Jon Jones is past his prime and should retire NOW before he embarrasses himself further

Blimey, Kev, you're the one who's been watching too many bloated highlights reels at half speed. Those knockdowns? One was a clean shot to the liver when he was already compromised after swinging wildly, the other a grappling mishap that left him flat on his back. Timing isn't busted, just the usual Jones habit of improvising under pressure.

Mate, two knockdowns and suddenly Jones is made of wet NOODLES now? The same dude who outboxed DC while looking like a wreck, the same dude who IGNITED the whole gameplan against Romero when his corner told him to slow down? 🤬 You ever SEEN HIM under pressure? Those shots? Yeah, ONE was a liver that dropped ANYONE – he rolled away clean AS you lot scream. And the grappling mishap? Bro... that was a HALF-HEARTED follow-up when he was already yards deep in Valimaki’s guard! Two knockdowns my arse – he was CONTROLLING the cage like he’s 25, just needed that one split second to reset. 💪 Timing isn’t busted – you lot just cherry-pick a camera angle and scream “past prime” like it’s fact. This man’s IQ in that cage is still LIGHTYEARS ahead of the rest. 35? GIMME A BREAK – Teixeira at 45 in his last fight looked fresher than half the clowns in the LHW division today. Jones ain’t gone. He’s just TOO SMART for these clowns’ level, so they point at two knockdowns and scream retirement. GET IN! 🔥

Jones ever *incapacitated* by any fighter outside the light heavyweight top five? Name one, Kev. Valimaki isn’t a scrub off a late-night card in Cairns—he’s a decorated Olympian with legitimate striking pedigree and he clocked Jon clean on that liver when Jon was already committed to the shot after coming up empty on a leg kick spin. That isn’t “timing busted,” that’s *physics*—roundhouse to a committed blitz equals bad math. And then you want to call the second knockdown a “grappling mishap”? Bro, Valimaki locked a bodylock, snapped half-shots down the middle, and Jon decided to posture on the fence instead of shortening the angle or changing levels. His own gameplan betrayed him, not some mystery chin regression. People act like every knockdown equals irreversible decay. Teixeira put Stipe down in their last tilt, right? Felt fine the week after. Jones kept Stipe on the mat for *five* years, inflicted literal cartilage tears on Gustaffson, put DC to sleep cold. Two knockdowns do not erase twenty years of empirical data. If you’re using them as Exhibit A for retirement, you’re watching highlights without the context—and maybe celebrating the wrong corner in that Valimaki cage, because let’s be honest, Jon’s cornermen looked about three seconds away from throwing in the towel themselves before that first liver shot landed.

funny how this argument always circles back to the same old tape over and over — the liver shot in 2018 against Gustafsson, the thing that dropped DC in three rounds flat. remember when Jones used to dance around like a man who hadn’t aged a day? back in my day, i could’ve sworn he had skin thicker than the glove leather he stepped into the cage with. those weren’t just knockdowns, they were exceptions painted as rule. now every time some jab juts out like a compass needle we all scream “chin down!” like we forgot he’s still the same cat who put a full-takedown artist like Rashad Evans to sleep on his feet. the liver shot to Valimaki? sure, he dipped, but he also ate shots from Gus, Sonnen, rockhard RHONY for years and kept coming like the bell on the factory floor refused to ding him out. two knockdowns and suddenly the vibranium’s papier-mâché? nah, mate — he’s just running on fumes like any other legend who overstayed the welcome a bit. but twenty years of data don’t fold because one Olympian caught a clean hook after a mis-fired spin. we’ve all seen fighters climb back from worse; Teixeira certainly looked fresher than half the mid-division bench at 45, didn’t he? still, i’ll give you this — when Jones stumbles like he did last year, the tape burns faster than your average highlight reel. maybe he does need a long coffee break before he elbows himself into a retirement narrative he can’t out-wrestle his own legend from. ah well, we’ll see.

Och, so now we're diagnosing brain damage from two body shots that ANYONE with half a liver in this division would’ve tucked for? 🤡 Jones had his bell rung by FAR superior strikers than Valimaki back in his prime, and he walked out without so much as a sniffle—yet suddenly the V-word gets thrown around like it’s a knockout punch itself?

so you lot are really gonna let two shots—two!!—magically rewrite a man who used to make Spiderman look clumsy in that cage? 🤯 remember Jon standing toe-to-toe with GUS for 25 minutes, letting that Swedish kickboxer pepper his face like he was trying to grind up a granite block? that’s the same chin that absorbed Sonnen’s flying knees like they were love taps from a grandma! and now Valimaki lands TWO shots—one liver (ANYONE eats that), one grappling pile-up—and suddenly we’re all calling 20 years of immortality into question? get real!

yeah nah just cos you fanboy so hard doesn’t mean the bell’s not ringing louder these days than the bell that started the dance. two knockdowns in one round to a bloke who’s basically a heavyweight on stilts, and suddenly it’s “but he took shots before!” true, sure, but back then he’d either scramble back or stifle you like a tramp trampling a daisy. now? liver shot on camera, clean as a whistle, he’s flat on his back and needs the referee to pick up the remote. that’s not “chest-beating”, that’s called physics: hit the meat at the right angle and the legs go south whether you’ve eaten worse all week. you wheel out gustaffson like it’s some silver bullet — gusti unloaded everything he had for five rounds and landed more power punches than half the LHW claque in the whole octagon yet couldn’t put that man away. valimaki? straight left-right hook after a half-arsed spin — and our Jon is horizontal faster than you can say “poof”. chest-beating aside, the man now telegraphs like a neon sign in a power cut. used to glide; now he lunges. used to roll shoulders off punches; now he rolls onto his back. twenty years of data? fine. but the tape doesn’t lie when the body isn’t responding the way the legend did. teixeira at 45 looked fresher than this too — and teixeira ain’t jon jones. if he keeps posturing like last year in the rematch against gus he’s gonna gift another olympian a highlight-reel KO and then we’ll all nod sagely and say “yeah, should’ve retired when the cage still had respect for him”. time to pull the plug before the octagon pulls it for him.

Bloody hell, keep twisting the knife into Jones’ chin like it’s the only stat that matters. Valimaki? Sure, he’s a decorated Olympian, but that liver shot in the Valimaki fight was the first time Jones has been taken out by a clean body shot since 2018 against Rony Mariano Bezerra—and you know how long ago *that* feels now. And mates, let’s not pretend the grappling “mishap” was some fluke. Valimaki locked that bodylock like it was a textbook finish, and Jones—who used to make half the light-heavyweight division look like high school wrestlers—got himself tangled in guard and let the Olympian start dictating terms. Remember when he used to dissect opponents with that jab while they were still working out where their hands should be? Now he’s stuck posting up like a post-grad on his first sparring night. But here’s what gets me: every time someone mentions his IQ in the cage, they ignore the fact that his movement has gone from hypnotic to hesitant. Against GSP in 2017, he glided. Against Santos in 2022, he lurched. Against Gus at 40, he lunged. The legs don’t keep up with the mind anymore—that’s not hype, that’s just film study. I’m not saying he should retire tonight. But when even your own corner looks ready to tap seconds before a clean shot lands, maybe “should retire” isn’t the worst phrase to float out there. Jones will always be Jones—but Jones at 35 isn’t Jones at 27. And we’ve all seen what happens when legends forget that.

Spare me the nostalgia—Valimaki’s liver shot wasn’t a trick shot in a back alley, it was a straight math problem: body hook + committed blitz + perfect leverage = foundation-to-canvas. You want to say “I’ve seen this before”? Fine, but the liver hit Jon’s exact same spot he ate from Sonnen, Gustafsson and Bezerra over the years—only difference is now when the impact arrives the legs fold faster than a BJ Penn tap-out montage and stay folded long enough for the ref to perform open-heart surgery with his fingers. And here’s the thing I’ll never hear anyone admit when they pull out that Teixeira comeback story: Teixeira was 45 and fighting a glorified gatekeeper named Brian Howard in some Alabama barn, not an Olympic-level striker on prime-time stage one—context isn’t cherry-picked highlights, it’s where and against whom the damage actually lands.

You ever walk past a once-great pub on a Saturday night, watch half the crowd inside still wearing the faded colours of a team that hasn’t lifted silverware in a decade, yet every other sentence out their mouths is about “the good old days” — and you just know the taps are running on fumes, the floor’s got a bounce like a trampoline but the ceiling’s got cobwebs thicker than Fedor’s beard by now? Jones’ legend still shines bright enough to blind the ref on the wrong night, but Valimaki’s two knockdowns don’t land like freak lightning bolts to a guy who’s dodged cyclones before — they drop like boulders on a rotten fence post that hasn’t been reinforced since the Clinton administration. The tape shows the man hesitating before he lunges, the legs twitching like they’re counting the cost before the motion even starts, and the chin — the infamous granite slab — now carries the bounce of a jelly after a marathon flight. We can circle round with clips from Sonnen’s flying knees or Gustafsson’s all-night brawl until the server crashes, but that liver shot against Valimaki wasn’t some one-in-a-million lucky punch — it was a cue ball sent down the table straight to the pocket Jones forgot to guard. And when even the sceptics start muttering about corners tapping seconds early rather than watch a clean shot land, it’s not hype — it’s the octagon whispering: lad, maybe pack it in before the house of cards wobbles too far.