Rampage Jackson: Breaking Down His Final UFC Performance

He wanted it. He got it. Rampage Jackson is no longer with the UFC, and he went out fighting a guy who was willing to stand in front of him and trade punches in Glover Teixeria. After complaining about not being able to find enough of those opponents f…

He wanted it. He got it.

Rampage Jackson is no longer with the UFC, and he went out fighting a guy who was willing to stand in front of him and trade punches in Glover Teixeria.

After complaining about not being able to find enough of those opponents for years, he couldn’t beat one when he finally got him. Teixeira beat him convincingly at him own game, to the point that it was Jackson looking for takedowns just as often as his opponent.

The performance itself was interesting, a fight prefaced by months of complaining about the UFC as a promotion and one painful week of pre-fight salesmanship that centered around the same idea.

In the cage Jackson looked better than he had since a 2011 fight with Jon Jones, but still not good.

Lethargy seemed to place him firmly in concrete shoes for most of the fight, and while his slick slipping and rolling was still there during exchanges, he lacked the mobility to bring the fight to his man. Teixeira, only 488 days younger than Jackson, looked like a fighter 10 years his junior.

You stand in front of enough professional punching machines, and they start to hit you. The more they hit you, the older you get.

It’s a sure sign of the inevitable for a man with more MMA fights to his name than he has years on this planet: Quinton Jackson is old.

On top of that, Quinton Jackson is tired. He’s tired of MMA, tired of the promotion game and tired of the countless perceived slights by which he’s been victimized.

And that showed on FOX.

This isn’t to say that he didn’t come and put on an okay show. He fought Teixeira hard, hung in there when he could have bailed and went out on his own terms. Yes, he suffered his third straight loss and fourth in six fights, but he hasn’t been knocked out since 2005 and has rarely been outclassed by anything in the cage that wasn’t his own lack of motivation.

For someone so mercurial and curious, his final UFC fight was the perfect embodiment of his run in the promotion overall: spurts of excellence, plenty of problems and an outcome that left a lot of people wanting more.

Frankly, there was no more fitting way for it to end.

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