UFC Madison Square Garden history: champions are 6-7-1 there before UFC 334

Two champions walk into Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Ciryl Gane defends the heavyweight title against Josh Hokit in the main event of UFC 334, and Kayla Harrison defends the women's bantamweight title against Amanda Nunes right before it. It is the UFC's 10th card in the building since UFC 205 in 2016, and every one of them has been in November. The only November the promotion skipped was 2020.

The nine cards before this one held 16 UFC title fights. In 14 of them a defending champion walked out to the cage, going by the official rankings of fight week. Here is how those 14 went: six kept the belt, seven lost it, one fight was a draw.

Six wins, seven losses, one draw. Over the same nine years, in every other UFC title fight where the rankings name a defending champion, the champion went 87-39-2. That is a 68 percent win rate for champions everywhere else and 43 percent at the Garden.

I want to get one thing out of the way first. Fourteen fights is a small sample, and I am not going to tell you the building is cursed. But the pattern is not one strange night either. Seven different champions lost their belts there, on four different cards across nine years, and that is worth knowing before you decide how safe Saturday's two favorites are.

Every UFC title fight at Madison Square Garden

UFC 244 is the one Garden card without a divisional title fight. Its main event, Jorge Masvidal against Nate Diaz, ended on a doctor's stoppage after the third round.

The night three belts left

Photo: KRK.TV / CC BY 3.0

UFC 217 is most of the reason the number looks the way it does. It had three title fights, three defending champions, and all three of them lost inside the distance.

Rose Namajunas knocked out Joanna Jedrzejczyk at 3:03 of the first round. Jedrzejczyk had defended the strawweight belt in the same building a year earlier, beating Karolina Kowalkiewicz over five rounds at UFC 205. TJ Dillashaw stopped Cody Garbrandt at 2:41 of the second. And Georges St-Pierre, whose previous fight had been UFC 167 in November 2013, choked out Michael Bisping at 4:23 of the third to win the middleweight title after four years away. All three new champions took a Performance of the Night bonus.

UFC 205 had already started the trend. Conor McGregor came in as the featherweight champion on the rankings of that week and took the lightweight belt from Eddie Alvarez at 3:04 of the second round. Then five years later, at UFC 281, two more belts changed hands on the same card: Alex Pereira stopped Israel Adesanya at 2:01 of the fifth round, and Zhang Weili submitted Carla Esparza at 1:05 of the second.

The most recent loss is the one that was not close. At UFC 322 last November, Islam Makhachev beat welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena on all three cards.

The knockout building

If the champions' record is the headline, the finish rate is the supporting evidence. The Garden is a place where fights end.

Across the nine completed UFC cards there, 113 fights have been fought. Fifty-two ended by KO or TKO, 46 percent. Over the same stretch, everywhere else the UFC went, 1,552 of 4,845 fights ended by KO or TKO, 32 percent. Only 45 of the Garden's 113 fights went to the judges (40 percent), against 49 percent elsewhere.

Title fights follow the same line. Ten of the 16 at the Garden were finished, 62.5 percent. Everywhere else in those nine years, 91 of 173 UFC title fights were finished, 52.6 percent.

I am not going to pretend I know why. A November slot that the UFC reserves for loaded cards brings in strikers with something to prove, and maybe that is the whole story. But a champion who plans to win on the cards should know that Garden fights reach the cards less often than fights anywhere else.

The ones that went to the judges

Seven of the Garden's 45 decisions were split decisions, and three more fights ended as majority draws. Two of those went to title fights.

At UFC 205, Tyron Woodley and Stephen Thompson went five rounds for the welterweight title and the judges could not separate them. Derek Cleary and Douglas Crosby both had it 47-47, and Glenn Trowbridge had it 48-47 for Woodley. Cleary's card turned on a 10-8 he gave Woodley in the fourth round. Woodley kept the belt on a majority draw, and both men took Fight of the Night.

At UFC 268, Namajunas defended against Zhang on a split. Eric Colón scored it 49-46 Namajunas, Douglas Crosby 48-47 Namajunas, and Michael Bell 48-47 Zhang. All three judges gave Zhang the first round and Namajunas the fourth and fifth. Rounds two and three decided it: Colón gave both to Namajunas, Bell gave both to Zhang, and Crosby split them.

So of the seven champions who left the Garden still holding their belt, one kept it on a draw and another on a split decision.

The ones who keep coming back

Photo: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Brittany Primavera / Public domain

Some fighters own this building. Alex Pereira has fought for a title there twice and won both by knockout, the middleweight belt from Adesanya at UFC 281 and the vacant light heavyweight belt from Jiri Prochazka at UFC 295, with a Performance of the Night bonus both times. Rose Namajunas is 2-0 in Garden title fights, one won with a knockout and one kept with a split decision.

Others keep coming back to it and losing. Zhang Weili has fought for a title at the Garden three times and is 1-2, losing to Namajunas in 2021, beating Esparza in 2022, and losing to Shevchenko last year. Michael Chandler is 0-4 inside the building, a Bellator title fight loss to Brent Primus in 2017 and then three UFC losses, to Justin Gaethje, Dustin Poirier and Charles Oliveira. All three UFC losses won Fight of the Night.

Two names on Saturday's card already know their way around. Stephen Thompson is 2-0-1 at the Garden, the draw with Woodley plus decision wins at UFC 217 and UFC 244, and he meets Charles Radtke on the prelims. Jim Miller is 2-0 there, a decision at UFC 205 and a submission at UFC 309, and he faces Terrance McKinney.

Saturday's champions

Neither Gane nor Hokit has fought at the Garden before, so the heavyweight title fight has no local history to lean on. Our model makes Gane the favorite at 61 percent.

Harrison's history with the building is a different story. Her only professional loss came at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden, the smaller room under the same roof, when Larissa Pacheco beat her on the cards in a lightweight title fight at the PFL's 2022 Championships. Four years earlier, on the PFL's 2018 Championships night, she had stopped Moriel Charneski by TKO in that same theater. Our model gives her a 67.5 percent chance against Nunes, which makes her the bigger favorite of the two champions on Saturday.

Sixty-one and 67.5 percent are the numbers. Champions at the Garden have kept their belts 43 percent of the time. One of those two sets of numbers is going to look wrong by Sunday morning.

The full card, start times and broadcasters are on the UFC 334 event page.