Entering 2018, Francis Ngannou was billed as a future champion and perhaps the hardest puncher ever to compete in the UFC.
A lot can change in a few months.
Ngannou was humbled by Stipe Miocic at UFC 220 in January and laid an egg at UFC 226 this past weekend in a unanimous decision loss to Derrick Lewis.
The 31-year-old Cameroonian carries tremendous power in his hands so he usually doesn’t need to throw much in order to have success. However, an uncharacteristically timid Ngannou landed just 11 of the 46 strikes he threw at Lewis over the course of their three-round, 15-minute fight Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Ngannou issued an apology after falling to 11-3 in professional mixed martial arts.
UFC president Dana White described Ngannou’s performance against Lewis as “horrible” but didn’t think Lewis’s stock fell too far considering Lewis was battling through a back injury and was the aggressor in the bout.
“I think that [Ngannou] had a pretty quick rise here and obviously the [knockout win] over Alistair Overeem catapulted him,” White told reporters in Las Vegas at the UFC 226 post-fight press conference. “Everybody was talking about him. I thought he was going to be the next guy. I think his ego ran away with him. Big time. I can tell you that his ego absolutely did run away. The minute that happens to you in the fight game you see what happens. You start to fall apart.”
White saying Ngannou was dealing with an inflated ego is a bit rich when you consider that prior to UFC 220, White and the UFC’s hype machine attempted to promote Ngannou as some type of never-before-seen world-beater with Joe Rogan even calling him “the scariest man in the history of the sport” and “literally a one in a million type athlete” in a promotional video released prior to Ngannou’s UFC 220 bout with Miocic.
White added: “I had some personal encounters with him, as did other people in the organization, and this guy’s ego was so out of control. Before the Stipe fight he took off and went to France. Didn’t even really train for that fight. And you see the results. Well, then he comes back and he did train, but the ego is what hurt Francis Ngannou.”
Despite his two consecutive losses, Ngannou has never been finished and remains a contender in the UFC’s heavyweight division—one in which Daniel Cormier is now champion after the current light-heavyweight titleholder finished Miocic with a first-round knockout.
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