Sherdog’s Top 10: Flashes in the Pan

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4. Paulo Thiago

Nobody expected much from Thiago, a Brazilian submission specialist and member of BOPE, the special operations unit of Rio de Janeiro’s military police force, when he debuted against welterweight mainstay and perennial top-10 fighter Josh Koscheck at UFC 95. One hellacious, powerful uppercut later, Thiago was suddenly a threat in a stacked division.

He crashed back to earth with a grinding decision loss to Koscheck’s teammate, Jon Fitch, before rattling off two more wins against Jacob Volkmann and Mike Swick. The hype built again, and Thiago entered his fight with durable Dane Martin Kampmann as a nearly 3-to-1 favorite at UFC 115. He lost that one and the next in a thrilling fight against Diego Sanchez before rebounding with a win over David Mitchell.

Whatever had gone wrong before showed up in spades for his last six outings in the UFC. Siyar Bahadurzada flattened him with a single punch; Dong Hyun Kim grinded him into paste; Brandon Thatch rearranged his internal organs with a vicious knee; and Gasan Umalatov and Sean Spencer beat the limited and glacially slow Thiago who stepped into the cage.

That stunning knockout of Koscheck was Thiago’s high-water mark, and perhaps it set the bar far too high for a part-time competitor with a demanding day job.

Number 3 » He rang off eight straight first-round knockouts to begin his career, and it took him only seven minutes to finish Ron Humphrey in his Strikeforce debut in 2009. Still, pundits and bettors lacked much faith in the Minnesotan as he was set to face Andrei Arlovski, pegging the Belarusian as a 4-to-1 favorite.