Rose Namajunas stuns Weili with early head kick to win strawweight title

Fans are back at UFC 261 as a sold-out crowd of 15,000 fill the Vystar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida on Saturday, April 24. Headlining a main card featuring three championship bouts is a welterweight title rematch between the current king Kamaru Usman and challenger Jorge Masvidal. In the co-main event, strawweight champion Zhang Weili makes her second title defense, against former champion Rose Namajunas. Current women’s flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko puts her strap on the line against former strawweight champion Jessica Andrade.

In the co-main event, a highly anticipated match-up between “Thug” Rose Namajunas and, current champion, Zhang Weili. Weili returns after more than a year when she defended her straw weight belt against, another former champion, Joanna Jedrzejczyk at UFC 248. Weili won in a split-decision.

For Namajunas, this will be her first fight of the year after defeating Jessica Andrade in a split-decision victory back in July.

Round One:

Zhang starts out trying to control the distance with a few leg strikes. Rose is trying to find her in against the champion. Rose land a huge leg kick to the head and the fight is over almost immediately. What a question Mark kick by Thug Rose.

Zhang can’t believe the fight was stopped.
After one successful title defense, Weili has been dethroned and Namajunas, is once again, the champion of the straw weight division.

Ten seconds after the fight, the crowd watching the fight with me started chanting “USA. USA.”

Namajunas def. Weili via 1st round KO (1:18)