On Saturday night, Stipe Miocic climbed the mountain, defeating Daniel Cormier by unanimous decision to claim the title of Greatest UFC Heavyweight of All Time. I plan on writing something about Stipe and his place in MMA history tomorrow, but as usual, I want to highlight three fighters outside the main event who boosted their stock in a big way in Las Vegas.

Here’s our Three on the Rise coming out of UFC 252:

Marlon “Chito” Vera

So, yes, let’s just get this out of the way. Marlon Vera’s first-round TKO win over the uber-hyped Sean O’Malley will have an asterisk placed next to it by a lot of fans, owing to O’Malley’s ankle injury that left him hobbled and vulnerable just a couple of minutes into the fight. One enterprising Reddit user, writing before the fight even happened, speculated that O’Malley might have already had an injured foot based on training footage from the UFC Embedded YouTube series, and we’re still presently awaiting word what exactly happened to O’Malley’s ankle on Saturday night.

But even if your opponent twists an ankle or tweaks a knee or falls down an elevator shaft, it’s still on you to take advantage and win the fight. There’s no crying in MMA, and we’ve seen plenty of people win fights through injury before. Marlon Vera showed Sean O’Malley no mercy, immediately attacking the rainbow-haired wunderkind with leg kicks several times before putting him on his back and forcing a referee stoppage with several truly violent elbows from top position.

If you’ve been invested in O’Malley’s career from the beginning, your mind probably immediately turned to his official UFC debut, against Andre Soukhamthath in March 2018. O’Malley suffered a broken foot in the third round and looked in serious danger, but Soukhamthath didn’t change course in any way to try and exploit that injury – instead he simply took him down and lost a unanimous decision.

Vera didn’t make the same stupid mistake that Soukhamthath did. Marlon Vera was ruthless. Marlon Vera broke into the engine room of Sean O’Malley’s hype train with a gun, hijacked that shit and drove it into a ravine. And even though Vera isn’t going to get the same kind of credit he would have gotten by beating a healthy O’Malley, “Suga” Sean is easily the highest-profile win Vera has claimed since his UFC career started in 2014.

Since eating back-to-back losses to John Lineker (who actually made weight for that fight!) and Douglas Silva de Andrade a couple years ago, Vera has struggled to break out of the crowd at 135. But now, Vera’s won six in a row at bantamweight – his one loss during that span, a controversial decision against Song Yadong in May, came at 145 – and he has a signature win in a big pay-per-view co-main.

What’s more, Vera did absolutely everything he needed to do. He won in a violent way – those elbows from the top would have absolutely killed any man, even one with the two most functional, healthiest legs in the world. He talked shit after the fight. He cut a killer promo in his interview with Joe Rogan. With the world watching, Marlon Vera established himself and established his personality. So yes, O’Malley injured himself. But I guarantee that after this, people are gonna take a little more notice when Marlon “Chito” Vera next steps into the Octagon.

Jairzinho Rozenstruik

Just a few months ago, Surinamese kickboxer Jairzinho Rozenstruik was the new hotness at heavyweight. “Bigi Boy” is just that, a really big boy with a ton of knockout power, and by the New Year he had run his pro record to 10-0 with nine KOs.

But Rozenstruik’s most recent win had hinted that he might not be 100% ready for primetime. Against certified striking legend Alistair Overeem in December, Rozenstruik looked a little bit out of his depth and appeared to be handily losing the fight going into the final minutes. You might remember what happened: in the closing seconds, Rozenstruik lunged forward and blasted Overeem with a superlaser right hand that shattered the Dutchman’s face into a million pieces and ended the fight.

Rozenstruik called out perennial top contender and man-with-cinderblock-hands Francis Ngannou after the win, but he should have been careful what he wished for: Ngannou put Rozenstruik on dream street in just 20 seconds. In a bounceback fight against fellow recent Ngannou victim Junior dos Santos on Saturday, it felt like Rozenstruik desperately needed an impressive win in order to keep himself from falling back into the heavyweight rank-and-file.

JDS is himself one of the great all-time heavyweight strikers, and outboxed a tentative Rozenstruik in Round 1. By the first couple minutes of the second round, Rozenstruik’s corner was begging him to move forward and open up. So Rozenstruik backed Junior up towards the cage – longtime JDS fans will probably know where this is going – blasted him with a monstrous left-right combo, and knocked him out with a flurry of follow-up punches.

Just like that, Jairzinho Rozenstruik’s cred as a frighteningly powerful knockout artist was restored. Rozenstruik could have come away from this fight looking like 2010-era Cheick Kongo, a strong heavyweight striker who builds some notoriety with some hype knockouts, but is ultimately not taken seriously because he wilts in the big fights. Instead, for now, he’s still a top-five contender.

Going forward, Rozenstruik’s power has to be feared along with the best in the heavyweight division. He very much appears to be the kind of guy who’s always one shot away from turning the tide. Few types of fighters are more dangerous.

Merab Dvalishvili

Honorable mentions to Daniel Pineda, who looked dominant in a second-round TKO win over an out-of-shape and colossally disappointing Herbert Burns, and Virna Jandiroba, who herself has her arrow pointing upward in the strawweight division after completely running through veteran Felice Herrig on the ground in less than two minutes.

But people who know me well know that I love professional wrestling. So I have to give some love to Merab Dvalishvili, a rising bantamweight contender who beat John Dodson on Saturday by putting him in the Ivan Koloff bearhug for 15 minutes.

A native of Tbilisi, Georgia, Dvalishvili is a smothering Eastern European wrestler/judoka very much in the mold of Khabib Nurmagomedov, and he was on Dodson like white on rice Saturday night. To his credit, Dodson’s takedown defense was absolutely sensational – Dodson is tiny for 135, but he was able to keep the larger Merab from holding him on the ground, and was able to swiftly get back to his feet whenever Merab did put him on his back.

Nevertheless, it was supremely impressive the way Merab was able to completely neutralize anything Dodson wanted to do on Saturday, especially since Dodson represented the biggest test of his UFC career. A former title challenger at flyweight, Dodson has plenty of losses on his record, but basically only to elite guys: current bantamweight champion Petr Yan, Marlon Moraes, Jimmie Rivera, John Lineker, two against former pound-for-pound king Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson.

Merab completely nullified Dodson with his wrestling and his clinch control, and a couple times literally just picked Dodson up over his head and walked him across the ring before slamming him on his back. That leads me to the other reason I want to give the Georgian some love: I don’t expect to see him get much from the UFC bookers.

He’s now won five in a row, all extremely dominant unanimous decisions, but he’s not a real action fighter. He’s a steady, stable, powerful wrestler who dominates opponents and grinds them down. Consider the way the UFC has treated fighters like Jon Fitch and Jake Shields in the past – Dana White doesn’t traditionally love guys like that, to say the least.

Merab Dvalishvili is looking very much like he’s going to be a factor at bantamweight, but expect him to have to take the long road to a title shot. Whatever, man. All you can do is keep winning until they can’t deny you anymore.