Sean Strickland

Sean Strickland is the UFC middleweight champion, again — and if that sentence reads strangely, welcome to the club that includes everyone in MMA. Strickland's 2023 dismantling of Israel Adesanya remains one of the biggest title upsets in the sport's history, a five-round jab-and-teep clinic nobody saw coming except the man throwing them.

The style is a fortress: a high Philly-shell guard, an endless jab, and cardio that lets him walk forward for 25 minutes behind it. It isn't flashy and it doesn't care. Opponents describe fighting Strickland as slowly losing an argument with a wall that talks.

The talking is the other thing. Unfiltered to a degree that gives the UFC's legal department night sweats, Strickland is genuinely uninterested in being liked — which, in the way of these things, has made him one of the most-watched fighters alive. Behind it sits a brutal childhood he discusses with disarming honesty, and a 31-7 record built across 17 years as a professional.

Champion again at 35, he defends the belt the way he does everything: forward, jabbing, and narrating exactly what he thinks about it.