PFL Tampa's ex-UFC six: the fighters who left on wins
Six former UFC fighters share Saturday's PFL Tampa card, 45 UFC fights between them. Three won their last Octagon fight and left anyway. The receipts.
On Saturday night in Tampa, PFL runs a 12-fight card headlined by Cris Cyborg against Ketlen Vieira. Look down the bout sheet and a pattern jumps out: six of the fighters on it used to work for the UFC. Between them, Vieira, Cyborg, Taila Santos, Daniel Marcos, Javid Basharat and Dakota Bush went to the Octagon 45 times.
That number alone is just trivia. Here is the part that should bother you: three of the six won their final UFC fight. Not "lost a couple and got cut." Won. Walked to the back with their hand raised, and the next time they appear on a fight card, it says PFL on the cage.
I will admit my lean up front: I think the sport is healthier when the second-biggest promotions have real talent, so part of me enjoys this. But the process by which a market leader sheds ranked, winning fighters deserves a closer look than "roster management." Let's take them one at a time, receipts included.
The six, one by one
Ketlen Vieira (16-5, 10-5 UFC). Ten years and 15 fights in the UFC bantamweight division. She out-pointed Miesha Tate over five rounds in 2021 and took a split decision off Holly Holm in 2022, both as the main event. Her five UFC losses read like a contender's resume: Irene Aldana, Yana Santos, Raquel Pennington, Kayla Harrison, Norma Dumont. Two of those were split decisions, and the woman who beat her most recently by a clear margin, Harrison, is the current UFC champion at 135. Vieira's last UFC appearance was May 16 of this year: a unanimous decision over Jacqueline Cavalcanti. Three months later she is a +262 underdog in a PFL cage. She never stopped being a top-ten bantamweight; she just stopped being a UFC one.
Cris Cyborg (29-2). The headliner is the original version of this story. Her UFC run ended 6-1, the single loss to Amanda Nunes in the first round at UFC 232. She won her last UFC fight, a unanimous decision over Felicia Spencer in July 2019, and the promotion let the biggest name in women's featherweight history walk. Since then she has gone 8-0 across Bellator and PFL: six wins in Bellator, five of them in title fights, then a five-round decision over Larissa Pacheco and a third-round rear-naked choke of Sara Collins. She is 41 now, unbeaten since December 2018, and still the fight other promotions build cards around.
Taila Santos (23-4, 5-3 UFC). The closest thing to a champion the UFC misplaced. At UFC 275 in June 2022 she took Valentina Shevchenko, the most dominant flyweight of the era, to a split decision in a title fight. One loss to Erin Blanchfield later, she was gone. In PFL she has gone 4-1: a first-round armbar of Ilara Joanne, decisions over Jena Bishop and Liz Carmouche, a stoppage loss to Dakota Ditcheva in the 2024 final, and a first-round TKO of Qihui Yan this May. Saturday she meets the unbeaten Sabrinna de Sousa (6-0).
Daniel Marcos (18-1, 5-1 UFC with 1 NC). This one I genuinely do not understand. The Peruvian bantamweight went 5-1 in the UFC with one no contest. His only loss was a decision to Montel Jackson, a top-15 opponent. His final UFC appearance, November 8, 2025, was a second-round submission of Miles Johns. He is 18-1 as a professional. Fighters with that sheet do not usually need a new employer, and yet Saturday he fights Magomed Magomedov (22-5) on a PFL undercard, in what the books price as a coin flip.
Javid Basharat (15-2, 4-2 UFC with 1 NC). Started his UFC run 3-0 with unanimous decisions over Trevin Jones, Tony Gravely and Mateus Mendonca. Then a no contest against Victor Henry, a decision loss to Aiemann Zahabi, a first-round knockout loss to Ricky Simon, and a bounce-back unanimous decision over Gianni Vazquez this February. That win was his last act in the Octagon. Like Marcos, he left on a victory; like Marcos, he is 15-2 overall and squarely in his prime at 30.
Dakota Bush (16-4, 0-2 UFC). The control case, and the happiest story here. Bush is what the pipeline is supposed to look like: he genuinely did not succeed in the UFC, dropping decisions and a first-round TKO in 2021 and 2022, and rebuilt outside it. He has won eight straight since. His PFL debut in March was a first-round knockout of Robert Watley, who, in the small-world way of this roster, also fights on Saturday's card.
What the pattern says
Add it up. Of the six, four left the UFC either on a win or one fight removed from a title-level performance. I do not know the contract details behind any individual exit, and I will not pretend to. Negotiations fail for boring reasons: money, fight frequency, timing, management.
But zoom out and the boring reasons stop explaining the shape of it. A promotion with functionally unlimited roster leverage keeps letting go of fighters who are winning, ranked or both, and a competitor has now assembled an entire Saturday card whose spine is made of them. Vieira won in May and fights for PFL in August. Marcos submitted a UFC bantamweight in November and was gone. Basharat won in February, same. Whatever each individual negotiation looked like, the aggregate is a choice.
The optimistic read is the one I opened with: MMA is better when the talent spreads out, when a Cyborg or a Santos has somewhere to be a main event instead of queueing behind a champion the matchmakers protect. The cynical read is that the UFC has decided depth is cheaper to replace than to retain, and cards like this one are the invoice.
Saturday, six former UFC fighters will share a cage in Tampa with 45 Octagon appearances between them. The promotion that spent years building their names will be running a show in Sacramento at the same hour, hoping you do not change the channel.