Don’t look now, but Alex Pereira is on the precipice of finishing one heck of a clean-up job.
As chaotic as the UFC light heavyweight division had been 18 months ago — with injured champions twice dropping the belt and a pair of high-level 205-pounders fighting to a draw to leave a vacant belt unclaimed in the preceding year — Pereira is just a win away from victories over each of the top four contenders.
Not that anyone’s making that a foregone conclusion ahead of Pereira’s UFC 313 title defense in the main event in Las Vegas, where at last he faces Magomed Ankalaev on Saturday night (10 p.m. ET, ESPN+ pay-per-view).
Ankalaev long has been pegged by pundits and fans as the toughest potential test of Pereira’s dominance of the division, with his mix of striking prowess and, especially, grappling competence exceeding that of anyone else the former middleweight champion has faced in his brief but brilliant UFC career.
To wit, when Pereira (12-2, 10 finishes) shared on social media a clip of him and coach Glover Teixeira — also a former holder of the light heavyweight belt — wrestling outdoors shirtless and shoeless in snow-coated Connecticut, Ankalaev’s reply: “I hope you ready to do this for 25 min.”
“I think this is going to be a great experience,” Pereira told The Post through an interpreter, during a recent video call, regarding the test against Ankalaev. “I can make his words my own as well. Let’s see if he can stand 25 minutes doing that. If he can’t grapple me for 25 minutes, then he’s going to have to stand up, and then we all know how that’s going to go.”
No telling for sure how that would go, but if Pereira’s history of violence as a two-division champion of Glory kickboxing and the elite MMA proving ground of the UFC … well, it won’t be pretty for the challenger from Dagestan, Russia.
Pereira has yet to need 25 minutes in any of his six UFC championship fights over the last three years, but he’s been close twice, knockout out rival Israel Adesanya in the final frame to win the 185-pound title in November 2022 and then again this past October putting away challenger Khalil Rountree Jr. late in the fourth.
A patient Pereira meticulously picked at a game Rountree, avoiding major damage while the challenger wore down before changing gears.
“That was the plan: to use the first three rounds and then really pour it on at the end of the third and fourth round,” Pereira explained.
Endurance at regular altitude — a grueling three-rounder in elevated Salt Lake City against ex-champ Jan Blachowicz set aside — has not proved to be an Achilles heel of Pereira.
But the majority of Pereira’s exchanges in the UFC have been on favorable terms for a striker as advanced as the Brazilian.
It’s hard to imagine Ankalaev (19-1-1, 10 finishes) won’t at least mix in clinch work and takedowns in order to test how well the champ and his gas tank handle extended grappling sequences throughout the fight.
While Pereira deserves to be considered the more dangerous striker with more potent finishing prowess — six of his last seven wins are by (T)KO — even he concedes respect for what Ankalaev is capable of doing with his kickboxing arsenal, such as his knockout of Johnny Walker last January.
To a certain extent, that is.
“He’s a high-level striker too,” Pereira says. “I just feel like I’m on another level.. I’ve been training a lot of different things, a lot of new things, so I think this fight’s going to be really interesting. It’s going to be a war, and I hope he’s ready now.”
Ankalaev, the top-ranked contender at 205 pounds, had been the anticipated opponent by most last fall before Rountree received a surprise title shot.
If Pereira, narrowly favored by handicappers to start fight week, can get through Ankalaev with the belt still around his waist, that would give him victories over each of the top four and with wins against five of the top seven light heavyweights in the promotion.
The champ admits he doesn’t know who makes sense as the next in line to face him if that comes to pass, and he wouldn’t mind giving more serious consideration to either a move to heavyweight — a can UFC CEO Dana White has preferred to kick down the road to this point — or taking a boxing match — almost certainly a no-go with UFC brass.
Perhaps the world looks different in the eyes of White next week, when he and his team get together and potentially explore next moves for one of their star attractions.
In the case of a heavyweight move, at least Pereira thinks his body is just about ready to go up a weight class.
“I’d have to change very little,” notes Pereira, who will turn 38 in July. “A couple weeks ago, I was weighing about 235 pounds, and that’s really heavy for me. I’m usually around 229, 230, but I think that would be a good weight for me to move up. It’s natural; the body, you get heavier and you get bigger as you age, so that’s what I see that’s been happening.”
