Dana White's Contender Series
Dana White’s Contender Series | Season 8 Review
Breaking Down The Numbers And Forecasting What May Come From This Season’s New Additions
The Dana White’s Contender Series Class of ’24 has a chance to be special.
After the number of contracts handed out each season increased each successive year from the original 16 awarded over the first season’s eight-week run through the record-setting 46 athletes added to the roster in Season 7, the most recent installment of the annual talent-search series produced a slight decrease in new additions to the roster.
There were 42 contracts awarded over the course of Season 8, and while that is the lowest total since Season 5, the outlook for this year’s graduating class might be better than any group that has passed through the UFC APEX thus far.
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As it stands, that fifth season collection of graduates is likely the best “draft class” of the bunch thus far, with Jack Della Maddalena, Jailton Almeida, and Jasmine Jasudavicius all earning contracts in Week 3, while Michael Morales, Caio Borralho, Azamat Murzakanov, Joanderson Brito and several others joined them along the way.
In the three years since that group matriculated to the Octagon, we have seen seven of them take up residency in the rankings, and several others establish themselves as permanent fixtures on the UFC roster, and if anyone is taking bets on where the next DWCS grad-turned-UFC champion is going to emerge from, the Season 5 cast is a very safe bet.
But as strong as that group has been already — and as successful as some of the competitors to graduate from the series in other years have been, as well — there is reason to believe that this latest pack of new arrivals could emerge as the best overall graduating class in the show’s history.
It feels fitting that the season opened with Lone’er Kavanagh collecting a first-round knockout win and announcing his presence as a prospect to watch in the UFC because the GB Top Team man is amongst the best young talents to pass through the series to date, and showed that in earning a solid victory in a competitive fight with Jose Ochoa in his promotional debut at the end of November in Macau.
Just 25 years old, the flyweight standout is already 8-0 as a professional and fought a solid slate to earn his Contender Series opportunity, and has maintained that tough schedule since. His Week 1 opponent, An Tuan Ho, is an outstanding prospect in his own right, and someone we’ll likely hear from again, while Ochoa was initially targeted to compete on Season 8 himself before being added to the roster directly and stationed opposite Kavanagh.
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Three other recent grads have also already successfully stepped into the Octagon for the first time, and each offers considerable upside in their own right as well.
Cody Haddon was the first to garner a victory, grinding out a good win on a short turnaround against Dan Argueta a couple weeks before Mansur Abdul-Malik made a statement with his first-round stoppage win over Dusko Todorovic. On the final card of the year in Tampa, City Kickboxing representative Navajo Stirling crossed the threshold into the UFC cage and came away with his first win, out-working Tuco Tokkos over three rounds to move to 6-0. All three of these competitors have Top 15 upside, if not higher.
Nothing is guaranteed, of course, and it will take some time to see if any or all of them can get there, but that doesn’t feel like an unrealistic projection for any of them, with the same holding true for Kavanagh, as well.
But those four aren’t the only fascinating new additions to the roster that make this most recent graduating class so special to track going forward.
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Kevin Vallejos returned for a second time and punched his ticket to the roster after suffering a unanimous decision loss to Fighting Nerds rookie standout Jean Silva in Season 7. Austin Bashi is 23 years old, but already sports a 13-0 record, and is penciled in to face Christian Rodriguez early next year in a matchup that tells you how highly the UFC thinks of the undefeated featherweight.
Heavyweights Danylo Voievodkin, Talisson Teixeira, and Mario Pinto all earned contracts this season; all three are undefeated and each is in their mid-20s. Finding a single promising, young heavyweight can be difficult, and nabbing two is tremendous, but inking three new heavyweights that each carry some clear upside and intrigue from one season is a bit of a coup.
More than half of this year’s class is age 27 or younger, and only six competitors north of age 30, all of whom profile as either all-action additions to their respective divisions (Luis Gurule, Seok-Hyun Ko, Andres Berg Gustafsson) or fascinating prospects in heavier weight divisions, where being in your earlier 30s doesn’t close the window of opportunity as much as it would in some of the lighter weight classes.
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The three female fighters added to the roster this season — Alexia Thainara, Yuneisy Duben, and Nicole Caliari — are a combined 25-3, with the undefeated Duben accounting for one of the most emphatic knockouts in DWCS history this year with her 73-second smashing of LFA champ Shannon Clark in Week 4.
What’s great about the anticipation this class induces is that we won’t have to wait long to begin seeing additional results and collecting further data on this promising class.
The 2025 UFC opener scheduled for January 11 at the UFC APEX is currently expected to feature five members of this year’s graduating class — Bashi, Gustafsson, Caliari, Bruno Lopes, and Marco Tulio — while Bogdan Grad, Teixeira, Quillan Salkilld, Jose Delgado, Elijah Smith, and Rizvan Kuniev are all rumored to be competing across the February slate.
Time will tell if this group develops and grows into an elite collection of Contender Series graduates, but after watching them earn their contracts this past season and comparing them across the groups that preceded them, the talent coming off Season 8 feels special and I cannot wait to see how this next crop of newcomers does inside the Octagon in 2025 and beyond.
