For as long as there have been people willing to pay money to watch grown men beat each other senseless, there has been a kind of unspoken, universal appreciation for the upset.
At those times when a fighter decides that he will not go quietly into that goodnight, but will instead rage against the idea that the sum total of his being, when he is at his most dangerous, is of no consequence in the face of an opponent assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be just that superior; those are the times that keep us on the edge of our seats.
They serve as a kind of admonition, “Don’t get cocky. Remember Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas!” while at the same time proving the indomitable will of the human spirit when faced against long odds and little faith from the masses.
It takes a rare person to be a fighter and a person rarer still to be a fighter who pulls off the victory against long odds, proving the naysayers wrong while reaffirming the fact that ours is a sport that, as fans, we can never take for granted.
In that spirit, here are 25 of the greatest upsets in MMA history.