UFC Vegas 101, The Morning After: Minutes-long knockout aftermath serves as sobering reminder of MMA brutality

UFC Vegas 101 was the first event of 2025. There will be 40-some more events spread out across the calendar year. It’s hilariously early to crown any finish the best of the year when there’s so much action left on the table.

Still, I have a feeling we’ll be talking about Cesar Almeida’s brutal victory over Abdul Razak Alhassan at the end of the year. It was a brief, but tremendous, fight last night (Sat., Jan. 11, 2025) in Las Vegas, Nevada. Alhassan knocked down the decorated kickboxer early in the first, chased the finish hard, and ultimately paid the price when Almeida got back to his feet and countered with a picture-perfect left hook.

It was bananas (watch it here).

Can it get much more dramatic? A one-punch walk-off comeback knockout doesn’t happen every day. I was immediately reminded of Cheick Kongo rising from the grave to sleep Pat Barry way back in 2011, a violent highlight that’s memory lives on even today. Objectively, this was about as great of a highlight reel moment as UFC can hope to produce from its Apex venue.

The problem was the aftermath.

Alhassan didn’t get floored by the left hook — he got put to sleep. After an Almeida celebration and cut to commercial, Alhassan was still out cold. The camera was on the 39-year-old veteran when he did stir and struggle to sit on the stool, disturbing video footage that we will share here. The cameras then returned to him a final time many minutes later as he tried to to walk out of the cage, struggling even with the assistance of several others. At one point, color commentator Dominick Cruz remarked how Alhassan’s head bouncing off the canvas made for an even more dramatic finish, and I can scarcely come up with a more uncomfortably true sentiment.

There’s no hiding it was a bad knockout, and I’ll give some credit to UFC for showing that reality. There was perhaps a little too much showing, however, as the super early “Knockout of the Year” moment grew more uncomfortable and sobering the longer the shot lingered on Alhassan’s struggle to regain consciousness.

For better or worse, the reality of a vicious knockout was on full display.

The knockout was really an example of UFC’s complicated relationship with violence. On one hand, its the sport’s great strength. The promotional tagline “As Real As It Gets” is not a joke. People tune into mixed martial arts (MMA) because it’s a fistfight between two hardened athletes intent on proving themselves the badder motherf—ker.

That’s the whole game! The high stakes are what make this sport fascinating.

Simultaneously, UFC has to distance itself from violence. The promotion has to invest in brain studies, claim its safety superiority to boxing, and change “Knockout of the Night” bonuses to “Performance of the Night” bonuses … even if knockouts win most of those checks. If too much is revealed about the health consequences of fighters on the wrong end of the “Knockout of the Year,” that’s bad for business.

None of this is intended as a criticism of the promotion, just a comment on the nature of combat sports. If anything, it’s even more reason to remember the Almeida vs. Alhassan knockout in 11 months.

I just hope “Judo Thunder” recovers well in the interim.

For complete UFC Vegas 101 results and play-by-play, click here.