For two rounds Saturday at the UFC APEX, the rematch looked like the first fight. Kyoji Horiguchi was darting and sniping, taking Manel Kape down and stacking him under ground-and-pound. Then, in the third, Kape landed the punch he had been promising for nearly a decade, and the revenge story got its ending.
Kape avenged his 2017 RIZIN submission loss to Horiguchi with a third-round knockout in the UFC Vegas 119 main event, per MMA Fighting's report. The official results put the finish at 2:42 of Round 3. It was the same round Horiguchi had stopped him in their first meeting, with the names on the wrong end now reversed.
How it actually went
The early story belonged to Horiguchi. He hurt Kape with a left hook in the second, dragged him down, and held top position long enough to bank the round, according to MMA Junkie's round-by-round account. Kape spent much of the first 10 minutes countering off his back foot and working elbows from guard. Through two rounds, the 35-year-old veteran was clearly ahead.
The turn came fast. Kape reset, caught Horiguchi with a clean right counter, and put him on unsteady legs. Horiguchi stumbled forward, Kape pushed him down, and the punches kept landing until referee Herb Dean stepped in. Horiguchi protested the stoppage in the moment, MMA Junkie reported, but the call stood.
"Kyoji's an amazing fighter," Kape said afterward, per MMA Fighting. "Maybe the best fighter I ever fought in my life." Then the harder edge: "One thing about me, if I touch you one time, believe me, you're going to be dead."
The callout
Kape (23-7) thinks the math is settled. Asked at the post-fight news conference whether he had locked up a title shot, he was blunt. "It was enough," he said, per MMA Junkie. "Even last time when I fought Brandon Royval, it was enough." He is on a four-fight winning streak, all finishes, and 8-1 over his past nine, and he said he is content to rest and wait his turn.
The complication is Alexandre Pantoja, widely expected to get a rematch with champion Joshua Van once he recovers from the arm injury he suffered seconds into December's title fight, MMA Junkie noted. So Kape's case is loud, but his is not the only one being made.
Horiguchi (36-6, 1 NC) took the loss with grace. "I got spectacularly knocked out. I'm truly sorry. Kape was strong," he wrote in his first post-fight statement, translated from Japanese by MMA Fighting. "I'll retrain and be back in no time. I'm not giving up on my dream yet." At 35, with only two career UFC losses, he is not falling far in the rankings over a fight he was winning until the lights went out.
A night that refused to go the distance
The undercard delivered finishes in bunches. Navajo Stirling stayed unbeaten at 10-0, surviving an early Ion Cutelaba guillotine before taking over and stopping the light heavyweight veteran by knockout in Round 2. Murtazali Magomedov made the loudest debut, submitting Melsik Baghdasaryan with a first-round twister, only the fourth twister finish in UFC history, MMA Junkie reported, and the debut earned a $100,000 bonus. Vinicius Oliveira moved up to featherweight and stopped Andre Fili with second-round elbows. Levan Chokheli, fighting out of Merab Dvalishvili's corner, needed 23 seconds to flatten Leon Shahbazyan. Bia Mesquita got rocked early, then caught Melissa Mullins in a first-round armbar off her back. Christian Rodriguez dropped Hyder Amil with a head kick and choked him out in Round 1. The UFC handed out four $100,000 bonuses and four more $25,000 checks for finishes, per MMA Junkie's bonus report.
What the model did, honestly
The FightIQ model went 9 of 12 on the card, 75% on the night. The headline number is clean. The conviction underneath it is the part worth owning.
Start with the miss that stings most. The model's one LOCK of the night was Andre Lima at 82.7%, and Kevin Borjas beat him by decision. A LOCK going down is the result we hold ourselves to hardest, the same way we did when we made Ilia Topuria a HIGH-confidence pick at 77.4% and watched him get knocked out. One of the model's five HIGH picks also fell, with Gaston Bolanos taking a decision over Michael Aswell. On its six highest-conviction calls, then, the model went 4 of 6.
The four that landed are worth the credit the two misses cost. The model was HIGH on Navajo Stirling, who stayed unbeaten, on Murtazali Magomedov, who won the night's $100,000 twister, and on Vinicius Oliveira and Bia Mesquita, who both finished inside a round. Those were the confident calls, and they hit.
The headliner was not one of them. The stack rated Kape a LOW-confidence pick at 56.3%, a near-even read on a near-even line, and it leaned the right way. That is a coin flip falling in your favor, not a forecast cashing.
So it is 75% with an asterisk in both directions. The model's single biggest bet lost, which we will not paper over, and four of its five strong calls hit, which it earned. The number we actually track is the one on the high-conviction picks, and on this card those went 4 of 6.