Jon Jones

The case for greatness

Jon "Bones" Jones is the most credentialed fighter the UFC has ever promoted at light heavyweight, and as of his 2023 heavyweight title win over Ciryl Gane, he is the rare two-division champion who took the larger belt by submission inside one round. His record over twenty years of elite competition includes wins over Mauricio Rua, Lyoto Machida, Quinton Jackson, Rashad Evans, Vitor Belfort, Chael Sonnen, Glover Teixeira, Daniel Cormier (twice), Alexander Gustafsson (twice), Anthony Smith, Thiago Santos, Dominick Reyes, and Gane. Only Matt Hamill has ever been awarded a victory over him, and that came via disqualification for downward elbows in 2009 — a fight Jones was winning decisively on the ground.

The Jones game plan

Jones' toolkit is built around three principles: extreme range advantage from his 84.5-inch reach, a willingness to use unorthodox strikes that force opponents to defend angles they have never seen, and elite cage wrestling that traps opponents along the fence until they break.

In a long-range exchange he leads with the oblique kick — a push kick to the lead knee or quad that disrupts the opponent's stance and stops forward pressure. From there he sets up the spinning back elbow, the front kick to the face, jumping switch kicks, and his trademark thrusting side kick to the body that scores both points and accumulated damage. Few light heavyweights could realistically close the distance behind that kicking arsenal, and the ones who did — Reyes in 2020, Gustafsson in 2013 — discovered that the fence game waiting for them was just as suffocating.

When the fight got into a phone booth, Jones leaned on a long-elbow over-and-under clinch where his height let him drag opponents' heads down to chest level and rain down elbows on the crown and temple. His wrestling is built around chain entries: a body lock from the clinch into a trip, a knee tap when the opponent based out, a high crotch when they overhooked. Once on top, he preferred posture-broken ground work — long elbows from inside the closed guard, half-guard knee slices, mounted triangles, and the brutal ground-and-pound that finished Mauricio Rua and Vitor Belfort.

The Cormier rivalry

The defining matchup of Jones' career was his back-to-back trilogy with Daniel Cormier. The first bout at UFC 182 in January 2015 was the closest Jones had come to losing — Cormier's Olympic-level wrestling kept the fight standing for stretches and his clinch reverses gave Jones trouble in round 2 — but Jones' oblique kicks, knees up the middle, and superior cardio took over in rounds 4 and 5. He won by unanimous decision.

The rematch at UFC 214 in July 2017 was a one-sided affair. Jones knocked Cormier out in round 3 with a high kick following a check hook. The bout was later overturned to a No Contest after Jones tested positive for the steroid metabolite turinabol, a result he and his legal team attributed to contamination — eventually verified by an arbitration panel.

A planned third bout never materialized; Cormier moved up to heavyweight and won the title, and Jones spent four years between bouts before finally returning at heavyweight against Gane.

The fight that didn't happen

The Jones era is also defined by the matchups that fell through. A bout with Stipe Miocic for the heavyweight title was scheduled, canceled, rescheduled, and finally became Miocic's retirement fight at UFC 309 in November 2024 — a fight Jones won by third-round TKO with a spinning back kick to the body. Negotiations with Tom Aspinall, the interim heavyweight champion, have spanned years without producing a contract.

Style influence

Jones' influence on modern MMA is visible in nearly every long-limbed champion who has followed him: the oblique kick is now standard at light heavyweight, the body kick from southpaw is in every gym's playbook, and his fence-pressure style — where the takedown is a threat used to drain the gas tank rather than a goal in itself — is the template Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira both leaned on early in their UFC careers.

His combination of length, calm, and willingness to take strange angles has been studied frame by frame on a generation of YouTube breakdowns. Whatever the verdict on the controversies surrounding his career — and there are several, from the 2015 hit-and-run to the 2017 USADA test result to the 2024 domestic-violence arrest — there is no honest accounting of MMA history that excludes him from the top tier of fighters the sport has produced.