UFC middleweight champion Dricus du Plessis has all the respect in the world for light heavyweight champ Alex Pereira, but if the UFC were to book a matchup between the two titleholders, du Plessis can see a real world where he stops Pereira with strikes.

“If I’m talking about just the standup exchanges—I’m not fighting a kickboxing fight, I’m fighting an MMA fight,” du Plessis told Submission Radio. “And in a kickboxing fight, You need to be able to land combos, you need to land massive punches the whole time, get a guy rocked, you get an eight count, you have all those variables. Where in MMA, I don’t care who you are. If I catch you clean with those small gloves, you’re going to go down and I am going to catch you eventually.”

Du Plessis captured the middleweight title with a decision win over Sean Strickland at UFC 297 this past January, and then stopped Israel Adesanya in his first title defense at UFC 305 the following August. At light heavyweight, Pereira has put together a Fighter of the Year campaign with knockout wins over Jamahal Hill, Jiri Prochazka, and Khalil Rountree.

The South African champion understands he has his work cut out for him, but after watching Pereira’s win over Rountree, du Plessis saw some things he could capitalize on.

“Now, I said it with with Izzy—he said, I’m too slow, I wouldn’t be able to catch him. Well, yeah,” du Plessis said. “I made a post recently saying maybe it’s not pretty, but damn, it’s effective because I will catch you eventually. And then it’s then it’s a whole different story because I’m not engaging in a kickboxing fight. I’m punching and I’m kicking, but it’s not a kickboxing fight. It’s an MMA fight, and when I put those together, it’s a different fight.

“So I honestly believe that with a guy like Alex Pereira, he has power. I have a lot of power too. The man is… yeah [he has] crisp striking. His striking is incredible. That’s why he has the kickboxing résumé. … But we saw with [the] Khalil Rountree fight, we saw a lot of things that [Rountree had] a lot of success [with] in those first two rounds. He really did.”

Watch du Plessis’ interview with Submission Radio below.

Unique fight shorts are the new wave in the UFC, and heavyweight champ Jon Jones will rock his first custom Venum fight kit shorts at UFC 309 when he puts his title on the line against Stipe Miocic.

Jones has only competed once thus far in the Venum era. He wore black shorts when he made his heavyweight debut against Ciryl Gane at UFC 285. Jones won the vacant UFC heavyweight title that night by submitting Gane in the first round.

Jones will wear his first custom Venum kit for his first title defense on Nov. 16 at Madison Square Garden in New York.

The black shorts feature two red roaring lion heads with gold lettering for Jones’s name, the UFC and Venum logos, and Philippians 4:13, the Bible verse the champ tattooed on his chest.

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Jones joins the recent wave of custom Venum kits, which have caught the attention of fans as the designs allow some star fighters to differentiate themselves in the cage.

UFC light heavyweight champ Alex Pereira wore a vibrant tribal design at UFC 300, while former bantamweight champ Sean O’Malley debuted neon pink shorts at UFC 306 as recent examples of popular custom offerings.

Last week at UFC Fight Night 246 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, former UFC flyweight champ Brandon Moreno rocked custom Mexico-themed shorts that turned many heads as well.

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The Chiefs, as you may have heard, are the NFL’s last unbeaten team, now 8-0 and almost halfway to the elusive perfect regular season.

The 1972 Dolphins, the only team to pull off an undefeated full season, opened that year with a win against the Chiefs, having beaten them in the playoffs the previous season. So any Chiefs run at perfection is ultimately a slow-burn revenge mission, and a difficult one at that.

Do the Chiefs even want to stay perfect? Kansas City has had two teams open 9-0, and both lost the 10th game. The 2003 Chiefs finished 13-3 and lost in their first playoff game; the 2013 Chiefs dropped five of seven to finish 11-5 and lost in the wild-card round.

So we’re here to remind you how remarkably unlikely a perfect season will be, no matter how good the Chiefs might be. They can be the best team in the NFL and win an unprecedented third straight Super Bowl and still fall well short of perfection. There’s no shame in that. Here are a few vulnerabilities to watch, relative weak spots that could be exposed in an eventual loss to spoil that bid at 20-0.

Turnover margin

The Chiefs are not a good turnover team. They have forced exactly eight takeaways in eight games, and on turnover margin, they’re tied for 24th this season at minus-4. This is not a new development: Kansas City won a Super Bowl last year despite finishing 28th in turnover margin, and did the same in 2022 while ranking 22nd in turnover margin. Last year’s champs forced 17 takeaways in 17 regular-season games.

They’re good enough that they don’t need to win on turnovers. Since Patrick Mahomes took over as starter in 2018, they’re 37-2 when they simply force more turnovers than they commit. Dead even on turnovers? They’re 24-6, winning 80 percent of the time. Even when they’re minus-1, as they were in Monday’s overtime win over the Bucs, they’re 17-9, winning almost two out of three times.

But get them to minus-2, and it’s a conversation you can have. When the Chiefs are minus-2 or worse under Mahomes, they’re 5-7. That’s actually really good under the circumstances, as NFL teams that are minus-2 or worse are 9-41 this year, winning just 18 percent of the time.

Why we bring this up: The Chiefs’ remaining schedule includes three of the NFL’s best teams in turnover margin. In two weeks, they face the Bills, tied for the league’s best at plus-11 in turnovers, and later they’ll face the Chargers (plus-9) and Steelers (plus-10). All three are leading their divisions right now, and the net turnover differential between the Chiefs and those teams is enough to bring those rare minus-2 scenarios into play.

Mahomes’ interceptions are up this year, enough that he was tied for the league lead with nine before this past weekend. It’s rare he has more than one in a game — it’s happened only 14 times in his seven-year career, but the Chiefs are just 8-6 in those games. So if a team can pick him off a couple times, there’s a chance.

Keep them under 20 points

Much has been written about how the Chiefs have won as much with their defense this year. Before Monday night, they’d won 13 games in a row and had scored 28 points or fewer in all 13 games, the only such streak in NFL history. They scored 30 points on Monday, but needed overtime to do it.

All this is to say that these Chiefs have not been a dominant team offensively over the past two years. At their scoring peak, from the start of 2020 to their Week 8 bye in 2022, Kansas City scored 40 or more points 11 times in 46 games, but since then, they’ve scored 40 or more just once in their past 42 games.

“Hey, get them to score less” is not an innovative strategy, but the key number to aim for is 20 points or fewer. When the Chiefs scored 20 or fewer last year, they were just 4-6. Only one team has held them under 20 this year, and it’s the Chargers, who have the NFL’s No. 1 scoring defense and lost 17-10 in their first meeting.

The Chiefs’ remaining schedule includes four games against the NFL’s top three scoring defenses — a rematch with the Chargers, a Week 17 showdown with the Steelers and two against the Broncos, this week and the season finale. That game at Buffalo next weekend — a rematch of last year’s playoff showdown — would also put Kansas City against the league’s No. 8 scoring defense.

Kickoff return concerns

The Bucs’ Bucky Irving had a 46-yard kickoff return Monday night, the second-longest the Chiefs have allowed over the past three seasons. Special teams coordinator Dave Toub is one of the best in the league, and Kansas City has an 80 percent touchback rate with Harrison Butker, so the team’s opponents have only returned nine kickoffs all season.

But on those returns, they’re averaging 30 yards per return, the eighth-highest average in the league. The Saints’ Rashid Shaheed had a 38-yard return against the Chiefs and the 49ers‘ Isaac Guerendo had a 35-yarder. The entire league has given up only three kickoff return touchdowns all season, and Kansas City hasn’t allowed one since 2020, but it’s something to watch. Keep an eye out for Bills rookie Brandon Codrington in two weeks.

The threat of a Mahomes injury

It’s almost cheating to have an undefeated season end because of a quarterback injury, but Mahomes had a scare early in the fourth quarter Monday night when he scrambled to his right, then pulled up and tossed a touchdown to Samaje Perine. He was down on the field with an ankle injury and initially had to be helped to the sideline before finishing the walk on his own. He ended up not missing a snap, but the concern was enough to have TV showing backup Carson Wentz throwing on the sideline.

Mahomes has been remarkably healthy in his NFL career, missing only two starts in seven seasons due to injury — in 2019 with a dislocated kneecap. He sat out the regular-season finales in 2020 and 2023 because the Chiefs had clinched everything they could, but otherwise, he’s been able to play every game.

Could the Chiefs win with Wentz? He’s 3-5 as a starter since the start of 2022 in stints with the Commanders and Rams. The Chiefs split the two games Mahomes missed in 2019, and that was with Matt Moore filling in at quarterback. Mahomes’ current ankle injury won’t sideline him, but it might limit his scrambling ability and the elusiveness that allows him to extend plays and improvise as few quarterbacks can.

Greg Auman is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He previously spent a decade covering the Buccaneers for the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.

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UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones and former champ Stipe Miocic are little more than a week away from squaring off, which means their training camps are starting to wind down.

Jones puts his title on the line against Miocic in the UFC 309 main event on Nov. 16 at Madison Square Garden in New York (ESPN+ pay-per-view). The matchup is being hyped as an important legacy fight for both men, with Jones, who spent the vast majority of his career ruling the light heavyweight division, widely considered the greatest fighter of all time and Miocic, who holds the UFC record for consecutive heavyweight title defenses (3), widely regarded as the promotion’s greatest heavyweight of all time.

The pause, however, is that neither Jones nor Miocic has been very active in recent years.

Starting with 37-year-old Jones, he had just one fight in the past four-and-a-half years, and that was 20 months ago when he submitted Ciryl Gane in his heavyweight debut for vacant title at UFC 285. Jones also is coming off a torn pectoral tendon one year ago and has had multiple surgeries since then.

For Miocic, the layoff has been even longer. Now 42, Miocic hasn’t competed since being knocked out in a rematch with Francis Ngannou to lose the title on March 27, 2021 at UFC 260.

Suffice to say, it’ll be interesting to see how Jones and Miocic look when they step inside the octagon for a scheduled five-round fight. In the buildup to UFC 309, both men have offered glimpses into the late stages of their training on social media.

You can watch their videos below:     

Nov. 5: Jones cracks mitts, shows off spinning back kick

Nov. 6: Jones hits bag, works ropes, does cardio in snow

Nov. 6: Miocic works intense gym cardio

For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 309.

We have seen some amazing Premier League comebacks down the years but few can match the way Chris claimed victory in last week’s predictions.

He was trailing his guest, The Piano winner Brad Kella, by 80-20 after eight of the 10 games in week 10, and was also 50 points behind you lot, before giving himself hope with an exact score in Manchester United’s draw with Chelsea on Sunday.

After 90 minutes of Monday’s final game, Kella’s prediction of a 1-0 Brentford win looked set to give him overall victory, before Fulham’s 92nd minute equaliser saw the BBC Sport readers, who had gone for a 1-1 draw, move in front as things stood.

Chris would have finished third with either of those results but instead snatched a remarkable last-gasp win, thanks to Harry Wilson’s 97th-minute winner for the Cottagers, which gave him another exact score and 40 more points.

That meant he ended up with four correct results, including those two exact scores, and a total of 100 points.

Kella got five correct results, but with only one exact score, leaving him on 80 points, and you lot got four correct results with one exact score, to end up on 70 points.

“I have sent a box of wine around to Harry Wilson’s house to say thanks,” Chris said. “Or at least I would do if I knew where he lived.”

Dana White might just be practicing the art of positive affirmation because he’s certain no matter who walks out with the heavyweight title at UFC 309, the winner will move on to face interim champion Tom Aspinall next.

The showdown between Jon Jones and Stipe Miocic has been anticipated for over a year after they were booked to meet in November 2023 until a torn pectoral muscle suffered by Jones delayed the fight. In Jones’ absence, Aspinall become interim champion but White and the UFC were adamant about Jones still facing Miocic in a battle between two all-time greats.

There has been plenty of talk of Jones, Miocic or both of them possibly retiring after their fight concludes on Nov. 16, but White continues to believe that the winner won’t walk away without giving Aspinall his chance to unify the titles.

“I truly believe that whoever wins this fight, just competitively the way that these guys are wired and the reason that they’re both massive legends in the sport, they’re not going to just ride off into the sunset without settling the dispute with Tom Aspinall,” White told TNT Sports.

Aspinall has repeatedly called out Jones, who claimed a vacant heavyweight title with a quick submission of Ciryl Gane back in March 2023. In response, Jones largely scoffed at Aspinall’s demands while staying steadfast that he’s always wanted to face Miocic, who holds the record for most successful title defenses (4) at heavyweight in UFC history.

While Miocic won’t make any commitment about his future until after he fights at UFC 309, Jones has publicly hinted at his own retirement numerous times. Despite that, White believes that Jones and Miocic respect the sport enough to give Aspinall his opportunity to become an undisputed champion before hanging up the gloves.

“When you think about Jon Jones becoming the youngest champion in [UFC] history and all the things that Stipe accomplished, they were given opportunities when they were young,” White said. “I think that they will reciprocate.”

Aspinall plans on sitting cageside for the event and he’s also weighing in as the backup, although it remains to be seen if Jones or Miocic would actually agree to face him on short notice if disaster struck during fight week.

For his part, White knows that either fighter eventually taking on Aspinall would do huge business for the UFC and he’s not giving up hope on making it happen.

“People will lose their f*cking minds if either one of those fights happen,” White said. “Stipe or Jon Jones [against Tom Aspinall].”