UFC 3312 takeaways: Talbott, Silva validate their top billing

[UFC 332 Dominance: Talbott’s Overture and Silva’s Championship Triumph Propel Top Acts]

• Brett Okamoto

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  Brett Okamoto

  ESPN Staff Writer

  Brett Okamoto has reported on mixed martial arts and boxing at ESPN since 2010. He has covered all of the biggest events in combat sports during that time, including in-depth interviews and features with names such as Dana White, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Conor McGregor, Nate Diaz, Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao and Georges St-Pierre. He was also a producer on the 30 for 30 film: “Chuck and Tito,” which looked back at the careers and rivalry of Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz. He lives in Las Vegas, and is an avid, below-average golfer in his spare time.

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• Jeff Wagenheim

Multiple Authors

Oct 4, 2026, 12:11 AM ET

The options were plenty for performance bonuses after UFC 332 in Salt Lake City. The fight card set a UFC record for knockouts with 11, and nine came in the first round. The most resounding KO went to men’s bantamweight Payton Talbott in the co-main event. He came out strong, sending former champion Deiveson Figueiredo to the canvas twice before finishing him a little over two minutes into the fight. The win is Talbott’s second in a row over a former champion and likely means big things ahead for him, but the loss for Figueiredo doesn’t do anything to minimize his legacy in the UFC.

The main event, which received prefight chatter over whether it was worthy of a headlining slot, was high energy but mostly one-sided. Natalia Silva, the No. 1 women’s flyweight contender, earned her first UFC championship with a unanimous decision over Wang Cong. The 29-year-old joins men’s flyweight Joshua Van as the only UFC champions under 30.

Was the main event criticism validated?

The UFC took heat on social media for booking Silva vs. Wang in a main event on a numbered card. Silva was at the front of a long line of women’s flyweight title contenders, no question, but it’s fair to say Wang, unranked by ESPN and outside the top five in the UFC’s own rankings, jumped the queue.

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But while I’m on board with a lot of the criticism the UFC receives for its matchmaking, especially at a championship level, I understand what the fight promotion was going for in this case: The UFC was trying to set up a couple of possible storylines involving Valentina Shevchenko, who vacated the women’s flyweight title to make the Silva-Wang title fight a possibility after suffering an undisclosed injury that will sideline her for “up to one year.”

Why Wang? She might not have an extensive UFC résumé, but she beat Shevchenko in a kickboxing match in 2015. Their history is not unlike that of Alex Pereira and Israel Adesanya, who met twice in kickboxing, with Pereira winning both and knocking out Adesanya in one of those fights. It provided a setup for their UFC rivalry.

A Wang vs. Shevchenko angle became moot, as things turned out, because Silva was too much for the Chinese fighter to handle. Wang came in with a 10-1 MMA record, but she had zero fights against top-10 flyweights, and it showed. Silva, by contrast, came in having defeated former UFC champions (Jessica Andrade, Alexa Grasso and Rose Namajunas) in each of her past three fights.

Silva was too fast, too elusive and too precise with her punches and kicks. Wang had no answers, looked lost and couldn’t get her offense going until the fifth round, when it was too late. Not to vindicate the prefight matchmaking criticism, but this sure was a lopsided and not-so-fiery bout, one that got booed by a crowd that had been treated to a UFC-record 11 knockouts on the night.

So now the 125-pound division is left with the Silva vs. Shevchenko storyline we were expecting to see before Shevchenko was injured. It will be interesting to see how Silva’s speed holds up when she meets her predecessor with the belt, and how differently she’ll fight when up against an opponent with a strong grappling game. Oddly, that wasn’t even addressed in Silva’s postfight interview in the cage. Shevchenko’s name wasn’t even mentioned. Now, that is a UFC decision worth questioning. — Jeff Wagenheim

Quick thanks to Figueiredo

MMA loves to move quickly, and it’s ready to move very fast with Talbott. Talbott is everything MMA could want in a prospect, and his future is very bright.

So before we all take off on the Talbott train (as we inevitably will), let’s take a moment to shout out one of the most exciting flyweights of all time, Figueiredo.

Let’s be honest, Figueiredo was always a borrowed bantamweight. He struggled to make 125 pounds, and most of the sport was happy to see him ditch the weight cut in 2023, but he was also undersized at 135.

It’s easy to forget now, as UFC men’s flyweight champion Van has taken the sport by storm — but the flyweight division was still in a precarious position when Figueiredo made his mark in 2020. Henry Cejudo saved the division by knocking out TJ Dillashaw in 2018, but then eventually vacated a weight class the UFC seriously considered shutting down. Figueiredo picked up where Cejudo left off, saving the division with his one-punch knockout power and (frankly) villain charisma. He played the role of “bad guy” in his back-to-back fights against Joseph Benavidez in 2020, as well as his four-fight rivalry with Brandon Moreno.

It was inevitable when he moved up in weight, but for a three-year period, Figueiredo was the exact figure the flyweight division needed. The 38-year-old’s career is undoubtedly coming to an end soon, but Figueiredo was not just a terrific fighter and champion in his prime, he will forever be remembered as a significant hero of flyweight MMA. — Brett Okamoto

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