Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC Saturday’s UFC Vegas 40 event may have been lackluster, but there was still one lone bright spot for longtime fans of the sport: Jim Miller. At the age of 38, Miller stole the show with his highlight-reel knockout of Erick Gonzalez just 14 seconds into the second round. The win capped off Miller’s 38th appearance inside the octagon — an all-time benchmark for the promotion — and extended Miller’s vast list of records. The 13-year UFC veteran also counts the most wins in UFC lightweight history (20), the second-most wins in UFC history (22), and the most submission wins in UFC lightweight division history (9) on his résumé, among several other historic marks. Thirteen years to the day of his promotional debut at UFC 89, Miller joined The MMA Hour to discuss his victory and reflect on his historic run. And even he admitted that his younger self wouldn’t have believed had you told him in 2008 what was about to come. “Not to this level,” Miller said Monday on The MMA Hour. “I knew that I would hang around. I knew that I could compete. But to really think about 38 fights, 13 years — I’d kind of planned on like, ‘Eh, I’ll try to get it all in, my whole career into like 10 years. Once I’m 34, I’ll be ready to get out.’ And it didn’t work out like that. So here we are and still plugging along. “Who the hell knows [what I’d be doing otherwise]. I’ve enjoyed the ride. It’s had some ups and downs, but it’s an awesome way to make a living and I’ve been able to make a life out of it thus far, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.” Miller’s vicious knockout of Gonzalez snapped a two-fight skid for the New Jersey native. It also marked his return to action following a positive test for COVID-19 in September which forced Miller to withdraw from a planned bout against up-and-coming lightweight Nikolas Motta. Miller said he was fortunate to only feel mild symptoms from his COVID-19 diagnosis and that he felt fight ready fairly quickly afterward, which why he was able to jump back into a short-notice booking against Gonzalez. But perhaps the most impressive of all of his various UFC benchmarks was the fact that the Motta incident marked the first time in Miller’s lengthy octagon career that he’s even withdrawn from a fight at all. “I’ve dealt with injuries. I’ve dealt with illnesses. And sometimes I rolled the dice and I lost and it was too much, or it just added an extra dynamic to the fight that I wasn’t able to overcome,” Miller said. “But yeah, I had one or two that I was like, ‘Maybe. Let’s see.’ Particularly my fight with Kamal Shalorus [in 2011] — I was banged up for six weeks leading up to that fight. My knee was the size of a grapefruit, a big grapefruit. I pulled my psoas muscle, which ... it’s torture, it’s basically torture to kind of get that worked on. “It’s basically your tenderloin muscle so you have to go in through your abs and behind all your stomach and stuff like that — and intestines — to have somebody work on it, and that’s what I had to have done. So that’s a fight where I was very close to pulling out of that one. I ended up not and [ended up] having a great performance. There were some other ones that I wasn’t able to have that good of a performance, but I’m confident in my skill set. I’m confident in the fact that if I’m fighting my fight style, I can beat anyone.” Although he’s no longer the top contender he once was, Miller continues to truck along just fine in the latter days of his UFC career. He’s won five of his last nine bouts and has finished every one of those victories, and has even picked up three more post-fight bonuses over that span. Altogether, he’s a happy and successful veteran in a sport where not everyone who shares his kind of his mileage could say the same. He’s also unarguably one of the greatest lightweights to ever lace up a pair of UFC gloves. That being said, Miller admitted Monday there is still one regret that bothers him about his run — and that’s the fact that, despite his successes, he’s never competed for a UFC title. “A little bit,” Miller acknowledged when asked if it bugs him. “It does today. But it’s one of those things, this sport’s all about timing. You’ve got to get that opportunity when you’ve got the momentum and you’ve got everything going for you. And it’s not so much just to fight for the title — I know that I could’ve won the title. I know that I could’ve held the title. At that time, I was 9-1 in the UFC and there were guys getting title shots on less. It’s just the way that it worked out, and the way that I always looked at it was just that I’m going to keep fighting, I’m going to keep fighting whoever they put in front of me, because I was like, ‘Hey, I know that I can do this. I know that I can compete with the absolute best on the planet.’ “And it didn’t work out. But I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who sat around and waited and waited and waited and just didn’t want to fight unless it was for the title. Because the way I view it is that once you get [the belt], the excitement of it is that everybody’s going to want to fight you, so you’re going to have to fight off all comers no matter the skill set and the style of fight. You’re going to have to fight them all, so I figured why not get it out of the way before I had the title, and then once I had it, it’d be business as usual.” Saturday’s performance was a clear indication that Miller remains a competitive lightweight at age 37, and he isn’t looking to retire anytime soon. But he’s also a realist and he does know that a Michael Bisping-esque late-career run to the belt likely isn’t in the cards. Miller just wonders how things could’ve been different during his prime era in 2008-11 when he rattled off nine victories over his first 10 fights to start his UFC career. “Unfortunately I fought a hammer in Benson [Henderson] and I was also dealing with some other bullsh*t that I didn’t really know [about] until fight night,” said Miller, who revealed he dealt with mononucleosis before the Henderson bout followed by a kidney infection. “So it’s just one of those things. I’ve definitely improved since then, I’m a much more dangerous fighter, I’m much more well-rounded, I feel like my skill set is better, but I’m also a 38-year-old who’s been living this stuff, so the body’s a little bit more beat up today than it was 10 years ago. So it’s not as easy to always be ‘on’ like I was able to back in the day.”

Stephan Bonnar | Esther Lin, MMA Fighting The Ultimate Fighter 1 veteran Stephan Bonnar now says he was suffering from a severe staph infection during a recent emergency room visit and an interview that left many in the MMA community concerned for his health. Bonnar said shortly after the interview, he spent over one month in the hospital after doctors found infected abscesses on both sides of a fractured vertebrae he said he suffered during pro wrestling match. He is now on a five-week recovery program that requires him to take IV antibiotics every 8 hours until the staph abates. Then he can address his back injury. If the staph had gone untreated, doctors told Bonnar, the infection could have been fatal. “When [the doctor] said it like that, it really, kind of, wow, it shocked me, like, here I got again,” Bonnar told MMA Fighting. “I’m almost, like, f*cking dead here. How did it get like this? It just got to where I was injured, and a week later I tried going in the ER and got shot down and was all upset about that. But in the meantime, I’ve got all this staph building up, and yeah, it really potentially fatal, and you don’t even think about it. You’re just upset you couldn’t get treatment at the hospital – you didn’t even know what you needed the treatment for.” At the time of his first interview with MMA Fighting, Bonnar was couch-bound and appeared to be a tremendous amount of pain. He said he wanted someone to deliver him pain medication so he could function after running out of the oxycodone he used to treat longstanding knee, hip and neck injuries. That prompted many in the MMA community to conclude his issue was with drug dependency and not a wrestling injury. After watching the interview, Bonnar wanted to show fans his need for treatment stemmed from legitimate medical issues. “I knew something wasn’t right,” he said. “I knew this shouldn’t be getting this much worse – I feel 10 times worse and it’s been 10 days later. So yeah, I really wish it didn’t come to that.” Bonnar said he lost 36 pounds in the hospital and showed off a walker he uses to get around the house. His wife, Andrea, and a nurse are helping him as he recovers from the infection. “It’s hard to eat, too,” he said. “I don’t have much of an appetite. I’m just forcing, for the most part, protein shakes with Ensures, and milk and an egg, and have that most of the day. ... This really took a lot out of me.” Pro wrestling was mostly a hobby for Bonnar, who retired from MMA in 2015 after a 13-year career in MMA. Following his recent health scare, he now plans to transition to a steady job in medical equipment sales and retire from all competition. “I would like to do something that has a good payoff that doesn’t require any physical risk, really,” he said. “After this one, I don’t want to be hurt any more. Hopefully heal from this, but I definitely don’t want to break anything. I’ve been pretty consistently getting injured my whole life, and I’m pretty sick of it. I’ve had 10 surgeries, broken about 20 bones – well, 22 now. “So I’ve had enough, man. My body’s had it. When I retired from MMA, my body had had it. But at least the wrestling, you could collaborate with a guy and work around injuries. But after this one, I’m just done.”

Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC Matt Brown returns to co-host the new episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer while previewing his upcoming fight against Bryan Barberena and how much setting records in the UFC actually matters to him. He also reacts to the controversy this past weekend after Aspen Ladd’s head coach Jim West was criticized for the advice he dished out during her fight with Norma Dumont, plus does the UFC have a responsibility to punish Jon Jones and Conor McGregor after their recent actions? All this and much more on The Fighter vs. The Writer. Audio-only versions of the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Ahead of his return against Paulo Costa in the UFC Vegas 41 main event, Marvin Vettori ended up engaging in a war of words with retired UFC fighter Paul Felder while he was serving as color commentator during a recent event. Vettori lashed out over the way Felder was calling a fight between Dan Hooker and Nasrat Haqparast while calling him “the worst to ever do it,” which led to a spirited exchange between them on social media. Now as he prepares for his own fight on Saturday night, Vettori will have Felder calling the action cage side but he promises whatever simmering tension exists between them won’t bleed into his performance. “I’ll definitely put it behind [me] and I’ll be laser focused when I’m in the cage,” Vettori told MMA Fighting ahead of his fight. According to Vettori, his issue with Felder came down to what he perceived was biased commentary towards Hooker and against Haqparast when they clashed at UFC 266 in September. The Italian middleweight says he’s had similar problems with Felder calling his fights in the past as well but his initial challenge over Twitter had nothing to do with his personal experiences at the time. “I just don’t like, and again, I came out saying this because I saw it happening to a friend of mine [Nasrat Haqparast] and not actually to myself,” Vettori explained. “Saying that, it actually happened to myself multiple times and one of the times was actually my last fight [against Israel Adesanya]. “Paul Felder tried to be the smart kid in the comments when he replied to me. I didn’t really like that. It’s not that I didn’t like it, it’s just coming from him, it’s not like it really made sense but he tried to be funny. I addressed the thing that was important to me.” Whether it’s Felder or anybody else behind the microphone, Vettori can’t help but feel at times that the commentators working UFC broadcasts can be skewed one way or another during certain fights. Of course, Vettori isn’t alone in his criticism — there have been numerous examples of fighters taking aim at commentators for perceived biases over the years — and he just got fed up with it that night. “Sometimes I feel like commentators, they just try to bias the public and whoever watches the fight cause they have that power sometimes and it’s wrong,” Vettori said. “We put our heart and soul out there and even him being a fighter and even him talking to the fighters before they fight, he should know better. Sometimes, I don’t know what goes on but I just feel like him in particular, he’s a puppet. “I’ll see him and I’ll talk to him. I like to talk face-to-face. At the end of the day, we’re in a civilized society, kind of civilized. By saying that, it’s not that it’s going to bother me or nothing. I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut when I saw it happen to a friend.” As part of the typical pre-fight week schedule, Vettori will meet with the commentary team ahead of Saturday night to chat with them about his training camp and preparation for the upcoming battle against Costa. That means Vettori will be answering questions from Felder and he definitely plans on addressing his issues with the commentary once they actually have a chance to talk. Vettori doesn’t want to misconstrue his actions as confrontational but rather a way to hash out their differences in person rather than a war of words on social media. “I’ll talk to him for sure. Whenever I see him, I’ll talk to him for sure,” Vettori said. “I just expect for anybody that does their work to be able to do their job properly. That’s what I ask. That’s the only thing that I ask. If he does it properly, then there shouldn’t be any problem.”

Esther Lin, MMA Fighting Next month at UFC 268, Colby Covington will get his second crack at the undisputed welterweight championship when he challenges champion Kamaru Usman in their highly anticipated rematch. The two first fought at UFC 245, in a Fight of the Year contender that saw Usman win by fifth-round TKO. The bout was not without controversy though as Covington contended that many things conspired against him, including Usman faking a low blow and referee Marc Goddard stopping the bout prematurely. Now, Covington will finally get his chance to right those alleged wrongs, and to hear him tell it, half the battle was just getting back to a title shot. “It’s been such a journey,” Covington told ESPN. “It’s been tough. It wasn’t supposed to happen. They did not want it to happen. His manager, they were refusing. They were trying to find every way in the book out of fighting this rematch. They didn’t want this fight and the only reason they have to take it is the UFC gave them no choice. They said, ‘Hey, you fight this fight or we strip you. It’s one or the other. You’ve got to come out and prove you’re the best in the world. There needs to be no controversy surrounding this fight.’ So it’s been tough.” Since their first fight, Covington and Usman have been on very different paths. Covington has fought just once, securing a fifth-round TKO over former champion Tyron Woodley last year. Meanwhile, Usman has been extremely active, racking up three more title defenses, one over Gilbert Burns and two over Jorge Masvidal, and starting rumblings that he may be approaching Georges St-Pierre’s title of greatest welterweight of all-time. However, for Covington, those victories ring hollow given who he beat. “I had to go out and finish a former world champion in Woodley,” Covington said. “He got too easy paychecks against lightweights that should have never been there. His last fight was against ‘Street Judas’ Masvidal. God, I was beating that guy decades ago. That’s not an achievement. You’re proud for beating that guy? That guy’s a lightweight. He shouldn’t even be up here at the top of the mountain.... “He’s knocking out lightweights, he’s knocking out guys that shouldn’t be in there with him. These are easy paychecks and there’s a reason he fought those guys, because he knew he was going to win. A former training partner of his, Dilbert, the guy should have never been in there. ‘Street Judas’ Masvidal? The only reason he’s in that position is because he’s got all the hype on him. No one cares to see that guy fight. He’s not a top-tier fighter. ‘Street Judas’ Masvidal is the most fragile guy on the UFC roster and he deserves no place fighting in a championship fight and we found that out.” Though Covington’s comments may miss the mark in some respects, Usman did face criticism for choosing to rematch Jorge Masvidal in April despite having won a clear decision over him last year, particularly when other contenders like Covington were waiting in the wings. However, Usman was clear in stating that he was not being particularly interested in a Covington rematch since “Chaos” had only had the one fight since their first contest. In the end, it didn’t matter though and now Covington gets what he’s been after all along, a second shot at Usman. “The fact is no one wanted to fight me,” Covington said. “Go to Hunter Campbell, go to Dana White, ask them the truth. No one would fight me. ‘Street Judas’ Masvidal, they wanted to make this big hype fight, best friends turned rivals who hate each other’s guts now. He was running his mouth in the media saying all this and that, ‘I’ll drop Colby on sight, that guy’s fragile, blah blah blah.’ There’s no one more fragile than ‘Street Judas’ Masvidal. That guy got - is he even awake yet, or is he still sleeping from the last time he fought Usman? “I was trying to put on the biggest and best fights for the UFC. No one wanted to take the bait so now we are here and we get the best fight in the welterweight division and it’s gonna be a real treat for the fans.” UFC 268 takes place on Nov. 6 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, NY. TOP STORIES Notorious. Italian DJ Francesco Facchinetti accuses Conor McGregor of breaking his nose in an unprovoked attack. Gamebred. Jorge Masvidal explains booking of ‘coward’ Leon Edwards fight: ‘He does what I say, when I say’. Cleared. Ex-UFC champ Chuck Liddell will not be charged following arrest for domestic violence. Reaction. Michael Bisping reacts to Conor McGregor allegedly punching Italian DJ: ‘Conor’s got to get his sh*t together’. Smart. Dillon Danis breaks silence on Jersey Shore arrest, disputes videos: ‘I’m not stupid’. VIDEO STEW The MMA Hour. Contender Series highlights from last week. Free fights. Jan Blachowicz’s training camp. Corey Anderson on TMZ Sports. LISTEN UP Fighter vs. Writer. Matt Brown joins to discuss Aspen Ladd, Jon Jones, and Conor McGregor. The Co-Main Event. Discussing Conor McGregor, UFC Vegas 40, and the Bellator grand prix. SOCIAL MEDIA BOUILLABAISSE Conor McGregor. Advised by who? Does this lanky streak of piss think he business savvy or something? Hey bro. You’d 15 fights in the ufc and were on 20k to fight 20k to win hahahaha 15 fucking fights. In the ufc! Eyelid hanging off your head and handed a 20k check pre tax Know who made you.— Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) October 18, 2021 Thirsty. Coked up Conor likes to play tough guy with musicians… Conor PLEASE try and do something when you see me !! https://t.co/CZfPtJApGo— Jake Paul (@jakepaul) October 17, 2021 Trying to “scoreboard” someone who knocked you out the last time you fought is an interesting tactic. Let’s see if it works out for him. Hold up... So a guy who bolted from the UFC after I've slept him and almost made him retire, got a couple of wins in the 2nd league and claims he is the best? Maybe I've punched him to hard... No class in win or defeat Corey. There's levels to this. ‍♂️— Jan Blachowicz (@JanBlachowicz) October 18, 2021 Let's not forget. What happened to you the 1st time I left you looking like elephant man. And you posted "I need to go home and rethink my career".Yea I got knocked out in our 2nd fight (lucky punch?) but I made you my broad for 15 min straight nothing lucky about that. https://t.co/q5kSRUVt48— Corey 'Overtime' Anderson (@CoreyA_MMA) October 18, 2021 He must've forgot..... ‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/VBcqPyhIqq— Corey 'Overtime' Anderson (@CoreyA_MMA) October 18, 2021 Statement from Ryan Bader. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ryan Bader (@ryanbader) Establishing dominance. I told you you could be my co-captain @GamebredFighter. Nothing wrong with being number @arielhelwani https://t.co/iGpvw5uSV4— Kayla Harrison (@KaylaH) October 18, 2021 Literally no one likes Dillon Danis. Well said @arielhelwani What a loser. He sent me threats via Instagram recently and it’s the most hilarious thing ever. https://t.co/cfyGGgdY47— michael (@bisping) October 19, 2021 Perspective. Please stop telling me how much money I lost you in your parlays.. I lost half my paycheck, consider us even..— Tim Elliott (@TElliott125) October 18, 2021 Don’t be like this guy. Paddy's fanbase is starting to spread their message ‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/aYj7gYD3t9— Terrance McKinney (@twrecks155) October 18, 2021 Blond Brunson. Blonde Brunson takeover . GTA send the residual check pic.twitter.com/xDlOIZS3EV— Derek Brunson (@DerekBrunson) October 19, 2021 FIGHT ANNOUNCEMENTS N/A. FINAL THOUGHTS Thanks for reading and see y’all tomorrow. EXIT POLL If you find something you’d like to see in the Morning Report, hit up @JedKMeshew on Twitter and let him know about it. Also follow MMAFighting on Instagram and like us on Facebook.