Pereira was on the wrong side of UFC title history once; will that happen again?

It’s difficult enough to conquer one opponent inside an MMA cage, but Alex Pereira will have two obstacles to overcome in his attempt to regain the UFC light heavyweight championship on Saturday at UFC 320 (ESPN PPV, 10 p.m. ET).

His primary focus, of course, will be on champion Magomed Ankalaev, who dethroned Pereira when they met in March. The other stumbling block Pereira will be up against is UFC championship history.

Ankalaev-Pereira 2 will be the first bout for both fighters since the belt changed hands, and toppled UFC champions have not fared well in immediate rematches. In the 16 such matchups in the fight promotion’s modern era (since November 2000, when the UFC first utilized the Unified Rules of mixed martial arts), four ex-champions have succeeded in regaining the title.

Pereira might be familiar with that daunting statistic, because he was a participant in one of those four triumphant rematches. Then again, maybe he has tried to forget the night in April 2023 when he was on the wrong end of the UFC’s most recent ex-champ success story.

Five months after taking away the middleweight title from Israel Adesanya in November 2022, Pereira had abundant reason to be confident going into the rematch. His title-winning knockout at UFC 281 had actually been his third victory over Adesanya across a couple of combat sports. Pereira defeated Adesanya twice in kickboxing, including the only knockout loss of Adesanya’s 80-fight kickboxing career.

“I do know how to beat him,” Pereira told reporters through an interpreter in the leadup to UFC 287. “I do know how he fights, I do know how he works. … I believe that me beating him this Saturday, I will never face him again.”

Adesanya, for his part, embraced the role of challenger in the encore. Ignoring that he was again the betting favorite, he knew the fans had seen him get stopped in the first meeting.

“This fight, I feel like the underdog,” he said during fight week. “I feel like everyone’s counting me out. I feel like, because of the result of the last fight, people are like goldfish memories. They’ve forgotten what I’ve done in this game. They forgot who I am. And it’s time to remind people how great I am.”

Adesanya certainly reminded Pereira. Late in Round 2 of a back-and-forth, all-standup battle, while covering up against the cage as Pereira swarmed him, Adesanya suddenly blasted two counter right hands that stopped Pereira in his tracks. Just when “The Last Stylebender” appeared to be in trouble, he became the trouble. The knockout win made Adesanya a champion again, and he felt like a new man.

“Beating me, he made me a better fighter, a better person,” Adesanya said in his postfight interview, referring to the consecutive Pereira pairings. “In this camp, I didn’t f— around. If you know me, you know I like to vacation, but … I stayed on the grind and I put myself through it.”

This weekend is Pereira’s opportunity to show off what he took away from the first Ankalaev fight. Conventional wisdom going into the first meeting said he would be in trouble against Ankalaev’s smothering wrestling, but Pereira stuffed all 12 of the Russian’s takedown attempts. Conventional wisdom also held that a standup fight would be to Pereira’s advantage, but Ankalaev got stronger in the striking exchanges as the fight wore on and was rewarded with a unanimous decision in his favor.

What did Pereira learn from the loss? Less than seven months later, has he had sufficient time to implement the adjustments necessary to turn the tide in the rematch? Is his confidence still bruised and needing more time to rejuvenate? Pereira might think he knows the answers to those questions, but he doesn’t yet. He and the fans will find out Saturday.

Ankalaev doesn’t know the answers, either, but he said the only thing that will change in the rematch is that it will be an easier win for him. Calling the 38-year-old Pereira “too old to make substantial changes,” Ankalaev told reporters through an interpreter last Thursday in Las Vegas, “I don’t think even he believes that if he finds a different game plan or changes something, then he could beat me. I just think he’s going out there to make good money, just for the check.”

The first dethroned UFC champion to fight in an immediate rematch was Randy Couture, who has made his mark in innumerable chapters of UFC history. In 2004, having already reigned twice at heavyweight and in his first run as light heavyweight champion, Couture headlined UFC 46 against Vitor Belfort, whom he had knocked out seven years earlier, when Belfort was just 20 years old. Belfort was a seasoned veteran entering their second fight and was on a hot streak, a winner in seven of his past eight fights. This was a highly anticipated, long-time-coming title clash.

Expectations fizzled in the opening seconds, when a Belfort punch grazed Couture’s left eye and inflicted a corneal abrasion. The referee noticed the compromised fighter and ended the bout in an unsatisfying 49 seconds, putting Belfort into a spin cycle of emotions. He was the new champion, which was something to celebrate, but this was not the way he wanted to win the belt. When the subject of a rematch came up in his postfight interview, Belfort was all for it. “He deserves a rematch,” Belfort said, sounding almost apologetic. “Randy’s still a champion for me. He always will be a champion.”

That gesture, as humble and gracious as it was, ultimately got filed away in the “be careful what you wish for” department.

Seven months later, at UFC 49, Couture mauled Belfort from start to brutal finish, amassing 14 minutes, 6 seconds of control time in a fight that lasted just 15 minutes. Couture landed 50 significant strikes to Belfort’s three, battering and bloodying the resilient but sagging Brazilian. And when the referee, at the advice of the cageside doctor, waved off the drubbing at the end of Round 3, Couture was a champion once again, at 41 years old.

“Thankfully, we get smarter as we get older,” he quipped during the postfight interview, his white shorts covered in Belfort’s blood. “I don’t do a lot of things I used to do when I was younger. … I feel better than I’ve felt my whole life.”

For 18 years, Couture would remain the only deposed UFC champion to win back the belt in an immediate rematch. Ten other ex-champs — including legends Anderson Silva and José Aldo — tried to be like “The Natural” but failed. Finally, Deiveson Figueiredo broke through in 2022, regaining the men’s flyweight title by winning a unanimous decision in a rematch with Brandon Moreno, who had choked him out seven months earlier.

By matching Couture’s accomplishment, Figueredo apparently opened the floodgates. In the 3½ years since he became the second fighter in modern UFC history to regain a title in an immediate rematch, four others have attempted it and two have succeeded: Adesanya and Amanda Nunes, both in 2022. “The Lioness” took back the women’s bantamweight title from Julianna Peña at UFC 277, knocking her down three times and scoring six takedowns in a one-sided beatdown that one judge scored a stark 50-43.

But there have been far more failures than successes, often shockingly so. After Frankie Edgar upset 11-to-1 betting favorite BJ Penn in 2010 to capture the lightweight belt, you just knew they weren’t finished with each other. It had been a closely contested fight that went the distance, and Penn was a two-division titlist with the mystique of an MMA legend. A rematch was booked for four months later at UFC 118, and Penn, despite being the challenger this time, was once again the oddsmakers’ favorite.

Edgar didn’t fight like an underdog, though, because he knew better.

“For the rematch, my mindset was different,” Edgar wrote for ESPN.com before his retirement bout in 2022, recapping a glorious career highlight. “Going into the first fight, I believed I could beat BJ. I didn’t know, but I believed. Going into the second fight, I knew I could. I think that’s why the gap between us was a lot bigger the second time.”

The gap was enormous. Edgar nearly tripled Penn’s output of total strikes and won every round on all three scorecards, keeping his title and ensuring that, as he later said, “the lightweight division was going to continue without BJ Penn.”

Several other once-dominant former champions have had cruel reckonings while trying to regain their mojo immediately afterward.

The most recent dethroned titlist to fight in an immediate rematch was Valentina Shevchenko, who lost the women’s flyweight championship to Alexa Grasso in 2023 in a huge upset. Shevchenko, the longest-reigning champion in the UFC at the time, was a better than 6-to-1 betting favorite, and she fought like it. Through three rounds, Shevchenko led on all scorecards. But late in the fourth, she spun for a kick, and Grasso secured Shevchenko’s back and quickly locked in a choke. The shocking finish, the third-largest upset in a UFC women’s championship fight, ended Shevchenko’s run of seven consecutive title defenses.

“Definitely immediate rematch,” Shevchenko said afterward, “because I know I was winning the fight.”

She definitely was ahead according to the judges, but that didn’t help her in the rematch six months later. Shevchenko had her moments, but so did Grasso, and the fight ended in a split draw, with Grasso keeping the title. But not for long. The matchmakers booked a third consecutive meeting at UFC 306 last September, and Shevchenko won a unanimous decision to take back the gold.

True, redemption didn’t come for Shevchenko in the fight immediately after losing the belt. But at least she returned to the promised land eventually. That has not been the case for others.

Joanna Jedrzejczyk was an undefeated strawweight champion and a 6-to-1 betting favorite for her 2017 title defense against Rose Namajunas. But the challenger was undaunted by Jedrzejczyk’s intimidating scowl. Namajunas dropped her with a right hand less than two minutes into the fight, then finished Jedrzejczyk with a left hook knockdown and ground-and-pound (eliciting the famous Daniel Cormier commentary exclamation, “Thug Rose! Thug Rose! Thug Rose!”).

When they fought again five months later at UFC 223, Namajunas was again an underdog. But she also was again a winner, this time going five rounds and taking a clear decision to retain the belt.

Jedrzejczyk, like some other once-lofty ex-champs, had a difficult time coming to grips with the two-part come-down. After the rematch, she had harsh words not simply for “Thug Rose” but for the 115-pound division as a whole. “They cannot compare themselves to me,” she said. “They are all only jealous and talking too much all the time. I’m telling them: Bow down. I’m the queen.”

The wounded self-worth of a dethroned champion feels like part of what’s behind the drive for immediate rematches. Not everyone is as vocal as Jedrzejczyk, but there’s something disorienting about being on top of the game, then getting knocked down a peg. An immediate rematch can set the record straight. Or not.

Despite the dismal track record for redemption seekers, the immediate championship rematches keep on coming. It makes sense in a sport in which contendership is ephemeral. If an ex-champ is offered the opportunity to regain the belt, there’s no time like the present. Within the MMA attention span, one can be here today and gone tomorrow.

So while Ankalaev will be the one putting the belt up for grabs on Saturday, Pereira will have something on the line as well: his aura. After eight of his 10 previous UFC bouts ended by finish, including several worthy of highlight reels, the first Ankalaev fight was relatively tame. There were no knockdowns, no takedowns, no clear supremacy established beyond the close scorecards.

Running it back right away, can Pereira make it look more like a Pereira fight? And can he overcome both the new champion and 4-11-1?