, and White later said he’d been giving general examples rather than talking about Basharat specifically.
Joe Rogan, who named both Basharat and Page as ranked contenders the UFC let go, didn’t hide his irritation on a recent episode of his podcast. “I don’t like guys not getting offered contracts because they don’t like their style,” he said. He also put it more bluntly, arguing that winning is what the game is about.
I’m with Rogan on the principle. I watch a lot of fights where the crowd boos a grappler who’s winning every exchange that matters, and I’ve long since stopped caring what the crowd thinks it saw. A decision is a perfectly legitimate result when the judges get it right. Clean judging is the whole point of having judges. Five clean wins on the cards should read as competence.
Business ledger versus legacy ledger
Jose Aldo gave the other side its sharpest form this week. Talking to MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz about Evloev, he argued the UFC is a business before it’s a ranking system and said he’d cut Evloev after his first loss because he’s “a guy who doesn’t sell, a guy who puts on boring fights.” Apply that logic to Page and you can see exactly how the meeting went at the UFC offices.
But that’s the business ledger. Legacy gets measured on the other one, the one with wins and losses on it, and on that ledger Page left the UFC with a 5-1 record. Heavy noted that the UFC has been cutting decision-heavy fighters since at least Jon Fitch in 2013, when he was among the best welterweights in the world and got released over a grappling-heavy style that produced decisions. Ask yourself whether you think less of Fitch’s welterweight career because of how his UFC tenure ended. I don’t, and I’d guess most people who watched him closely don’t either.
If there’s a genuine dent in Page’s broader combat sports standing in the sources, it sits outside the UFC entirely. Mike Perry’s perfect 6-0 run in BKFC included a win over Page, per MMA Mania. That’s bare knuckle, a different sport with two-minute rounds that Perry himself called a “cheat code,” but it’s on Page’s ledger all the same, and anyone building his overall case has to account for it.
Page, for his part, already seems to be thinking past the Octagon. MiddleEasy reported that he’s urging MMA fighters to take collective action over pay, which is a pointed subject to raise weeks after a promotion declined to bring you back at 5-1.
The next test of this whole philosophy arrives Saturday, Oct. 24, at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi, where Evloev (20-0, 10-0 UFC, every Octagon win on the cards) challenges Alexander Volkanovski for the featherweight title. If he takes the belt by decision, the UFC will have a 145-pound champion with the exact profile it just showed Page and Basharat the door for. I’d love to sit in on that matchmaking meeting.
