Gable Steveson Gets KNOCKED OUT in Biggest Upset In UFC History; What’s Next?

Few results in recent memory landed with the same shockwave as this weekend’s stunning heavyweight upset — a fight that ended so fast, and so unexpectedly, that even the panelists who watched it live struggled to process what they’d just seen.

“There is just no way to process it,” one analyst admitted afterward. “You see it happening and you’re like, it didn’t happen.”

The scale of the upset became even clearer once the betting numbers surfaced. According to odds tracked by a prominent sportsbook, the underdog entered as roughly a plus-1100 outsider — meaning the favorite was priced at minus-1800, making it, by some measures, the single biggest betting upset in the promotion’s history.

Panelists were quick to point out that almost no money came in on the underdog beforehand, meaning the shocking line never moved.

“They picked the wrong guy,” one analyst put it bluntly, while another pushed back on any revisionist narrative suggesting the eventual winner had been an obvious live threat all along — by every measure, this was a fighter nobody expected to win.

The conversation quickly moved from the result itself to the larger question it raised: has the sport been overestimating decorated wrestlers the moment they step into a cage?

One panelist floated the theory directly, pointing out that world-class boxers who talk about trying MMA are usually laughed out of the room, while elite college and Olympic wrestlers are frequently treated as can’t-miss prospects from day one.

“Are we actually overegging the omelet,” he asked, “to the point where we’re setting them up to fail?”

The response from the rest of the panel was more nuanced than a flat yes or no.

Wrestling, they argued, genuinely is considered the most transferable base in mixed martial arts — plenty of standout wrestlers with limited striking have gone on to have strong careers, while gifted strikers who can’t stop a takedown tend to get exposed.

But that doesn’t mean the transition is automatic. One analyst pointed to the mechanical adjustments a converted wrestler has to make — even something as fundamental as which foot leads in a stance — as evidence that success isn’t guaranteed just because someone dominated at the highest levels of another sport.

Still, the numbers from this particular fighter’s early UFC run raised eyebrows of their own.

Two fights in, both ending in quick knockouts, he has yet to attempt a single takedown inside the cage — a notable wrinkle for a fighter whose entire reputation was built on wrestling dominance.

“You’ve got to use the wrestling,” one panelist said. “We’re two fights in, and there’s been zero wrestling so far.”

That tension bled into a lighter moment on the show, when one analyst was pressed to revisit his own pre-fight prediction that the heavyweight in question could eventually challenge for, and even win, UFC gold.

Rather than fully backing away from the take, he leaned on the sport’s oldest cliché in his own defense: styles make fights.

He argued that his read on the matchup wasn’t inherently unreasonable — the current interim heavyweight champion, for instance, has real vulnerabilities against wrestling-heavy opponents — and that hindsight makes every bold prediction look worse than it did in the moment.

Still, he didn’t dodge the outcome entirely, conceding that if a rematch scenario were booked today between the interim champ and the fighter in question, he’d now lean toward picking the champion.

The panel also weighed in on what should come next for both men involved. For the shocking upset’s architect, there was broad agreement that his desperation and hunger — reportedly training out of a modest setup with a well-regarded striking-heavy camp — played a real role in pulling off the result, regardless of what comes next in his career.

For the heavily favored fighter on the losing end, there was more division: some argued he still possesses more than enough raw talent to rebuild and eventually compete at the top of the division, while others were far more skeptical that he’ll ever fully return to the hype and expectations he carried into the fight.

By the end of the discussion, one thing was clear: a single 12-second sequence had done more than deliver a shocking result.

It had reignited a debate about hype, projection, and just how much credit combat sports gives elite athletes before they’ve proven they can survive adversity inside the cage.