Gerald Meerschaert's 60th fight: what five straight UFC losses predict

On January 13, 2007, a 19-year-old from Racine, Wisconsin, submitted Fernando Gomez at a show called Freestyle Combat Challenge. Julius Walker was seven years old.

On Saturday, nearly 20 years later, Gerald Meerschaert (37-22) fights Walker (7-3) on the prelims of UFC Fight Night: Allen vs Duncan at the Meta Apex. It will be his 60th professional fight, his 27th in the UFC, and his first at light heavyweight in a decade. He has lost his last five.

I want to be clear about my bias before I go any further. I like Meerschaert, and I think the record he built in the UFC is one of the more underrated in the middleweight division's history. That is why the question this fight raises is worth asking with numbers rather than sentiment.

The record nobody talks about

Photo: Show Me The Money / CC BY 3.0

Meerschaert came to the UFC in December 2016 as the RFA middleweight champion and submitted Joseph Gigliotti in his debut. He is 12-14 in the UFC since, and every one of those 12 wins is a finish: 11 submissions and a single knockout, of Eric Spicely in 2017. He has never won a UFC fight on the scorecards.

In our records of UFC bouts at middleweight, no one has more finishes. Meerschaert has 12, one more than Anderson Silva. His 11 UFC submissions across all divisions put him level with Demian Maia, behind only Charles Oliveira with 17 and Jim Miller with 14. For a man who has never appeared in the UFC's official rankings, that is a strange and specific kind of greatness: if the fight hits the floor, he has been one of the most dangerous people in the building for a decade.

The last of those finishes was a second-round submission of Edmen Shahbazyan in August 2024. Then the streak started.

Five losses, three ways

The five losses since look like this. Reinier de Ridder submitted him in the third round in November 2024. Brad Tavares beat him on all three cards in April 2025, despite Meerschaert holding 4 minutes and 44 seconds of control. Michal Oleksiejczuk knocked him out in 3:03 at UFC 319 that August. Kyle Daukaus submitted him in 50 seconds at UFC 322 in November. And on May 2 this year, Jacob Malkoun won a unanimous decision.

Two of the five lasted less than a round, and in those two Meerschaert landed three significant strikes in total. The other three went long enough for him to get his grappling going, and he still lost them. That spread matters, because it means there is no single fix. The streak is not one opponent type he keeps meeting.

So the UFC is sending him up a division, to 205 pounds, against a 27-year-old. The promotion has tried this weight before: it booked Meerschaert at light heavyweight against Ed Herman twice in 2020, and both bouts fell through. The last light heavyweight fight in his record is a win over Sidney Wheeler at Valor Fights 36 in August 2016, two months before he won the RFA belt at middleweight.

What a sixth chance usually looks like

Here is the question I wanted the database to answer. When a fighter walks into a UFC fight on five or more straight UFC losses, how often does he walk out a winner? It has happened 21 times.

Draws and no contests make up the small differences in the top two rows. Five wins in 21. The five who did it are Chris Camozzi in 2015, Josh Burkman in 2016, Andrei Arlovski in 2017, Carlos Condit in 2020 and Karolina Kowalkiewicz in June 2022.

Nobody has done it since. The 11 fights after Kowalkiewicz in that spot have produced 11 losses: Donald Cerrone, Tony Ferguson three times, Andrea Lee, Jeremy Stephens twice, Tai Tuivasa three times and Vince Morales. Two of those were on the same card as Meerschaert's fifth loss. On May 2, Morales went in on five, Tuivasa on six, and Meerschaert on four. All three lost.

To be sure, 15 fights is a small sample, and a five-loss streak against ranked opponents is not the same as a five-loss streak against anyone. But the direction is not ambiguous. The UFC keeps giving these fights, and lately they have kept going one way.

Walker is not a free win

What makes this matchup more interesting than the table is the man across the cage. Walker is 27 and played NCAA Division II basketball at Drury University until 2019, and by his coach's account he had no fighting background before he started training around 2020. He won light heavyweight titles at Synergy FC and Peak Fighting in 2024, then came to the UFC.

He is 1-3 there. He lost a split to Alonzo Menifield in February 2025, out-landed 87 to 86. He beat Rafael Cerqueira in August 2025 with six takedowns from ten attempts and 11 minutes and 46 seconds of control, which is about as complete a wrestling performance as a 15-minute fight allows. Then Dustin Jacoby knocked him out in the second round in February, and Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev knocked him out in eight seconds in June.

So both men come in having been stopped. Walker's two knockouts are three and a half months and eight months old; Meerschaert has been stopped twice in his last three. Walker has the wrestling numbers, 4.07 takedowns per 15 minutes in the UFC, and Meerschaert defends 40 percent of takedowns. On paper that is the path. It is also the path that puts a younger man in the one place on earth where Meerschaert has made a living.

What the market and the model see

The consensus across 18 sportsbooks has Walker at -300, 71.7 percent once the margin comes out, up from -280 when it opened on October 1. Our model has him at 65.6. Its biggest reason by a distance is age, 27 against nearly 39. The main thing it gives Meerschaert is experience: almost two decades as a professional against three and a half years. Six of the nine people on our pick'em took Walker.

I think Walker wins, probably on the feet. But I would ask the people who run the matchmaking one thing. If the history says a fighter in this spot wins one time in four and has not won in four years, is a move up a division against a younger wrestler a lifeline, or a way of letting the numbers decide?

Prediction: Julius Walker by KO/TKO

Every result on the card will land on the event page as it happens, and my picks for all 12 fights are in today's predictions piece.