Welcome to Midnight Mania!
Let’s start the night off by taking a look back over the three biggest stories of Monday, Feb. 9, 2026.
- Highlights! Andrei Arlovski mangles Ben Rothwell’s face, wins BKFC Heavyweight title | Knucklemania 6: I really thought Big Ben would have the edge in bare knuckle, where his durability is such a major asset — shows what I know! Arlovski’s career is absolutely incredible.
- UFC Vegas 113, The Morning After: Jailton Almeida, the world-class Heavyweight who hates fighting: I’ll be interested to see if Almeida’s motivation improves down at 205 pounds, but I’m not optimistic.
- Justin Gaethje breaks down Paddy Pimblett win from UFC 324: ‘He kicked like a b–ch’: Count me among those who wrongly thought Pimblett’s low kicks were going to turn into a bit of a problem then didn’t matter at all.
Insomnia
Sadly, Kyoji Horiguchi is looking at a couple months on the sidelines at least.
MMA Twitter is rightfully blasting this Javier Mendez take for a simple reason: Gaethje was losing badly! A takedown does nothing!
Like Francis Ngannou before him, Tom Aspinall has thrown about five low kicks in his entire UFC career and they’ve all looked devastating.
Roughly 50% of my fight preview articles include a phrase along the lines of “Fighter A should hit the body to help stop the takedown,” which is almost always the case!
I posted this in The Feed yesterday (check it out if you aren’t already!), but it’s too good a clip not to share again to a wider audience.
The great Nieky Holzken has retired after a long and successful kickboxing career.
Slips, rips, and KO clips
I don’t know anything about the level of competition really, but how can you argue with three very clean first-round knockout wins? That’s a great night at the office!
A long and lanky kickboxer throwing Travis Browne elbows? Scary.
One of the nastiest met returns
Random Land
Could easily be a movie scene.
Midnight Music: Hip-hop, 2005
Sleep well Maniacs! More martial arts madness is always on the way.
