UFC 315 takeaways: Jack Della Maddalena ushers in an age of total chaos

UFC 318 saw one title change hands, another title stay put, and a legendary career possibly come to a close. That’s a whole lot of living for a fight card that seemed like it would be one of the less eventful pay-per-view offerings of the year.

Now that the dust has settled in Montreal, here are the key takeaways from Saturday’s UFC 315:

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1. Here’s a phrase that might take some getting used to: UFC welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena. It’s not that the concept itself is so foreign or absurd. It’s that I just didn’t think we’d ever get here so soon. That’s what happens when you seize opportunities and fight your freaking heart out, though.

“JDM” had answers for every single thing Belal Muhammad did. Against a guy who specializes in making every fight his kind of fight, Della Maddalena systematically took away every perceived edge we thought Muhammad might have, and just flat-out beat him up in the process. Respect to the new champ. From 0-2 at the start of his career to UFC champ less than a decade later. Now that’s an arc.

2. But oh wait, did two different UFC divisions just become a total mess? We were led to believe that a loss for Muhammad would bring UFC lightweight champ Islam Makhachev up to challenge for the welterweight belt. Which means we won’t get Makhachev vs. Ilia Topuria, which had the potential to be the year’s second-biggest fight (yes, I’m looking at you for the top spot, Jon Jones and Tom Aspinall). That would also mean that welterweight’s top contender, Shavkat Rakhmonov, will have to wait a little longer to get his well-earned title shot.

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It’s chaos, basically. Which can sometimes be fun in this spectacle of a sport, but also makes the ground beneath our feet feel suddenly unstable.

3. Now that Valentina Shevchenko has turned away another flyweight contender, can we go ahead and do the Zhang Weili fight now? A champion vs. champion thing is pretty much the only interesting thing anywhere on the horizon for Shevchenko now. The women’s divisions in the UFC badly need a spark right about now, and Shevchenko gradually outpointing little-known challengers is definitely not going to be it.

4. On Monday Jose Aldo was a bantamweight hell-bent on adding to his legacy. He’ll wake up on Sunday as a featherweight headed into retirement. What a week, huh?

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It’s always hard to know whether to believe a fighter who stands there in the cage after taking a beating and tells us he’s had enough. Sometimes, after the depressive haze of the loss wears off, he’ll decide he has more in him and doesn’t want to end on that note. In Aldo’s case, stopping here would be just fine. He proved his greatness in his featherweight prime. He even made dropping down to bantamweight late in his career seem like a good idea for a time.

But after deciding at the last minute that he was done making 135 pounds, then barely surviving to hear the final horn after a strong start against Aiemann Zahabi, it’s clear that there’s probably nothing but diminishing returns ahead for Aldo. It was quite a ride though, wasn’t it?

5. What’s to become of Muhammad now? Circling back to the former welterweight champion, let’s spare a moment to note the irony of his most exciting fight also being the one that costs him the title. Let’s also admit that he might have a really hard time convincing the UFC to give him another crack at it.

Remember how long a climb it was for “Remember The Name”? He finally won the belt and then turned right around and lost it in his first defense, and to a guy who came in ranked fifth in the division. So that’s not great. He also never exactly seemed like anyone’s favorite as champ in his brief time with the belt, which doesn’t bode well for getting another title shot any time soon.

He really gave it his all in this fight, though. He seemed to know he was down on the scorecards and did everything he could to get back in it, even when that meant walking into damage just to increase his own output. That cost him a useful amount of blood, but it still wasn’t enough. All that hard traveling and he may only end up as a transition champ in the division’s history. It doesn’t seem fair. But it does seem to be the most likely reality.