Sherdog’s Top 10: Greatest Punchers

4. Junior dos Santos

Former UFC heavyweight champion dos Santos is as close as elite MMA gets to having a one-trick pony, but what a trick it is: launching a steady stream of vicious punches until the final bell sounds or his opponent falls to the ground. Gifted with great explosiveness, lightning hand speed and the kind of power you cannot teach, dos Santos rode his physical gifts and crisp boxing to nine consecutive victories to open his UFC career, including a devastating knockout of Cain Velasquez.

Dos Santos is almost exclusively a boxer. He knows how to do other things -- there is plenty of video of him kicking and working on the ground in training -- but when push comes to shove, the Brazilian chooses to throw hands. His game revolves around a sharp jab that he uses to dictate range and pull his opponent’s hands in front of his face, a long right hand to the body that draws his opponent’s hands downwards and a blazing overhand right, right uppercut and left hook that exploit the holes created by his bread-and-butter strikes. These are basic tools but the way dos Santos puts them together and the speed and mechanical precision with which he throws them is unique.

Against Fabricio Werdum, for example, it was a brutal uppercut that snuck through the more experienced fighter’s porous, wide guard and tendency to duck down. When he fought Velasquez the first time, dos Santos timed the champion’s constant jab and looped his overhand around the American Kickboxing Academy ace’s outstretched arm to catch him on the ear. Prior to the wheel kick knockout, that same overhand dropped the iron-jawed Mark Hunt. Gilbert Yvel fell victim to a rising left hook that played off the straight right to the body.

“Cigano” has been in the UFC for less than seven years, and yet, he has already produced some of the sport’s iconic knockouts. Here is to hoping that he does so for many years to come.

Number 3 » While it took him more than a decade, he has finally settled his enormous natural gifts into a sustainable approach that can both generate heart-stopping knockouts and still win decisions against the cream of MMA’s most stacked weight class.