“Gable’s doing great. Gable’s doing really, really awesome. I believe in Gable,” Jones told The Schmo. “And as far as the athlete that Gable is, he’s extraordinary. He’s absolutely extraordinary. He deserves good things. He does all the right things. I see the way that he treats the people around him, and he deserves success.”
The change he wants is in the training room. “I feel like, as a team, we need to add a lot more sparring, and we have our little things that we can work on as a team, but he’s in great hands,” Jones said. “He has great mentors and a great team around him, and we believe he is going to pull back in an amazing way.” Jones did not name sparring partners or a timeline for Steveson’s return, but the diagnosis fits the arc of his career so far. Steveson, now 26, is still early in his MMA development, and Jones’s emphasis on live rounds reads as an acknowledgement that a decorated wrestling résumé does not replace time spent absorbing and reacting to heavyweight power.
The loss itself left little room for analysis. Steveson entered the September 19 fight in Los Angeles as one of the heaviest favourites in UFC history, and Sharaf knocked him out with a single left hand 12 seconds into the first round, an upset ESPN immediately placed among the biggest the promotion has seen. It was the first defeat of Steveson’s professional career, leaving him 4-1 in MMA and 1-1 in the UFC. The aftermath added its own controversy: Steveson left the Octagon before the result was read rather than acknowledging Sharaf, drawing heavy criticism. Jones took responsibility for that within days, writing on social media that it had been his decision to take Steveson straight to the back after the fight, and adding that he believed Steveson would go on to be one of the best heavyweights in the UFC.
To frame the setback, Jones reached for the most famous upset in the sport’s history. “I mean, GSP vs. Matt Serra,” he said, pointing to Georges St-Pierre’s first-round title loss in 2007, a defeat that ultimately became the turning point of one of the greatest careers in MMA. The comparison is about trajectory rather than circumstance: elite careers often include a night that looks like this one, and what defines them is the response. By Jones’s account, Steveson is back in the gym and, as he put it, in the right head space. Others have come to his defence too, including Chael Sonnen, who has pushed back on the suggestion that the result exposed a fundamental durability problem rather than a single mistake punished with full power.
The path forward is unsettled on both sides. Steveson’s next booking has not been announced. Sharaf, who walked away with the signature result of his career, has publicly pondered retirement, and has already been called out by Anthony Wint, one of the six UFC 332 winners who entered the Meta UFC Rankings last week. For Steveson, the question is no longer whether he fights again. It is how much of the extra sparring Jones is prescribing shows up in the opening exchange when he does.
