The loss he is answering deserves its plain accounting. On July 18 in the main event of UFC Fight Night 281 at Oklahoma City’s Paycom Center, Du Plessis beat Usman by unanimous decision, 50-45 and 49-46 twice, in a five-round fight that took Fight of the Night honours and was contested almost entirely on the feet: no successful takedowns, no submission attempts, and a 136-92 edge in significant strikes for the former middleweight champion. Both men arrived off nearly a year away. Usman, true to the identity he is now defending, pushed the pace hardest in the fifth and briefly appeared to have Du Plessis in trouble before the round, and the fight, slipped away. It was the kind of loss that confirms the engine and questions everything else: the cardio was there for twenty-five minutes, the wrestling that built his reign never landed once, and the bigger man won the striking exchanges that decided the cards.
That is precisely the ledger Usman addressed. In LowKick MMA’s account of the MelBet interview, he pointed to undisclosed pre-fight circumstances that, in his view, kept him from performing at his ceiling, while pointedly declining to dress them up as an excuse. The conditioning claim, which supplied the headline, reads less as a boast than as a reaffirmation of the attribute he has always sold: output and pressure accumulated over championship distance. And on the tactical cost of fighting at 185, he acknowledged that adapting a welterweight style built on measured control to a division of heavier hitters is a project that, by his telling, requires a full camp dedicated to the move. The quotes and characterisations here come from a single promotional interview and should be read as such, but the direction of travel is clear enough: Usman believes the Du Plessis version of himself was not the finished middleweight.
The honest context makes the decision ahead genuinely difficult. Usman is now 0-2 at middleweight, the first of those losses a majority decision to Khamzat Chimaev in 2023 taken on roughly ten days’ notice, the second a clear defeat to a former champion who has now beaten the current one, Sean Strickland, twice. At 39, with a record of 21-5 and a career clock he described as finite, a full-camp second attempt at 185 would test whether the Du Plessis fight was a ceiling or a draft, as LowKick framed it. A return to 170, the division he ruled with five title defences, would put him back among familiar problems and familiar names.
One of those familiar names spent last week saying it out loud. Colby Covington, whom Usman beat twice for the welterweight title, floated a trilogy with Usman as his preferred next fight in the days before his Real American Freestyle title match with Chimaev was made official for November 14 in Abu Dhabi. That matchup now sits on a wrestling mat and a promotional calendar outside the UFC, and nobody has suggested the third fight is close. But it is a reminder that Usman’s name still carries enough weight to be requested by his oldest rival, even after two straight setbacks.
What the interview did not contain is notable too. Usman called out nobody, sketched no shortlist, and named no timeline. The language was that of a fighter taking stock, weighing a decade at the top against the number of camps left in it, and choosing to lead with the one quality nobody in Oklahoma City could take from him. Whether that engine gets its next five rounds at 170 or 185 is the question still sitting open. The answer, as these things always are, will arrive with the next contract.
