Tomorrow's main event came together late. Sean Brady got hurt, Brady against Gabriel Bonfim fell through, and the heavyweights got the top of the card: Johnny Walker against Waldo Cortes-Acosta at the Apex.
On paper it's about as clean a contrast in how fights end as you'll find.
Walker doesn't hang about
Walker has had 16 UFC fights with a result, plus a no contest against Magomed Ankalaev. Ten of the 16 ended in the first round. That's 63%. Across every UFC heavyweight fight since 2018 the figure is a third, and across the whole UFC it's a quarter.
It cuts both ways. Seven of his nine UFC wins came in the first round, and three of his seven losses did too. When Walker fights, somebody usually gets finished early, and it hasn't always been the other man.
When he does win, he wins well. Eight of his nine UFC wins score 85 or more on our card, which is what we call dominant. The latest was the knee that stopped Mick Parkin a month ago, in his first fight at heavyweight.
Cortes-Acosta doesn't get stopped
Cortes-Acosta has had 14 UFC fights and has never been finished. Nine of them went the full 15 minutes, and all four of his losses, to Marcos Rogerio de Lima, Sergei Pavlovich, Alexander Volkov and Curtis Blaydes, were unanimous decisions. The same is true of his whole professional MMA record.
He finishes people too, when they let him: five knockouts in his ten UFC wins, including Derrick Lewis in January.
The man they have in common
Ryan Spann. Walker knocked him out in the first round at light heavyweight in 2020. When Spann moved up to heavyweight in March 2025, Cortes-Acosta was waiting, and stopped him in the second round of his debut.
Where they sit
Cortes-Acosta is seventh on our heavyweight board. Walker is 11th after one fight at the weight. When a fighter moves up we bring most of his rating with him, because results at the old weight are still evidence, and we widen the uncertainty because they are not the same evidence. One more heavyweight fight will tell us a lot more about where he belongs.
We don't pick fights. We'll score this one once it's done.
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