I still can’t say I know exactly what the UFC’s thinking was when it matched the veteran of all veterans, Jim Fucking Miller, against a 29-year-old debuting fighter with 15 pro bouts to his credit at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night event. Normally, this type of May-December fight booking means one of two things:
1) The promoter is excited about this new guy and wants to put a little shine on his name by getting him a win over the aged and decrepit version of a formerly great fighter.
2) The new guy sucks and is there to be food to sustain the old bones of the elder fighter for just a little while longer.
But as anyone who watched the first round round of Saturday’s fight already knows, Nikolas Motta doesn’t suck. He’s fast, has good power in his right hand, even stung Miller with it once or twice in the opening frame. Then midway through the second Miller dropped him with that right hook and swarmed him on the mat to get the TKO stoppage, so if anyone was hoping that Miller would somehow be easy work for a newcomer you’d have to wonder if they even knew who they were dealing with here.
Miller has now had 39 fights in the UFC, which is a literal goddamn record. That’s two more than Donald Cerrone and Andrei Arlovski. It’s six more than Demian Maia and seven more than Clay Guida and Diego Sanchez. This man made his debut in 2005 and still he is holding it down with a two-fight winning streak in one of the most talent-rich divisions in the entire sport. The last time he was stopped in a fight was 2018, when he got submitted by current UFC lightweight champ Charles Oliveira.
Point is, that dude isn’t going to be easy work for anyone. So what are we doing putting him in these mid-card matchups on JSF cards against UFC debutants who most fans haven’t even heard of?
Miller might be wondering the same thing right now. When asked about potential opponents for his 40th UFC fight – again, pause for a moment here and reflect on how fucking insane that is, especially at that weight class, and spanning multiple eras in which most UFC tenures lasted between two and five fights – he had a couple suggestions. One was Joe Lauzon, with whom Miller had two memorable bouts that brought Fight of the Night honors both times. The other was Donald Cerrone, who knocked Miller out back in 2014.
See what both of them have in common, though? They are peers. They are both around Miller’s age, with comparable levels of UFC experience. They are also people we have all fucking heard of, which is nice. And as matchmaking requests go, this seems entirely reasonable. He’s not asking for Conor McGregor in a soccer stadium. He’s not calling for a title shot. He’s saying, ‘Give me a fight against an opponent on my level in a fight that has at least some semblance of a narrative to it.’ Hasn’t he earned that much?
I tend to think so, and not only because of his years and years of service to this company. Let’s not forget, Miller had undiagnosed Lyme disease for years that left him basically unable to do any of his usual workouts. The worst of it, according to Miller, happened around 2015-2017. And you know something? Miller still fought in the UFC at least three times in all those years.
This is not just another UFC fighter. He’s not just content fodder there to keep the ESPN+ library bulging with new stuff. At this point he’s a living part of UFC history, and he’s not going to be around forever.
(Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)
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