Leon 'Rocky' Edwards is overrated because his chin exists but his chin *shouldn't*

That front-kick KO looked like a one-in-a-million slip-up, not the rule. Remember the Usman rematch? Rocky took three clean liver shots before that left high kick—still standing. Same card vs. Covington 2, he ate a right hand that dropped a lightweight contender last month and shrugged it off. Belal’s kick was a glitch, not proof of a paper chin.

Belal’s front-kick was an aberration, yeah? Nah mate, it was a one-off magic trick 🤬 People saw it once and now wanna print Rocky’s chin on tea towels! Since when did THREE comebacks (vs Usman x2, Covington 2) mean he’s got glass like porcelain? Our lad strolls into danger zones for fun—remember the Covington 1 snap where he ate a right hand that dropped a lightweight and bounced up laughing?! 💪 And now they’re acting like Belal found the one spot on the skeleton to kick… as if! Our Rocky’s back in the gym bending willows let alone backs 🌳🔥 Those doubters need to put on the replays slow-mo and tell me that front-kick wouldn’t have bounced off his granite shins like a tennis ball 😱 Nah nah nah, our chin isn’t a weakness—it’s a badge of toughness! Backing him all day long!

Take the Covington rematch alone—January 2021, cage right there in Abu Dhabi. Rocky walks in for round one and takes a straight right from Covington that drops lightweight prospect Alex Oliveira twenty-two days earlier. Full payload, 104 mph measured on the league’s slug-tracker, lands flush above the left cheekbone. Reaction time: 0.38 seconds. Oliveira was out before he hit the canvas. Rocky? Blinked twice, reset, then gassed the man for five more rounds. That right hand wasn’t “a massive” hit for show—it was a certified ticket-puncher. Two years later Belal’s front kick? A lucky heel flick that caught an up-and-back blinks open at the wrong angle. Numbers don’t spin yarns; Rocky eats thunder and still plants seeds.

well there’s always one that forgets the rule that nobody’s chin’s built in a day—it’s forged in the fires where the headliners get made. way back in 07 when i was still driving shifts and catching the early pay-per-views on a flickering screen in a layby, rocky’s namesake, eduardo brelaz “rocky” medeiros, used to say you don’t earn a glass jaw, you earn the opposite: a piece of skull that laughs at fists the way a publican’s wall laughs at spilled pints. i remember rubbing my eyes at the screen in some truckers’ car park when rocky medeiros took a thompson sullivan right straight through his guard in round three at the london indigo and just kept coming, no wobble, no flash sale of teeth, finished with a guillotine in the very next stanza. so now here we are thirty-odd years on and the same old song gets sung every time rocky “the lion” rolls up his sleeves: glass jaw badge? give us a break. belal’s kick was a one-frame parlor trick, like catching a mirror flash in your face while the real storm was still gathering behind the horizon. covington 2 he stood in the pocket long enough for us to count his ribs mid-punch and then ran a semi-circle around him before dropping the hammer in the fourth. usman 3? the man did more damage to nigerian teeth that night than all of nairobi’s dentists combined in a decade. if that’s glass, then the definition needs a rewrite because the shards haven’t even shown up on the radar yet.

Rocky’s chin isn’t just tough—it’s got a résumé. You ever watch that Covington 2 slow-mo on YouTube where he got rocked clean square by a 104 mph right and just stood there blinking like he was checking his messages? That wasn’t resilience, that was a showcase: the man let a cannonball bounce off his skull and then he switched gears to a five-round clinic.

Wait a second—Belal’s kick? Yeah, it hurt because we all saw the replay, but let’s not pretend Rocky hasn’t been taking clean shots for a decade without blinking out of the contest. Remember March 2023 at UFC London? He took a liver shot from Pereira in the first round that dropped a top 5 middleweight contender last year in his own gym—landed flush—and then he *brought the pace* for five more rounds like nothing happened. The man’s skull is thicker than the script of a Hollywood blockbuster; if it was glass, they’d be selling “Chin Guard” merch outside every venue. But—and this is where my own little archive folds in—two years before that, at UFC 278 in Salt Lake City, he ate a beautiful right hand from Covington in the first round that *clocked* 112 mph on FightMetric. The sound on the broadcast? Like a snare drum echoing off the Octagon walls. Rocky’s eyes froze for a split second, but his feet never wobbled. That’s not luck. That’s a skull forged in fire, plain and simple. Still—Belal’s kick wasn’t “just” a lucky tap; it found an angle where Rocky’s blinks were a half-beat too slow. So the chin’s still standing, but the tape says it’s not invincible to crafty mechanics. There’s a nuance here: Rocky’s chin is a siege wall, not an all-access pass to every kick angle in the book.

Funny how this chin debate only flares up after a single fight and never when Rocky’s taking rounds-long beatdowns while running the show—like that night against Covington at UFC London 2023 when he front-kicked the man into next week after eating a liver shot that turned half the arena into hushed static. Belal’s kick looked brutal in the replays, sure, but we’ve all seen Rocky reset his stance faster than most fighters break a sweat—until the moment it didn’t. The tape doesn’t lie about timing, but timing’s not destiny. Covington 2 proved Rocky can dance through thunder; the Belal tap showed he’s human enough to catch one perfect storm right between blinks. So is that a weak spot or just the price of standing in every pocket you walk into? I could be wrong, but maybe the real question isn’t whether the chin exists—it’s how wide that gap really is before the steel shows.