Colby Covington was just getting started. So he says.
Joaquin Buckley may have seemed to be in total control as he pasted Covington with sharp jabs and thudding body shots, but that was all prelude to Covington’s glorious comeback. This, anyway, is the story Covington started shopping around after his third-round stoppage loss to Buckley in Saturday’s UFC Tampa main event.
And really, if you’ve been paying attention to this man’s career, what else did you expect? To hear him tell it, he’s hardly ever lost a fight. So it’s no wonder he came away from this one with a take on things that was, to put it mildly, not exactly supported by the evidence.
“I was just getting warmed up in that fight,” Covington said after the loss. (He was in fact covered in his own blood from the second round on, which is a hell of a way to get warmed up.)
“I think it was tied up 1-1, and I was starting to wear on him.” (It was actually a clean sweep for Buckley on all three judges’ scorecards and Covington was getting thumped on pretty good.)
“I could see him breathing out of his mouth.” (So could we, but that’s still preferable to bleeding heavily out of your face.)
“I was starting to catch him with more shots, so it’s unfortunate that they stopped it.” (Covington landed just eight strikes in that third round; Buckley landed three times as many.)
What we can take from this fight is that Buckley is very, very good. He never appeared to be in any danger against Covington. He stopped seven of eight takedowns, and when he did get planted on his back, he got up again without absorbing any real damage. He was faster, sharper and just plain better than Covington. That’s why he moves on up the ranks with a win, while Covington falls into unknown territory with the first losing streak of his pro career.
This is a weird spot for Covington. At 36, he has zero wins against anyone in the current top 15 of the UFC’s welterweight division. He had a cup of coffee with an interim title back in 2018. He was stripped of it a few months later while sitting out due to a medical procedure, but that never stopped him from taking the belt everywhere with him. He lost three consecutive shots at the undisputed welterweight title, which is how he ended up 2-4 in his past six fights.
Covington says he’s not done, that there’s still plenty of fight left in him. He also says “the best is yet to come” in his career, which, sure, you have to tell yourself that. But does anyone really believe it?
If Covington were to come back and win a UFC welterweight title now, he’d be the oldest person to ever win a title fight in that division. Odds are, we’ve seen the high-water mark of his career already. So where does that leave him?
Legacy is always a tricky topic in this sport, but it’s even trickier with guys like Covington. In his prime, he was one of the best fighters in the division — but never quite the best. He dragged himself out of obscurity by leaning into a character he’d created for himself, and to an extent it worked. He went from being just another wrestler on a winning streak to being a known name in the division. Fans who wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a police lineup a few months earlier suddenly couldn’t help but know him, whether they liked it or not.
That makes it tempting to liken his arc to Chael Sonnen’s, but the comparison doesn’t really hold up. Sonnen also used his mouth in addition to his skills in order to force us to care about him. Sonnen also came in second in every UFC title shot he had across two different divisions.
The difference is that Sonnen’s gimmick was built on an undeniable sort of charisma. He was brash and obnoxious but also clever and funny. Covington’s bit was never either of those things. It was just mean-spirited without ever feeling fun. His whole thing was that he’d say the worst things he could of about people. The only creativity involved was in finding ways to continually sink lower after we’d all assumed he’d already found the bottom.
Fans will react to that and some will even rally to it, but they don’t exactly love it. Just look at how quickly the crowd in Tampa on Saturday turned on him. This was a main event in the state where Covington lives and trains, the state he’s called home for years. But two minutes into the first round, when things already weren’t looking so great for him, the “Colby sucks” chants started up. A reminder that his schtick only really works when he’s winning. The second he’s not, it’s no longer anything that people feel any particular connection to.
Here’s where the pro wrestling-style gimmick giveth but also taketh away. If you’re a fighter beloved by fans, you can come up short in title fights and still be remembered as one of the greats. But if you stake everything on being so polarizing that people have to care one way or another, you don’t end up offering people anything fun or rewarding or even remotely positive to cling to during the declines. It’s just animosity and anger then. People tire of that after a while. They also don’t tend to miss it when it’s gone.
In that way, the Covington gimmick risks overshadowing the skills. At his best, he was a suffocating fighter who could take over in a fight. You could know exactly what he wanted to do and he’d still do it to you. Now the toughness and the resolve is still there, but the rest isn’t. The division has moved on. The new crop, as usually happens, is better than the old.
Covington’s place now seems increasingly to be in the division’s past. And we might find that, the more distance we get from it, the more we remember him purely as an antagonist for actual champs like Kamaru Usman. He was an obstacle to be overcome.
Maybe he’d say that’s still better than not being remembered at all. It was, after all, kind of the point of the gimmick. He set out to be the villain. He just might not have realized how firmly that cast his best opponents in the role of the hero.
