B/R MMA Awards: Best Fight, Fighter, Knockout and Submission From 2024

The year 2024 was an incredible one for MMA.

Much of the most memorable action of the year, as always, occurred inside the UFC's Octagon, as blockbuster events such as UFC 300, UFC 303 and the promotion's spectacular debut at the Las Vegas Sphere wowed viewers with dramatic finishes and back-and-forth battles.

We also got plenty of unforgettable moments outside the UFC, as the PFL officially absorbed Bellator MMA, while ONE Championship continued to promote exciting events in Asia—and one in the U.S.—and promotions such as KSW and Rizin continued to deliver exciting shows in Poland and Japan, respectively.

With so much exciting MMA action on offer around the world, it is not easy choose the best fight, fighter, submission and KO of the year, but after dozens of sleepless of nights of painstaking deliberation, we've made our selections.

September's UFC 306 marked the promotion's first—and ostensibly last—show in Las Vegas' new state-of-the-art Sphere arena. The event was also a celebration of Mexican Independence Day, despite being hosted by Sin City and sponsored by Riyadh Season.

Ahead of time, the confusingly branded card caught quite a bit of flack for its lack of depth. The headlining title fights were also quite forgettable, as Valentina Shevchenko and Merab Dvalishvili wrestled their ways to tepid decision wins over Alexa Grasso and Sean O'Malley, respectively.

Thankfully, the card was saved by the spectacular production, and one truly unforgettable scrap: A back-and-forth lightweight contest pitting Mexico's Daniel Zellhuber against Argentina's Esteban Ribovics.

There's really no way to express how good this fight was, but the stats paint a clear picture: The two lightweights traded nearly 300 strikes over the course of their 15-minute meeting, and many of those would have stopped less-durable fighters point-blank.

In the end, Ribovics won a split-decision, which reflected the competitive nature of the fight, though it was the kind of contest with no real losers. Both men displayed so much technique, durability and heart that they could retire tomorrow and still be mentioned by fight fans 50 years from now. They may never become champions in the packed UFC lightweight division, but they earned their immortality here.

There were other good fights this year. One great example is a PFL bout between Lewis McGrillen and Dean Garnett, which featured 14 knockdowns in three rounds. However, that contest featured much lower-level fighters, and it was buried on the undercard of an event that was ultimately so inconsequential that PFL founder Donn Davis seemingly doesn't even know it happened.

However, Ribovics vs. Zellhuber is the obvious choice for Fight of the Year, both in terms of excitement and the quality of the fighters involved.

UFC light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira has a strong case for 2024's Fighter of the Year. He fought three times, scoring knockouts over solid foes in Jamahal Hill, Jiri Prochazka, and Khalil Rountree at UFC 300, 303, and 307 respectively.

The Brazilian also scored some bonus points by taking two of those fights on fairly short notice. He had an incredible year, and he was easily the promotion's MVP from a fiscal perspective.

However, there is no question the true Fighter of the Year is Ilia Topuria. The undefeated Georgian-Spaniard fought once less than Pereira, but both of his 2024 wins were more impressive than anything his counterpart has done in his entire MMA career.

The first, at UFC 298 in February, saw Topuria claim the UFC featherweight title by knocking out one of the greatest fighters of all time in Alexander Volkanovski, who had not lost in the weight class in 29 pro fights, let alone been knocked out.

As if that wasn't impressive enough, the 27-year-old then defended his belt with a knockout of another living MMA legend in Max Holloway at UFC 308 in October.

Not only was Holloway riding a KO win over Justin Gaethje at the time—arguably, the best victory of his career—but he had also never been knocked out before. In Round 3, Topuria melted him with a left hook.

Yes, as impressive as Pereira's year was, there's really no debate. In the span of a year, the undefeated Topuria stopped two of the best featherweights ever, and neither had been knocked out in the weight class before.

There were a lot of reasons to doubt Khamzat Chimaev heading into 2024.

Despite being undefeated with impressive wins over a number of high-quality welterweights and middleweights, he had been extremely inactive, having been repeatedly forced out of fights by health problems.

After being forced out of a planned summer showdown with former middleweight champ Robert Whittaker, he finally made it to the cage for a rescheduled scrap with the same man at UFC 308 in October.

Many people fairly counted Chimaev out heading into his long-awaited comeback fight. Not only had he been inactive, but there was serious reason to doubt his cardio after he scraped by Kamaru Usman and Gilbert Burns in some of his recent fights.

Whittaker, meanwhile, is arguably one of the top three middleweights in UFC history, and he was fresh off a first-round knockout of streaking contender Ikram Aliskerov. He's not the kind of guy you want to fight after a long layoff, especially if your gas tank isn't up to snuff.

In the end, though, Chimaev proved all his naysayers wrong, using his world-class wrestling to drag Whittaker to the mat in a matter of seconds, then tapping the former champion out with a face-crank before the first round was over.

It's not just that Chimaev beat Whittaker. He did it extremely decisively, and destructively, squeezing the former champ's face so hard that his teeth and bottom jaw effectively exploded.

It was a display of extreme and abrupt violence against a fighter of superb skill. There were other great submissions this year such as Islam Makhachev and Dricus Du Plessis' chokes of Dustin Poirier and Israel Adesanya, respectively.

But when context is considered, nothing else really comes close to Chimaev's win.

We had some epic knockouts in 2024, so there is some room for debate when it comes to the best of the year.

Having said that, anyone who chooses anything but Max Holloway's stunning, last-second KO of Justin Gaethje at the landmark UFC 300 card in April is just wrong.

Even in a vacuum, Holloway's one-punch KO of Gaethje was beautiful, but what really made this one special was the context—and their was plenty of meaningful context.

For starters, Holloway was supposed to lose to Gaethje. On paper, his UFC 300 fight with "The Highlight" was an execution. As a long-time featherweight climbing to lightweight, he was expected to be substantially smaller than Gaethje, and despite his recent KO over "The Korean Zombie" Chan Sung Jung, he was widely believed to lack stopping power, particularly against a guy like Gaethje, who is renowned for his iron chin.

In the end, though, Holloway made up for his his physical disadvantages by using speed and technique to style on Gaethje for nearly all of their fight, only to flatten his foe with a single punch at the last second of a 25-minute fight.

The fact that Holloway did so after pointing to the centre of the Octagon and calling Gaethje into a caution-to-the-wind slugfest that was far more likely to result in his own demise made it all the more stunning.

Maybe Shara Magomedov's double-spinning-back-fist stoppage of Armen Petrosyan at UFC 308 was a little prettier, but that finish came in a tailor-made matchup the unranked Russian was supposed to win. Holloway did it in a five-round fight against one of the best lightweights of a generation, on the biggest card of the year, and almost nobody could have imagined it happening that way.

The "BMF" belt he won for the performance is so corny it hardly bears mentioning, but there is no denying his win over Gaethje symbolized everything that belt is supposed to be about.

In fact, when all the context is considered, Holloway's UFC 300 KO of Gaethje is, arguably, the greatest KO in MMA history.