Cuz when an elite kickboxer comes in we truly don’t know just how good he’s going to be, if his tdd holds up, or his ground game etc etc. I nabbed him when he was 1-0 in the UFC and took 2 rounds to take out a Greek nobody. We still didn’t get enough information a few months later only winning a decision against Bruno Silva, that’s been ktfo several times. It took to knocking out Strickland, then Izzy in the same year to know something.
I certainly never envisioned him winning the belt in the same year and thought it would take a couple of years at the very least.