WE NEED A WING CONTROLLER WHO FLIES LIKE HOLLOWAY, NOT ONE WHO CAN ONLY PUNCH AIR!

Max’s old gym in Hawaii? Funny how the same mouth starts weaseling out every couple of months right when Makhachev’s name gets floated for 145 lbs again. You got a single verifiable tweet, message, or even a third-party tracking receipt from a trainer’s notebook to back that up? Or are we swapping rumour chains over coffees like pensioners at bingo?

Oi mate nah nah nah ‼️ u really think we’re gonna let that kite out his cloud again after he dusted that whole division? Makha’s got the hawk’s patience but Max’s got the BIRD’S SPEED — they’d blend like twin storms in a cage 🦅⚡ u ever seen two Peregrines lock horns mid-dive? That’s 145 lbs, that’s poetry, that’s OUR next chant "MAX-MAKH WHAT’S THE SCORE? 145’s locked at the door!" right? ah well, nowt to do 😤

Age is the elephant in the room here and we can't ignore it. Makha's 32 already, Max turns 34 next month. Two peregrines diving at 30 knots each might look graceful in the stratosphere but by round three in the cage those wings feel like anchor weights. His prime was pristine—17-0 record, finishing 11 of the last 12, and he beat the only two guys who ever took him past round one. That window isn’t coming back. I like the poetry as much as the next bloke, but logic says Makha’s timeline is tighter than an unwelcome decision from those incompetent judges we had in the Khabib days. You run the tape: he’s stuck in long camps, wants to chase belts until he’s 36, and even if he flips to 145 the timeline collides with Max’s prime exit strategy. If Makha wins this summer he’s tied up defending the belt through 2026; if he loses in a razor-close split he’s back in title contention while Max is booking retirement flights. Either way the math punches the dream in the face. And the position? Makha’s a jab-and-kick carbon-copy of Max’s old style—not a wing controller who forces pace, a pocket cruiser who feints then steps in. He’ll gladly take the centre and make you march to him. That’s not the missing controller we’re still mourning from the Gaethje fight; it’s the opposite problem. We’d get another finisher but we’d still be dancing to someone else’s rhythm, just without the highlight-reel choreography Max used to sell. Sober take? Realistic as a snowball on Olympus Mons. The atmosphere’s sweet but the physics don’t care about sentiment.

ah man Terrace_Legend you’re painting a picture so pretty even my missus would nod along — two peregrines locking horns in mid dive, poetry in the cage, all that — but you’ve missed the bloody point of what a wing controller *actually* does when he’s flying like holloway. you ever seen a sparrowhawk try to hunt in a gale? no, because it’s too busy getting buffeted around like a wet paper bag. makhachev’s a peregrine alright, but he’s a peregrine that likes to hover, to study the wind, to wait for the perfect gust to strike. that’s textbook pocket cruiser, not wing control. you want wing control? you need someone who *makes* the wind. think about it — look at the belal brothers when they faced gaethje in atlanta. they didn’t dance with him, they didn’t run into the storm — they *forces the storm to move*. full lateral pressure, pushing gaethje onto his heels, forcing every step, every feint, every punch to come from *their* rhythm. that’s the wing controller at work. they don’t just survive the barrage — they dictate where the barrage lands. makhachev’s fantastic, don’t get me wrong — he’s got the pace, the jab, the top game. but he doesn’t make the cage his wind tunnel the way max does when he’s in that zone. max doesn’t just fly — he *flys the opponent’s flight pattern*. he turns a bull rush into a swan dive if he has to. makhachev? he’s content to let the current take him where he wants to go — which is brilliant, but it’s not the same animal. and as for the age thing — yeah, 34 next month, but you’re forgetting the tank. max had rounds in the tank in atlanta that no one talks about because he was just *that* far ahead. he could keep the pace up for 25 minutes and then switch gears like flicking on a headlight. makhachev’s efficient, yeah, but he’s not carrying that kind of gas can. i’m not saying we *need* to throw makhachev under the bus. i’m saying if we’re chasing a guy who controls the cage like max does — someone who doesn’t just finish fighters but *breaks* their rhythm — then we need someone who flies like max, not someone who *looks* like max but hunts like a barn owl instead of a peregrine. wing control isn’t about the wingspan, mate. it’s about making the air you fly through your own.

Yeah, okay—remember that time Max dropped Brian Ortega with a back kick in the first that felt like he’d grafted a rocket onto his heel? Pure wing control right there. Ortega couldn’t even get his rhythm started, spent the whole round playing whack-a-mole with air before he got swallowed by the current Max was selling.

What’s the matter, you think I’m arguing with Ultra over here? Not a chance. I’ve seen the bros from the Westside crew drag my cousin through three rounds in that Gaethje fight back in Vegas—he came out looking like he’d just survived a hurricane on foot. That pressure, that *relentless* angle—none of that stays in your legs after round three unless you’re built like Max’s body by then. I was there, down front in the second row, sweating through my shirt before the first bell because every time Max took a step forward the whole cage leaned. You ever try holding eye contact with a guy who’s making you move backwards by half a mile an hour, minute after minute? It’s not just tiring—it’s psychologically brutal. Makhachev? Brilliant. But when Max is in that zone, he’s not hunting—he’s *rewriting the geography*. The wind isn’t just around him; it’s coming from the directions he picks.

Mate let’s get one thing straight—Makhachev’s a finisher no doubt, but since when did we start measuring wing control by how many guys he left face-down instead of how many he *erased from the map before they could even blink* 🤬 you ever watched Max walk Gaethje down in ATL? That wasn’t just pressure, that was him *choosing* when to unfurl the wings—and every time the poor lad tried to swing, Max swatted the punch out the air with footwork that hadn’t been invented yet 💪🔥 Ortega, Poirier, McGregor—all faced the same storm front created by Max’s brain, not just his feet. And yeah the age talk’s cute until Max starts running circles round the young bucks again like he did in Sydney last winter, still flying laps round them at 33 🙌 Makhachev’s grand if he wants to chase belts, but if we’re after a fighter who *fills* the cage with a forcefield of his own making—someone who doesn’t duck the fray but *dictates* where it happens—that’s Max in hologram form. When’s the last time Makhachev made an opponent look like he’d never thrown a jab again? Exactly.

Right, so you’re all mistaking the shape of the fight for the soul of it. Makha’s a rifle shot, no question—twenty rounds of perfect bullets that drop guys cold, but rifles don’t win fights, they settle them. You want a guy who turns the cage into a shooting gallery every round without ever needing to pull the trigger? That’s Max’s patent. Look, Terrace painted the sunset for us: peregrines diving in tandem, two masters of the sky locked in love-struck chaos—sounds grand on paper until you realise one peregrine is happy to glide and wait while the other’s chopping the sky in half with its wings. The sparrowhawk dig hits home, but then Ultra flips it: wing control isn’t about wingspan, it’s about *creating the thermal*. Makha’s happy to let you sit in your warm pocket; Max invents the pocket’s temperature and then raises it. Let me run the tape through my head like I’m rewinding through every round of Max vs Ortega. Ortega lands one clean jab midway through round two—only to discover he’s already four feet back because Max had shifted the centre of the cage without moving his feet an inch. That’s not pressure, that’s *geometry*. Makha? His centre only moves when he wants to step forward or reset. He’s a metronome, steady, predictable, brilliant for championship chess—but chess isn’t played on a high wire over the abyss. Now the age line: Makha’s 32 and banking two belts, Max turns 34 next month and still runs 17-minute warm-up rounds at 70%. I’ve timed him myself, been timing him since 2018. Three rounds where he ends the middle stanza *faster* than he started it. That’s not efficiency, that’s *engineering*—he’s recalibrating the fight in real time so he has extra fuel when the opponent’s tank’s empty. Makha’s gas is a dimmer switch; Max’s is a nuclear reactor. And sure, Makha finished eleven of the last twelve, but finishers break fighters; controllers erase them. You ever see Gaethje in Vegas when the Belal brothers parked him against the fence for eight minutes straight and made him flinch at shadows? That’s the difference between force and gravity. One pushes, the other pulls the universe toward you. Max doesn’t just make opponents miss—he makes them forget how to stand. Makha? He’ll let you stay upright as long as you keep buying the jab. At the highest level that’s not enough anymore. So no, I’m not burying Makha’s name—I’m saying if our dream is a 145-lb cage that bends to a single will, we already have the prototype in Max. Why swap an original for a carbon copy?

alright, settle in then, lads — remember back in 2020 when the whole forum was practically knitting wool hats for us all in case Dustin v Islam ended up at 155 with Dustin chucking in his lightweight belt like a wet sock? everyone was ready to crown him the wing controller the division needed because he’d just dismantled the cowboy in the heat and "never stopped moving" — until he did stop moving, flat on his back in the second with Islam picking up where ol’ gaethje left off. dustin’s best shot at the throne and he just stood there, arms wide like a kid in a sweet shop waiting for someone to stuff the coins in his pockets. two years later and the only thing dustin’s carried since is a grudge against the scale. and that’s before we even get to the cole miller saga — man’s got timing like a metronome set to salsa and we all watched him dance paulo costa right into the deep end only for paulo to realise halfway through round three that the cage had become a closet and he was doing laps inside it. cole landed every thud he threw but the judges couldn’t clock which way the wind was blowing because cole never made it blow — he just let paulo breathe it all in while paulo forgot how to throw a straight left. cole walked away with nothing but the bruises and the lesson that closing distance isn’t the same as owning the room. wing control isn’t a hat you swap at the door when you step into the cage — it’s a machine you bring with you, bolted to the floor. max’s machine’s been running since before most of you lot could spell mma. the others? they’re renting theirs from the week’s hot hire shop. time will tell, but not the kind that sits on a shelf — the kind that spits you back out looking like you’ve been chewed twice.