The things Demian Maia does inside the Octagon are supposed to be impossible, yet somehow he continues to make them look easy.
Maia’s uncanny march through the welterweight division rolled on Saturday at UFC on Fox 21, as he scored a first-round rear-naked choke over Carlos Condit in an important contender bout.
In doing so, Maia became the first man to submit Condit since 2006 and the first to make the former WEC and UFC interim champion look quite so helpless.
The performance shocked many observers—and from the sound of his in-cage interview with UFC color commentator Brian Stann after the fight, it surprised Maia too.
“This guy [Condit] is a former champion,” he said, choking up a bit on the heels of such a big win. “This guy has been knocking out everybody. This is the guy who I watched his fight with [former champ] Robbie Lawler and many people think he won—and I also think [that]. So for me, [Condit] was the champion. I knew it would be a hard fight.”
We’ll take Maia’s word for that last part, but from the outside looking in, it did not, in fact, appear to be a hard fight.
One of the things Condit has been known for during a 14-year, 40-fight career is his durability, but he turned out to be no match for Maia’s vaunted grappling attack. The ferocious and exciting New Mexico native is a notoriously hard out, but Maia sucked him into a takedown, took his back and choked him out in a grand total of one minute, 52 seconds.
It was the swiftest loss of Condit’s professional life, and it happened so fast that he managed to land just one strike before Maia planted him on the mat.
And so Maia continues to buck many conventions of modern MMA fighting.
At 38 years old, he’s not supposed to be putting on the best performances of his 15-year career, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.
As one of the sport’s last pure Brazilian jiu-jitsu specialists, he’s not supposed to beat the rest of the best fighters in the world with such a one-dimensional game plan, but he is.
Since suffering back-to-back losses to former Strikeforce middleweight champion Jake Shields and perennial top contender Rory MacDonald in 2013 and 2014, Maia has been on a tear—and his sudden run of late-career success has come with a return to his roots.
He appears to have made peace with the fact he’s one of the best BJJ stylists ever to grace the Octagon and is not particularly great at any one other thing. During recent fights, Maia has all but abandoned any notion of a striking attack in favor of straightforward, no-frills grappling.
In the UFC in 2016, everyone is supposed to be meticulously cross-trained, a modern hybrid of as many fighting styles as can be squeezed into a single body and a single brain. But Maia is going out there and relying on little more than his merciless submission skills. Everybody he faces knows exactly what he wants to do—and yet they still can’t stop him.
That’s extraordinary.
Over the course of his last half-dozen fights, Maia has established himself as one of the greatest submission grapplers in the history of MMA.
He is perhaps the most successful jiu-jitsu fighter in the UFC since Royce Gracie. And Gracie was doing his thing during the sport’s formative years against opponents who had little to no background in submissions. Maia is accomplishing it against men who at least in theory are supposed to be in the same universe as he is on the ground.
News flash: They’re not.
Take Condit, for example. The Natural Born Killer has long been regarded as one of MMA’s more well-rounded fighters. He may be a kickboxer at heart, but he’s no slouch on the mat, where he’s dangerous enough that 43 percent of his 30 career wins have come by submission.
Against Maia, he looked like it was his first day in the gym.
Perhaps most impressive of all, Maia has notched his most recent wins while suffering nearly no damage. As ESPN’s Phil Murphy noticed on Twitter Saturday night, the striking totals in his last few bouts are nothing short of amazing:
Maia has now won six in a row and is 9-2 overall since dropping to welterweight in July 2012. He came into this fight ranked No. 3 overall in the 170-pound division. There may not be much room to move up from that spot, but a victory like this over an opponent as well-regarded as Condit will toss a wrinkle in the welterweight title picture.
Tyron Woodley has been champion for all of one month after taking the belt from Lawler at UFC 202. He’s talked openly about making his first title defense a money fight against an opponent such as Nick Diaz or even a returning Georges St-Pierre.
UFC brass, however, has been angling to get consensus No. 1 contender Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson the first crack at Woodley.
Thompson is perhaps the only fighter in the welterweight landscape who can make a better argument than Maia for an immediate championship fight. He’s won seven bouts in a row, including beating former champion Johny Hendricks and MacDonald.
In the wake of the Condit win, it sounded as though Maia understood his two realities—that Thompson might well get the chance to take on Woodley first and also that he doesn’t have the luxury of waiting forever.
“I respect Thompson very much,” he said at the post-fight press conference, via MMA Junkie’s Brent Brookhouse and Ken Hathaway. “He’s a great guy. Of course, I’m much older than him. So, if they can give [the title shot] to me first, that would be great. If not, I hope they give it to him fast and I wait to see who wins the fight.”
Even if Thompson goes first, it’s tough to imagine a better demonstration of championship readiness than this victory. According to Odds Shark, Condit was the slight favorite by the time the two fighters took the cage, but even people who were giving the edge to Maia never dreamed it would go the way it did.
That’s because nobody had ever dispatched Condit with such relative ease.
But that’s just what Maia is doing these days.
Making the incredible seem routine.
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