Charles Oliveira did nothing wrong. The people acting betrayed are the same people who built the thing he exploited.
Dan Hooker has spent the last few days on a mission. In a Submission Radio interview he said the BMF belt was like their belt, a prize for guys whose careers are a mess, and that the UFC let too many nice guys have a crack. He ran through his cast: himself and Bobby Green, who could lose plenty and still qualify, Jorge Masvidal running hot and cold, Nate Diaz with a messy record. His beef is that Oliveira treated a novelty belt like a real one, and won it the unglamorous way.
At UFC 326 in March, Oliveira beat Max Holloway. All five judges scored it 50-45. He landed takedowns in each round and spent the final stretch in Holloway's guard. The crowd wanted Holloway and booed the long dead patches. It was a grind, and it was also a dominant, one-sided win against one of the toughest men in the sport. Oliveira collected the belt for it.
So what's the alternative standard supposed to be? Nobody tells a lightweight champion he owes the crowd a specific flavor of violence. You win the title by winning the fight. The only reason anyone thinks Oliveira owed something different is that the belt is named after a curse word and sold on a promise of chaos. That promise was never written into anything. There's no judged "recklessness" criterion, no clause that voids the title if you shoot a takedown. The UFC invented a championship whose entire pitch is a vibe, then handed it to a title-tested grappler and acted shocked when he grappled.
That's a design flaw, and it belongs to the promotion and to Dana White, who was himself among those grumbling about how Oliveira won it. You can't build a belt on "baddest motherf***er," attach it to no weight class, no criteria, and no contractual demand to brawl, and then act surprised when a professional does his job. The people who sold an aura they couldn't enforce are the ones who killed it.
Hooker's best point is that Holloway deserved better than getting smothered, and that a fun belt only works if both guys agree to make it fun. Fair enough as a preference. But that's on Holloway for not stopping the takedowns. Oliveira just landed them. And the idea that Oliveira is some safety-first point-fighter now falls apart the second you look at his last title fight. At UFC 317 in June 2025, challenging for the vacant lightweight belt, he tried to stand and trade with Ilia Topuria and got knocked out in the first round. He later admitted he "abandoned" his strategy. That's a man who will brawl when he feels like it. He just didn't feel like it against Holloway, because he wanted the win more than the applause.
There's also the matter of who's delivering the sermon. Hooker has shared cages with ranked contenders and former champions across a long UFC run, including a short-notice loss to Islam Makhachev, but he has never once fought for a UFC belt of any kind, BMF or divisional. He said as much himself after his last outing. Calling it "our belt" is a nice bit of poetry from a man who was never in the room. Oliveira's response was to suggest Hooker was "in love" with him, which is funnier and closer to the truth than anything in the complaint.
The belt gets its first defense on December 12, when Oliveira faces Diego Lopes at UFC 335, and Lopes has already promised the war everyone says they want. Maybe it delivers. But if it doesn't, don't blame the winner for reading the rulebook. Blame the people who wrote a belt that never had one.
